The Guardian Host

Overview

The Guardian Host is raised by Sanctified Magic, the liturgical school of blessing, consecration, and priestly battle magic. An invocation manifests a small number of radiant martial forms that intercept blows, hold a line, and strike enemies driven by corruption, and they stand as long as the rite is kept. The school's own teaching is plain that they are sustained liturgical constructs, not independent souls or beings in their own right. Those who have fought beside them rarely believe it.

Appearance

A host is a few figures, often six, of golden vow-light shaped like armed warriors: taller than the defenders beside them, helmed or bare-headed, with shields and spears or swords that are part of the same light. Their faces are sketched rather than made, a brow, the line of a mouth, and their outlines shimmer like heat over a road. The light is warm gold at the heart and paler at the edges, and it casts the defenders' shadows outward, away from the shrine.

They move together and without sound. A blow they take rings faintly, like a struck bell heard from a long way off, and the air near them smells of hot metal and lamp oil. In the related working called Pale Watch, the forms are paler and fainter, a slow-turning ring of watchful guardians around a sleeping camp.

Habitat and Range

A host belongs to a place and a vigil: a shrine, a gate, a knot of a battlefield, a camp. It is raised there by host invocation in a short chant or by a great vigil rite, and it lasts from a short while to a night's vigil. Radiant Chapterhouses, Choir Bastions, and the Lantern Altars of the pilgrim roads teach the working, and shrine defenders and war-priests use it most.

Behaviour and Temperament

The host has no temper. It guards. Its forms step between the defenders and what comes at them, close ranks where the line is thin, and turn on anything driven by corruption: cult-work, curse-work, revenants, the risen dead. They do not pursue, plunder, or speak, and they do not leave the place they were raised to hold. A host fights until dawn if its rite is kept until dawn, and goes out when the rite ends.

Abilities

The forms take blows that would kill a defender and turn them aside, and they strike hardest at corruption. Their strength is the rite's: spoken liturgy, sanctified weapons, and the caster's reserves feed them, and a willing patron god can carry much of the cost. A host kept by a tired caster thins and dims; one fed by a shrine's god may outlast its caster's strength. Against ordinary steel and siege the host holds a line, but it is a working against the corrupt first.

Uses and Dangers

Shrines, gates, and pilgrim camps have survived nights they should not have because a host stood in them. The danger is to the caster, who pays for every hour of the vigil, and to the defenders who come to trust the light more than the line: when the rite breaks, the host is gone at once.

Lore and Belief

Almost everyone who has seen the Guardian Host believes it is something more than a working: the faithful dead of the shrine come back to guard it, the god's own warriors, or the defenders' ancestors in gold. Families have named the six figures of a famous vigil after their dead. The school's teaching is otherwise, and the teaching is right: the forms are sustained liturgical constructs, with no souls in them, and there are no detachable souls in the world to put there. Priests mostly let the belief stand, since a defender who thinks the dead are fighting beside him fights better.

Priests still keep the memory of the vigil at a burning shrine where six priests held the Host up for two nights against a horde of the risen dead, and the dawn when the last of them fell asleep on her knees and the gold figures faded with the last of the enemy.

Where It Appears

• Sanctified Magic