Grave-Keepers

Overview

The Grave-Keepers are among the Keepers of Dust of the Whispering Trace: beings that guard the resting places of powerful Echoes, so that what lies there is not disturbed.

Appearance

A Grave-Keeper stands like a tall, gaunt mourner in faded indigo, hooded, with long, bone-pale hands folded over a staff of black wood. Its face, when the hood falls back, is a smooth grey mask with dark hollows for eyes, like a funeral effigy. It stands so still at a tomb that travellers take it for a carving until it moves. When it does, it moves with slow, deliberate dignity, and the murmur of voices in the Trace falls quiet around it. Its staff strikes the ground with a hollow knock that echoes far longer than it should.

Habitat and Range

They stand at the tombs and graveyards of the Whispering Trace where powerful Echoes rest, each at its own grave.

Behaviour and Temperament

A Grave-Keeper guards. It lets mourners and the respectful come and go, and will stand aside for a traveller who comes to speak with the dead in good faith. Those who come to take, disturb, or call up what rests there, it turns away, and then stops.

Abilities

It knows who rests in its keeping, and it can hold an Echo at rest against those who would disturb it.

Uses and Dangers

They keep the resting places of the powerful dead from those who would use them. Their danger is to necromancers and grave-robbers, and to any traveller who mistakes their grave for treasure.

Lore and Belief

Many graveyards on Caeldon have a tale of a hooded watcher seen at dusk by an old tomb. Some say it is the watcher of the dead, a god; some say it is a Grave-Keeper come through; most such watchers, when looked for, are not there.

Grave-robbers tell the other side: of a crew that broke into an old lord's tomb for its grave-goods and was found at dawn laid out in the tomb's niches, as neatly as the dead.

Where It Appears

• The Whispering Trace