The Unweeping

Overview

The Silent Screamer comes to the grieving and the angry and offers to take the noise away. The Unweeping are those who said yes. They can no longer cry, complain, or confess, and what they cannot let out festers in them. Their mouths are not sewn, as the Seed-Hosts' are; the stitch is inside.

Appearance

At first they look calm, and those around them are relieved. A widow who wept every night is quiet; a raging son is still. Then the signs gather. The face is set in a mild, fixed composure that never changes; the eyes are dry, red-rimmed, and bulge a little, like the Screamer's. The lips are pale and pressed together, and sometimes a faint violet line shows across them. They grow thin and grey. Their voices, when they speak at all, are flat and soft, and they never raise them. Close to, they smell faintly sweet and sour, like fruit going bad under its skin.

Habitat and Range

They live where they lived before: in their own homes, at their work, at the bedsides of the sick. They are found wherever the Screamer has passed, often several in one household or one street, since the hush spreads to those nearest.

Behaviour and Temperament

They are gentle, patient, and helpful, and they cannot bear noise. A crying child, a quarrel, a keening at a deathbed: the Unweeping come to soothe it, and they are very good at it. Inside they are not calm. Everything they cannot say presses on them, and when the pressure breaks, as it does at last, it breaks as violence or madness.

Abilities

Their touch hushes. A hand laid on a weeping face stops the tears; on a shouting man, his anger goes still in his throat; on a mourner, the grief sinks inward unspoken. The one touched feels relief at first, and then begins to go the same way. The rot within is real: the Unweeping waste, and many die of it, quietly, without ever saying they were ill.

Uses and Dangers

They give nothing but a false peace. The danger is to the self and to the household: the hush spreads through a family or a sickroom by kindness, and a village touched by it stops talking things through. Those who know the signs answer with noise: they keen aloud at funerals, sing, and make the hushed one speak, shout, or weep, even if it takes days. Some recover that way.

Lore and Belief

All peoples know them by rumour, under many names: "the quiet ones", "the dry-eyed". Many believe a soul hushed this way has given up its voice to the dead. That is not so; the voice is still there, held in. Mourning customs that insist on keening aloud are often said to have been made against them, which may or may not be true.

Where It Appears

• Overview: Hosts of the Dark Entities