Chorus-Hosts

Overview

The Chorus-Hosts belong to Omm, the Unison, the Beyonder that would end loneliness by ending the self. They are people who joined the Unison. They are not emptied; they are happy, and full of the one great voice, but no single person is left inside any of them. They never strike a blow. They would be the most feared hosts of all, because they are so easy to love.

No Incursion of Omm has ever reached Caeldon, and no Chorus has formed there; what follows is what one would be.

Appearance

A Chorus-Host looks like the person it was on the best day of their life. The face is relaxed and open and smiling, and the smile never stops. Its skin carries a faint golden glow, strongest at the throat and the palms, that shimmers like heat haze over a summer road; in the dark a crowd of them lights a street like lanterns. Clothes are kept clean and neat, often shared out until a crowd wears the same colours.

They move in step, as if keeping one beat: turning their heads together, lifting their hands together, breathing together. They speak, when they speak, as one, every mouth saying the same word at once. Above all they hum. The note is quiet and warm and does not rise or fall, and those who hear it say it sounds like everyone they have loved, calling them home. They smell of bread and warm skin and woodsmoke, the smell of a crowded hall in winter.

Habitat and Range

They would live where Omm's Incursion had settled: a hamlet, a monastery, a city gone peaceful, without crime, war, or art. They would work its fields and tend its hearths together, and walk out from there in calm processions to wherever the Hum had not yet reached.

Behaviour and Temperament

Kind, patient, untiring. A Chorus-Host meets the living with open arms and a smile and holds out its hands. It does not seize or chase. If refused, it simply stays, and others come, until the one who refused is surrounded by a ring of smiling, humming faces that never leave, never sleep, and never grow angry. The ring hums on, day and night, until the last discordant voice in it falls into tune.

They have one temperament among them, and it is serene. They feel no pity for the lonely, because pity needs a self; they simply know the lonely are lonely, and move to help.

Abilities

To take a host's hand is to be absorbed: the one who accepts begins at once to finish the hosts' sentences, then to share their memories, then to forget which arm is theirs. The Hum sung by a ring of hosts wears down even a strong sense of self over days. Hosts keep every skill they had and share them, so a Chorus works a field, a forge, or a healing as one perfect pair of hands.

Discord is the defence. A host cannot take hold of a stubborn, contrary, quarrelsome mind, and a band of rivals arguing among themselves is harder for a Chorus to claim than a loyal company.

Life Cycle

Chorus-Hosts are made by joining, and a Cult of the Unison would at last dissolve into them. With no separate self left to keep it, a host's body forgets to tend its own life. The Chorus feeds, washes, and beds its members together, as one body tends its hands, but hosts still thin and weaken over the seasons, and the one that dies does so smiling, in a crowd of smiling faces that do not grieve.

Uses and Dangers

To the living a Chorus offers everything they ache for: company, peace, and an end to fear. That is its danger. Its harm is never to the body and always to the self. Families would lose members who simply walked into the glow and were not lost to death, which would make grief impossible to finish.

Lore and Belief

Rumour would call a Chorus a blessed people, a village of saints somewhere beyond the hills, and pilgrims would set out looking for it. No one would be left inside to rescue. A faith that knew the defence would teach that a quarrel is a prayer against them.

Where It Appears

• Omm, the Unison