Ghost-Blooded

 

In the First Age, few ghosts walked the Underworld, and fewer still found their way back into Creation except at the behest of sorcerers and necromancers. All that dramatically changed with the Great Contagion. The plague scoured the population and spread the gnawing blights of shadowlands, leaving ghosts aplenty to settle the many places where life and death conjoined. It was from this post-Contagion era that the first known Ghost-Blooded emerged. None endure to the present who remember the experiments of Arcanoi that bore these earliest Half-Dead, and so, none can say whether the births were deliberate or merely serendipitous. Perhaps the magic was simply rediscovered, as with so much other lore from records and tomes of the First Age. Regardless of their origins, the early Ghost-Blooded proved quite useful to their undead forbears. In spite of this, the secret of Half-Dead creation spread slowly, owing in large part to the difficulty of the required magic and the effort of remaining in Creation. But since that time, there have always been ghosts arrogant and powerful enough to spawn wherever and however they will.

Those few Ghost-Blooded cursed to walk the Threshold during the reign of the Empress were mostly outcasts of the lowest sort. The dead condemned them variously as below the station of the dead and as painful reminders of their former existences. The living feared them as monsters, and the Immaculates condemned them as the pitiful products of cosmological miscegenation. Then came the sack of Thorns, and everything changed. The Ghost-Blooded now rank only slightly behind the deathknights and the Solar Anathema on the Wyld Hunt’s targets list, as the Realm’s poor intelligence of the Underworld leads them to assume every Ghost-Blood is a potential spy of the Deathlords among the living. Indeed, many are, and various Deathlords have been encouraging their ghostly minions to reproduce.

Most Ghost-Blooded in the modern era grow up in the shadowlands, surrounded from birth by the cycles of life and death that govern those forsaken lands. During the day, they live as mortals among the sickly wretches eking out sustenance in the murk. By night, the ghosts of their ancestors appear and walk among them like beings of flesh beneath the dim stars of the Underworld. Instead of parental love, these God-Blooded know the stilted melodrama of Passion. Instead of toys, they tend the Fetters and relics of their parents. Their existence is rooted in morbid acceptance that life itself is merely an apprenticeship for unlife. This is especially true in older ghost clans, where respect for elders and piety meet in a rigid familial hierarchy. Ghost-Blooded who belong to these clans receive extensive and versatile training as assassins and courtesans, educated in prayer and etiquette as thoroughly as their training in the killing arts. These agents walk in Creation as the hands and eyes of their ancestors, preparing for the time when they will kill themselves and take their rightful positions as full members of their families. Many of these ghost clans serve the Deathlords directly or indirectly, and so, a number of talented Ghost-Blooded serve as lieutenants for Abyssal Exalted. Those who are not servants of the lords of the Underworld are seen as little different by the living, and most of those Ghost-Blooded who do not dwell among the dead live in secrecy, lest they be struck down by Dragon-Blooded hot to avenge Thorns. A rare few Ghouls rebel against their nature entirely and take up lucrative — and highly dangerous — careers as ghost hunters and exorcists.

Heritage Power: Half-Dead may attune their senses to the Essence of the Underworld as a basic dice action for a cost of 1 Willpower point or 3 motes of Essence. This sixth sense allows a God-Blood to perceive all shadowland borders and immaterial ghosts within the range of her normal senses for one scene. In addition, Ghost-Blooded with the Awakened Essence Merit may drink blood to replenish their motes as if they were ghosts. Finally, all Ghost-Blooded become full ghosts upon their demise, losing all Traits specific to life as a God-Blood, while gaining appropriate Passion dots for each Virtue and 5 dots of Fetters. Unlike the majority of ghosts, Ghost-Blooded who cross over simply step out of their dead flesh and remain at their previous location.

Associations: Ghost-Blooded are creatures of the shadowlands, alive and yet stained by death. Many Half-Dead embrace the trappings of their ancestry, dressing in funerary garb or anointing themselves with the fragrant unguents of embalming. Others dwell in crypts or graveyards or simply surround themselves more subtly with hues of black, gray and bone white. It is ever in the dimness and shadows that the Heirs of Dust and Ashes walk.

Sobriquets: Ghouls, Grave-Born, Half-Dead, Heirs of Dust and Ashes

Concepts: Deathknight’s lieutenant, speaker for the dead, morbid poet, mailed fist of the ancestors, keeper of the old ways

 

 

I died the night of my

birth and suckled stillborn

at my mother’s breast. Do

you think to frighten me?