Undead are a category of Others that are made from the dead and dying. Formed through impressions, grudges, or by disturbing the balance between life and death. These Others were often once Humans or Practitioners, however they can sometimes be created from animals.[1]
The art of using the undead is called Necromancy.
Types[]
The Undead don't change much from their original appearances while alive, besides whatever toll was taken on their body.
Artificial undead tend to be made of bone.[2]
- Banes[3]
- Bestealcian,[4] hunter-killer undead made from predators who choked on the bodies of their prey.
- Cimitir,[5] rare undead constructed as wardens for certain important areas.
- Dirges[3]
- Beasts
- Things
- Ghosts, as a subcategory of Echoes that were specifically created by a death
- Specters
- Wraiths
- Ghouls[3]
- Revenants[3]
- Vampires,[3] or Nosferatu,[6] though sometimes things that appear to be 'vampires' aren't really undead.[7]
- Widows[3] or Widwe,[8] forged and empowered by mourning, they can block practices easily. Considered a moderate-tier creation.
Uses[]
Any usefulness that stems from an undead is from the natural abilities they had in life, circumstances surrounding their death, or as basic muscle.
Weaknesses[]
Vampires, Banes, and likely other undead are vulnerable to running water, as it represents Nature and drains Death energy,[9] as well as to other sources of Nature energy, including green wood, daylight, lightning, clean fire, a spike of crystal, or a stalagmite, though artificial Undead can be treated to protect against fire.[6]
Notable Undead[]
Trivia[]
- Others that can revive from being killed, such as Dog Tags or Bogeymen, but aren't themselves connected to Death aren't generally considered undead.
- Entities like the corpse-based Feorgbold created by the Briar Girl that are vessels for forces other than Death, such as life or Nature, are also not considered undead.
- While the term 'zombie' has appeared several times in the Otherverse, it hasn't been used as a formal classification.
References[]
- ↑ “There’s another upstairs. Died, went unclaimed, spirit found its way back to the body. Undead now. Could get messy in the wrong circumstance.”
“Messy how?”
“If it bit another cat, there’d be two undead cats. If it bit a human, it would be two undead cats and an undead human.”
“Ghoul? Zombie? That sounds like a problem.”
“One or the other or both. Only reason things haven’t gotten worse is it’s doing what it did while it was alive. Lies in a sunbeam all day. Only difference is it doesn’t eat, drink, make waste, doesn’t have to move. But it stinks and we have to work to keep others from trying to share the sunbeam. All it would take is a reflex bite.” - Excerpt from Crossed with Silver 19.15 - ↑ Created undead tend to have a motif of bone, but may also use Death-saturated items (even fencing, wire, dirt, tools from graveyards), have shadows or omens worked into them, or have some tortured or altered human or recently dead individual at their core. They are usually created as specific tools, be it as watchdogs, creatures that spread more necromantic influence or bad omens, and a means of attacking and terrorizing others. - PACT DICE
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 There were ghouls, far more common, who could thrive because unlike Vampires, they could eat the dead, who were plentiful and not innocent.
There were Banes, Revenants, Widows, Dirge-things, Dirge-beasts - Excerpt from Cutting Class 6.2 - ↑ Yiyun opened a box. Inside, there was a trio of skeletal dogs, the skin shrunken around them. Forelimbs and rear limbs had what looked like wooden stakes strapped to them, bandaged on, and the mummified skin, bandage, and stakes had all been so stained and worn down that they’d melted in together.
“Bestealcian. Moderate tier undead,” Yiyun said. “You need canines, wild cats, or raptors who choked on the meat of their prey or died in pursuit. With trained Sight, you should be able to see how they died and the quality of that death. There are ways to find bodies like this, if you devote the time and resources. Treatment of the body is detailed in one of the texts I gave you. The stakes are wood from any graveyard, tomb, or tree growing over where a body was buried, used to kill something.
[...]
Like the Bestealcian stalker-hunters. - Excerpt from Let Slip 20.a - ↑ The Cimitir are created by necromancers as a kind of guard dog against spiritual forces and a means of collecting power or defining areas. Standard necromantic practices means dealing with not only the forces of death, but the other forces that *manage* death, and sometimes this is inconvenient.
These are undead wards and wardens fashioned from the bodies and traces of people and animals who died holding vigil or died in grief, the dog that lay on a gravesite until it died, the old woman who let herself pass soon after her husband did, following after him, the woman who threw herself from a cliffside after her son died by her own error. These events are often discovered by recognizing the echoes that they spawn and tracking down the body before authorities do. A difficult collection, but rewarding, because the Cimitir hold their own kind of vigil in death. It's rare to have more than one as an individual or a small handful as a family. They are wrapped in grave shrouds and armed with exposed teeth (such as the aforementioned dog's fangs) and the materials from old graveyards and sites left to go to fallow and ruin, and from old desecrated, dug up, or raided burial sites.
The Cimitir as an entity is not especially dangerous in reality, biting and scampering away, but its presence marks that practice may operate differently, and the spiritual may lose sway with echoes getting more effectiveness. Spiritual Others may stay away from the area as a matter of preservation, and humans may notice an area gets more creepy or uncomfortable.
The true use, however, is in the realms that are not physical. There, the Cimitir holds sway, a stalking thing that is far larger than its proportions in reality, turning its eyeless, shrouded face this way and that as it looks for intruders. It is alarm system and stalker, and will scream at, illuminate, suppress and snap at or attack any intruder. This includes psychopomps and the typhlotic that would prey on the echoes. In the regions where the Cimitir stalks, the dead don't rest easy and they remain the Cimitir's creator's preogative, to sort out, use, or manage. The boundaries of the region can be expanded by using materials from the same fallow or desecrated gravesites that were used to make the Cimitir, but these markers that stake out the expanded borders can be found and turned against the practitoner, so care must be exercised. In a similar manner, if the Cimitir itself is destroyed, its influence ceases, but it is almost always destroyed in the realm of the living, rather than the Ruins or the other realms of Death and near-death, because its immaterial self gets stronger and more imposing as it gets approached in other, less visceral planes.
Astral travelers may be stalked and snapped up if they venture too close to the staked out regions, or be suppressed and trapped in a location, keeping them at bay and leaving their bodies hollow. Echoes may also be collected or herded. Cimitir lack a great deal of will but as familiars they may act as an extra set of hands (despite not necessarily having such) for the necromancer. - Wildbow on Discord - ↑ 6.0 6.1 When defending oneself against a Bane [...] care must be taken, as the Bane is a thing of blight, and will blight all it touches. Many will alter their Banes to make this contact easier. Fire will serve if the Bane was carelessly wrought, but many will be coated or painted to protect their flesh. One might surmise that the Nosferatu are a natural variation of the Bane, insofar as they are natural. The Nosferatu, if this theory were correct, would incubate spirits of death within them, and depositing them within a victim, inviting them to and from the veil of death. The blight, both pre-existing and given, would be one of the blood.
As such, consider the same methods that function on the Nosferatu. A length of green wood will serve as a conduit for the living energies to vacate the dead prison that confine them. Natural energies, too, will suffice, with daylight, running water from a natural source, lightning strikes, clean fire if the Bane is not pre-treated, a spike of crystal, or a stalagmite with a history of attachment to the ground serving to provide this conduit of natural forces. Like the Nosferatu, the Bane is a wretched thing, and death should be seen as a mercy. - Excerpt from Duress 12.3 - ↑ “Bone. Paper. Every other follows different rule. What looks like a goblin could be a demon, or a wraith, or a glamour. I mean, you remember those ‘vampires’ from out west.”
“The faerie? Sure.”
“You’re not getting what I’m saying. If they can fool themselves into thinking they’re vampires, and believe it to the point it becomes sort of true, sparkly skin aside, then they can fool us. This is what bothers me about all this. You can’t make any guarantees, you can’t slap on convenient labels. It’s why we call them others. You can’t plot-” - Excerpt from Bonds 1.1 - ↑ Yiyun unboxed another Other. A female figure, skeletal, shrouded in black lace. “This is a Widwe. Moderate tier. Easier to get the pieces, harder to actually pull those pieces together. The lace is hung to collect the energies around where a person is in mourning, or taken from the mourningwear of others.”
[...]
This- this is mostly protective. It is also a battery. It serves as a good guard against any undead that are stopped and rebounded back at the sender, and against other energies. Like what Josh and Lenard might be doing. I usually keep something like the Widwe close when I travel.”
[...]
The Widwe lunged forward, jerky, paused-
The practice unfolded- paper, covered in writing, expanding out, forming an origami shape as it charged-
The Widwe collided with it, graceless, the two of them collapsing into a heap.
The Widwe stood up again, herky-jerky, shuddering, pausing frequently, moving in bursts of high speed when not paused.
[...]
The Widwe stopped more practices, blocking each. One of them seemed to hurt her badly. - Excerpt from Let Slip 20.a - ↑ You know that bit, about how vampires can’t cross running water? Water is life, it’s natural, and it naturally draws out the deathly energies. - Excerpt from Damages 2.7