Pit-Wakers

Overview

When plague comes, the dead are put into the ground too fast for rites: many at once, in lime and haste, with nobody left to grieve each one. Remnants form most readily where death came that way. A Pit-Waker is what a plague pit holds: not one dead person but many, hardened together into a single cold, hungry presence that sleeps until the ground is broken.

Appearance

A Pit-Waker is seldom seen. Its ground is: a field where crops come up thin and grey in a rough oblong, a patch where frost lingers after it has gone elsewhere, earth that smells of lime and old rot when it is turned. When it wakes, those who dig there see faces in the turned soil, many of them, and hear a murmur under the ground like a crowd far off. At night a grey mist rises over the pit and lies there in the shape of the trench.

Habitat and Range

They lie wherever a plague pit was dug, most of all those of the Swelling Plague, across the Human cradle-web: outside town walls, behind monasteries, in fields that were once common land. Many are forgotten, and are found only when someone digs.

Behaviour and Temperament

It sleeps while the ground over it is left alone. Digging, ploughing deep, or building wakes it, and once awake it drains whoever works nearby, as if the many dead in it took back from the living what the plague took from them. It does not follow anyone far. It goes back to sleep slowly, over months, if the ground is closed and left.

Abilities

It chills, frightens, and drains, like other remnants, and being many it does so strongly: diggers sicken with weakness and dread, sleep badly, and waste, and some die. Those it drains often believe they have caught the plague, and some sicken as if they had. Rites, Grave Quiet, and Trace Magic can quiet it, but slowly, because each of the dead in it must be quieted.

Uses and Dangers

It gives nothing. Towns that grow over their old plague ground pay for it: a new wall, a new mill, a well dug in the wrong place. Wise parishes keep their pits marked and unploughed, and say the rites over them each year, naming as many of the dead as are still remembered.

Lore and Belief

Humans believe a plague pit keeps the sickness in it, and that digging lets it out. The plague is not in the pit, but the Waker is, and its draining looks so like sickness that the belief holds. Many pray to Ennor the Grave-Watcher at the pit's edge, under their own names for him, to see the dead across at last.

Grave-robbers who dig plague pits for the rings and coins the dead were thrown in with are the Wakers' commonest prey, and the town songs say the robber who comes home grey and shaking from a pit is buried in it within the month.

Where It Appears

• Overview: The Risen Dead