A Bestiary of Caeldon

The Risen Dead

Here stand the dead who walk or linger. Most of the dead settle: their Echoes soften and disperse or pass into Record, helped by grief, rite, and remembrance. The beings on this shelf are the exceptions.

Some are bodies put to work: Necromancy gives a corpse enough structure to move under orders, and nothing in it is alive. Others are Echoes that could not let go, or were not allowed to: the Unfinished looping around a debt unpaid, the Choked held in a Truthwell until their lie is named. A few of the beings here are not dead at all, and the entries say which.

Most Named in This Part

• Humans PeopleThe young, fast people of the cradle-web's basins and headwaters, of the balanced adaptive field, who emerged c. 300,000-c. 220,000 BR; what marks them is pace, and they form regional peoples rather…
• The Hushvale RegionA basin and valley chain under fog that never lifts, at the foot of an unnamed range on the edge of the Glassbelt Interior, sealed since a waking Record-engine and the rite that hid its survivors c.…
• The Choked CreatureLiars drowned by the Truthwell, their bodies hanging preserved in its water and their Echoes held there until their lies are confessed or named.
• The Material Plane PlaneThe central Anchor, also called the Equilibrium: Caeldon's own plane, the hub of the Veil, and the only plane where free will truly works.
• The Taken CreatureThe Sepulchre-Kin preserved as damaged Echoes inside their dormant Record-engine, the last of the Tomb-Builder's worshippers.
• Ithaere the Drowned Mother ResonantA Resonant of Aqua that condensed briefly out of the terror of the Drowning Bloom, when the Elves whose survivors became the Dark Elves prayed for permission to survive by any means, and faded when…
• The Anchored CreatureThe imprisoned Echoes of the Soul Anchor: translucent figures pinned where they died, replaying their last moments and grasping at the living.
• The Ghost Step Resonant ZoneA stretch of road where the past has folded back over the present and Path-Echoes repeat their routines forever.
• Self-Raised CreatureCorpses moved by their own hardened remnant, with no necromancer behind them, which rise where rites were skipped or necromancy was careless.
• Ennor the Grave-Watcher ResonantThe god who stands at the threshold of the dead, a Resonant of Umbra condensed over ages of burial, whom most cradle-web peoples honour at their graves under names of their own; Ennor is his Human…
• Salt-Kept CreatureDead preserved in the salt of the Glassbelt's vanished inland sea, who walk the pans and the old shorelines at night.
• Thaluren PeopleAn ancient oceanic people of the Tidebound Reaches, no branch of the Elves despite the misnomer "sea-elves"; they live at sea but are born upriver, and the return to spawn shapes all their custom and…
• Trace Magic School of magicThe Harmonic school of the Whispering Trace, concerned with what remains after departure, damage, death, or loss.
• Burst-Dead CreatureCadavers prepared with Corpse Burst and left as traps, which lie still until the sigil wakes and then explode into bone, rot, and remnant shock.
• The Confluence Basins RegionThe broad lowland heartland of Humans: wide valleys, deep fields, and linked rivers gathering towards the Serath.
• The Forgotten (the Eternal Record) CreatureRecord-bound Echoes of people erased from the Material Plane, who wander the stacks of the Eternal Record as memory-forms.

Terms

Echo · The Rattlecut

In the Writers’ Guide

• The Anchored
• Bridge-Dead
• Burst-Dead
• Cairn-Wakers
• The Choked
• The Clock-Keeper
• Crossroad Hanged
• The Drowned Court
• The Forgotten (the Eternal Record)
• Fused Dead
• Grey Crews
• Hostile Remnants
• Marrow Sentinels
• The Old Hunt
• Path-Echoes
• Pit-Wakers
• Possessing Ancestors
• Raised Corpses
• Rattlecut Dead
• The River-Given
• Salt-Kept
• Seal-Knockers
• Self-Raised
• Surface-Walkers
• The Taken
• The Unfinished
• The Unreturned
• Unsworn Dead
• The Warmed
• Word-Generals