Truth-Seekers

Overview

Truth-Seekers are the hunters of the Radiance. In a plane where secrets show as distortions in the light, they hunt them: they are drawn to the dark spots that lies and hidden things leave in a visitor's aura, and they consume what is hidden there. They are counted among the plane's Revealed, beside those the Light shattered and the Confessors.

Appearance

A Truth-Seeker is a shape of light with a hole in it. It is roughly the size of a large hound, long and low, made of a white glare so bright that its outline is hard to hold; at its front, where a head would be, is a dark, round opening that seems to drink light. It moves in quick, straight darts, freezes, and darts again, like a heron striking. It makes a thin, high keening that rises as it nears a secret. Near one, the air smells of hot glass.

Habitat and Range

They hunt across the crystalline plains of the Radiance and wherever visitors gather, because the Illuminated have nothing hidden for them to eat.

Behaviour and Temperament

A Truth-Seeker finds its prey by the dark: the jagged warping of malice, the flicker of deceit, the shadow a kept secret casts in a visitor's light. It follows the darkest visitor in a group, closes, and fastens on the dark spot. It does not seek flesh. It ignores anyone with nothing to hide.

Abilities

It consumes hidden things. A secret a Truth-Seeker has fed on is torn out of hiding: the victim speaks it, or shows it, or simply cannot keep it any longer, and the feeding hurts, like a burn from the inside.

Uses and Dangers

Some say the Illuminated tolerate them because they clean the plane of secrets. Their danger is to every visitor who carries one, and that is every visitor.

Lore and Belief

Travellers call them the secret-eaters. A saying brought back from the Radiance holds that the only defence against one is to have nothing to hide, and those who say it usually add that no traveller has ever managed it.

Spies and thieves fear the Radiance more than any gallows, and the warning of the spy who fled into it to escape his pursuers and was found by them on the crystal plain, weeping out every secret he had ever sold, is told in every lord's hall that keeps spies.

Where It Appears

• The Radiance
• Writers' Guide: The Planes