Watchers

Overview

The Watchers are the Eye-Cloud of the Many-Eyed One, the Cast-Out born of the fall of the Oculus of Lux and came to believe that nothing should be hidden. It sets them loose as swarms of disembodied eyes. A swarm follows its victim everywhere, never blinking, recording every act, word, and thought, until the victim has no inside left.

Appearance

A Watcher is an eye with nothing around it: a wet, living eye the size of a plum or a pea, floating at head height. Some are human eyes, brown or grey or blue; some are the faceted eyes of insects, the slit eyes of reptiles, or shapes of light and flesh that hurt to look at. They never blink. A few weep a thin light that drips and fades before it lands.

They come in swarms, a dozen to a few hundred, drifting like midges around their victim, turning all together to look at whatever the victim looks at, and then back to the victim. They make no sound. Near them the light turns too sharp and too knowing, shadows seem to stare, and skin prickles with being watched. They smell faintly of tears, salt and warm.

Habitat and Range

They live wherever their victim is. A swarm is set loose on one person and goes where that person goes: into the house, into the bed, into the privy, into a crowd and out of it. Where the Many-Eyed One has lingered, as in the City of Glass that it emptied by the truth, eyes open on walls, the backs of hands, and flower petals, and loose swarms hang in the streets.

Behaviour and Temperament

Watchers follow and record. They do nothing else: they do not touch, speak, or harm, and they cannot be persuaded or driven off by threats. They stay closest when the victim tries hardest to hide something, gathering thickest at the mouth and the eyes, as if waiting for a confession.

The Watchers have no temper, but their victims say they feel a patience in the swarm, and a hunger to know that is the Many-Eyed One's own.

Abilities

What the Watchers see, the Many-Eyed One knows, and it pushes its words straight into the victim's mind through them: "I see you. I know you. You cannot hide." Their stare draws thoughts toward the surface, so a victim followed long enough begins to speak secrets aloud without meaning to, or shows them in a visible aura that others can read. The Many-Eyed One may then burst a secret open in the victim's mind all at once.

They are beyond the reach of anyone who keeps a secret with conviction. Closed rooms, drawn curtains, and the shade that gathers where a mind holds something back for someone else's good thin the swarm; light, which gives them more to see, only feeds it.

Life Cycle

Watchers are set loose by the Many-Eyed One; they are not born. A swarm stays until its victim breaks, confesses everything, or dies, and then its eyes close one by one, shrivel, and fall like dry seeds. Some say each eye that closes opens somewhere else.

Uses and Dangers

The Watchers take the self's privacy, and with it trust: a family, a guild, or a court that a swarm has followed into is soon at war with itself. Victims often collapse or go mad. People who have met them keep one thing back from everyone, as a kind of discipline.

Lore and Belief

In some towns the Watchers are believed to be the eyes of the gods, sent to see the guilty, and those followed by them are shunned as sinners. They are not the gods' eyes. Elsewhere a painted eye is hung over doors to ward them off, which does nothing, and closed shutters, which help, are mistaken for mere modesty. The proverb "draw the curtain" is said to have begun as advice against them.

Spies and thieves fear a swarm more than any guard, since a Watcher-followed thief cannot hide a thing, and thieves' dens laugh at the master thief who led a swarm straight back to his own hoard.

Where It Appears

• The Many-Eyed One