Noise-Hosts

Overview

Noise-Hosts are the glitching vessels of the Static, the White Noise, a Beyonder that buries every signal in interference. They are people drowned in its Hiss who did not wholly drown. Half there and half not, they seek out anyone whose mind is still clear and garble it.

The Static has never broken through at Caeldon, so no Noise-Host has walked there; this is what one would be.

Appearance

A Noise-Host is hard to look at, because it will not stay one thing. At one glance it is a man in a carter's coat; at the next a blur the colour of grey snow, seething with tiny random specks; then a face that is three faces at once, none finished. Edges smear and break up. Parts of it go missing for a heartbeat and come back in the wrong place, an arm a hand's width from the shoulder, an eye on the cheek.

It moves in stutters, as if each motion were caught on a skipping frame: here, then a stride nearer with nothing between, then back half a step, then nearer again. From it comes a shrill hiss, like rain on a slate roof heard from inside the skull, and under the hiss, now and then, a half-word in a voice the listener knows. Its smell, if it has one, is the sharp tang of the air before lightning.

Habitat and Range

An Incursion of the Static would hold most of them: a place blanketed in unreadable noise, where a horn call arrives as hiss and a signal fire as a smear of flicker, and the land around it. They would drift outward to wherever minds are still clear, and the Hiss would follow them.

Behaviour and Temperament

Noise-Hosts seek out clear minds. A single host stutters closer and closer to a traveller, a watchman, a scholar at her table, and several surround anyone still clear-headed until that one is garbled too. They do not strike or seize. They speak only in hiss, which some listeners hear as voices begging, scolding, or calling their names.

There is no temper in them to read: no anger, no hunger, no fear. Their stutter is the closest thing to a mood.

Abilities

A Noise-Host's touch fills the head with hiss. Thought scatters, words come out wrong, and the senses report what is not there: a door where a wall stands, a voice from an empty chair. A messenger touched by one forgets the message and remembers three others no one sent. Near a host every signal is garbled: a lamp seems to flicker though its flame is steady, a bell's peal is lost, and a spell that needs a clear thought falters.

They are pushed back by clarity. One clear, focused thought held steady cuts through them, and a clear gem, a sharp knife, or one steady lamp keeps a small space readable around the one who holds it.

Life Cycle

Noise-Hosts would be made from the drowned of the Hiss, and from a Cult of the Final Noise, most of whose members would drown in the Hiss while a few went on as hosts. A host does not eat or sleep. When the Static is driven out, a host flickers more and more thinly until one morning it is simply not there, and those who knew it cannot agree what it looked like.

Uses and Dangers

A Noise-Host gives nothing and scrambles everything near it. Its danger is the confusion it spreads: a garrison that cannot hear its own horns, a village that mistakes friend for foe, a healer who mixes the wrong herbs. Watchmen near a Static Incursion would keep their messages short, learn them by heart, and carry a polished stone to look into.

Lore and Belief

Many would take them for the restless dead, whose voices are the dead trying to speak. They are not the dead, and the voices in the hiss are not theirs. Naming the thing one sees aloud and plainly would help, because naming a thing is a clear thought.

Where It Appears

• The Static, the White Noise