Possessing Ancestors

Overview

The Rotting Crown, a Cast-Out that cannot bear any ruler to yield, summons the dead to possess the living: not to haunt them, but to rule them. A possessing ancestor is a dead father, grandmother, or founder pressed back into a descendant's body, its will on top and the heir's beneath. The possessed act out their ancestors' desires, aware the whole time and unable to resist. What rides them is the ancestor's Echo and the Pattern the line inherited, bent by the Crown into a single will.

Appearance

The ancestor has no body of its own; it wears the heir's. At first only those who knew the dead can see it: a young woman who suddenly stands with her grandmother's stoop and taps two fingers on the table as the old woman did, a boy who speaks in his great-grandfather's turns of phrase and his accent of sixty years ago. As the possession settles, the heir ages towards the ancestor: the hair greys early, the skin loosens and spots, the hands knot. The eyes keep the heir's colour but look out with someone else's expression, and sometimes, under it, the heir's own terror shows for a moment.

Around the possessed the Crown's rot gathers. Their rooms smell of wet earth, old velvet, and mould; signet rings tarnish green; flowers set near them wilt by evening. The voice is the heir's, but in it many hear a dry rattle of ancestors behind the words.

Habitat and Range

Possessing ancestors are found in the houses the Crown has entered: dynasties facing a broken succession, old families burdened by a forebear's debts or sins, the heirless and the reigning who asked it to keep the line alive. A single house may hold several, a whole succession bound one into another.

Behaviour and Temperament

An ancestor wants what it wanted in life, and wants it more for having died without it: the old war finished, the old enemy humbled, the old house kept exactly as it was. It cannot let anything change. It rules through its heir with the confidence of someone who has already lived the life once, and it treats the heir's own wishes as a child's. The heir, awake inside, relives the old mistakes and pays their price however hard they fight.

Abilities

The possessed have whatever skill and knowledge the ancestor had, and they speak with an authority the living heir never held; listeners feel the urge to obey. Their bodies pay for it: under the Crown's rot field an heir may age decades in years and die of old age young. A curse the Crown has driven down the line follows the same path, so that the grandson pays for the grandfather's sin.

Uses and Dangers

The houses that asked for it get what they asked: continuity, a ruler who never changes. The cost is the heir, and then the house: communities ruled by the possessed cannot change course, children do not grow up, and when the Crown leaves, the whole line may slump to black sludge.

Lore and Belief

Many people take a possessed heir for a dutiful one, "the very image of the old lord", and only the family knows otherwise. Some faiths call the condition an honour, the ancestors returning to guide their house. It is not; the ancestor is held in place against its own passing. The Crown's own legends give the cure: an heir who sets the inheritance down, refuses the ancestor by their own name, and lets the old one die is beyond its grip. Old houses repeat that letting go cannot be learned by proxy.

The songs are full of such heirs: the young lord who rode to war in his grandfather's armour and his grandfather's temper and burned a village his grandfather had once failed to take, and the sister who killed him at the gate to set them both free.

Where It Appears

• The Rotting Crown