The Wordless

Overview

The Wordless of the Silence are the last of its Unspoken and the strangest. They have no form at all. They are a presence, and what the presence takes is the will to exist.

Appearance

There is nothing to see. Travellers know a Wordless is near by what it does to them and to the plane: the faded colours seem to fade further, the pressure of the absent sound grows heavier, and a dullness settles that is not tiredness. Some say the air feels thicker, like standing at the bottom of still water. There is no sound, no smell, and no warmth or cold.

Habitat and Range

They are found across the Silence, more often towards its stillest parts, where the plane borders the Frost-Bound and a body may go on surviving while the mind inside it stops.

Behaviour and Temperament

A Wordless does not move towards anything that anyone can see; it is simply there, and then it is not. Whether it seeks travellers or merely lies where they walk is not known. While one is near, a traveller stops wanting: to go on, to eat, to remember, to be.

Abilities

It drains the will to exist. A traveller caught in one's presence for long sits down on the stone and does not get up, and the plane does the rest.

Uses and Dangers

It gives nothing. Its danger is that it cannot be fought or fled by force, only walked out of, by a will that keeps hold of its purpose.

Lore and Belief

Travellers call the Wordless the weight, or the stillness. Some believe they are the remains of everything the Silence has ever erased, gathered into a dumb heaviness; others that they are the plane itself, waking a little. Neither is known.

Where It Appears

• The Silence
• Writers' Guide: The Planes