I have been asked to compile what is known, and what is rumored, about the energetic remnants of the dead. Aldric was characteristically sparse in his instructions.
“Write down what you find. Leave nothing out. Especially the things that embarrass you.”
I will do my best.
It is the Temple’s position, and my own sincere belief, that the gods are present in all things. What follows does not contradict that. If anything, it confirms it - that even in death, even in suffering, something of the divine order persists. Whether that order is merciful is a question above my station.
On Shades
The most common phenomenon reported to the Temple, and the most benign. A shade is not a presence - it is an impression. Witnesses describe seeing figures repeat the same action, walk the same path, speak without sound. The figures do not respond to intervention. They do not acknowledge the living. They simply… continue until they don’t.
My understanding is that a shade is what remains when the energy of a moment is somehow fixed in place rather than released. A death, a great joy, a terrible violence - something caused the current to eddy rather than flow. What we observe is the echo of it, replaying without purpose or awareness.
The Temple’s guidance is clear: shades require no intervention beyond prayer for the departed. They are not suffering. They are not present. They are, as best I can determine, the spiritual equivalent of a scar.
On Ghosts
This is where my research becomes more difficult to write, and more difficult to read back.
A ghost is not an echo. It is aware. Witnesses consistently describe a sense of being seen, of the figure turning toward them, reaching, sometimes moving objects or producing sounds. Unlike a shade, a ghost responds to the presence of the living.
What disturbs me most in the accounts I have reviewed is this: no ghost has ever communicated clearly. They reach, they knock, they disturb - but nothing coherent passes between them and the living. Aldric suggested, when I raised this with him, that perhaps they are trying. That the inability to communicate is not indifference but limitation.
I have been sitting with that thought for several days now.
The Temple’s position is that ghosts are souls unable to complete their passage - held here by attachment, by violence, by something left unresolved. Our role is to pray for their release, to perform the rites of passage that were perhaps denied them, and to trust the gods to do the rest. Whether the gods always answer is not a question I am prepared to examine in writing.
On the Strigoi
I include this entry with significant reservation, as I have found nothing credible to confirm it exists at all.
The Strigoi appears in accounts from the eastern and northern mountain settlements - always secondhand, always someone’s cousin or a merchant who passed through. The description is consistent enough to be either true or a very persistent story: a dead thing that moves, that feeds on the living in some fashion, that is difficult to kill by conventional means.
I have raised this with Aldric. He told me to write it down and stop asking him about it.
I have written it down.
On the Corpus
I am even more skeptical here than I was with the strigoi, and I was quite skeptical there.
The accounts describe animated dead - skeletons walking, the newly buried rising. They come exclusively from places no one goes anymore: collapsed mining settlements, abandoned frontier outposts, the edges of the Frozen Wastes. In every case the account is old, unverified, and passed through enough hands to be unrecognizable from whatever truth it originated from.
My considered opinion, having reviewed what I could find, is that the majority of these accounts describe something far more mundane and far more terrible: starvation. Communities cut off from supply, reduced to doing what people do when they have nothing left. The dead do not walk. People do. And people, when desperate enough, do things that the survivors cannot bring themselves to describe plainly.
I note this not to be unkind to the accounts, but because I believe the Temple serves no one by chasing shadows when the real horror is entirely human.
On the Subject of Callers
I almost did not include this section. I am including it because Aldric specifically asked me to, and because I think my reluctance is itself informative.
A Caller is not like the others. A shade is a remnant. A ghost is a soul. A Caller, if the accounts are to be believed, is neither - or rather, it is many, compressed into something that believes itself to be one.
It originates, inconsistently, in places of mass death. Battlefields. Fallen settlements. Sites of plague. The accounts suggest that when enough souls fail to complete their passage in the same place at the same time, something forms from the aggregate - a presence that is not any single person but carries the weight of all of them.
What it does with that weight is where the accounts become difficult to read.
It intrudes. Witnesses describe thoughts that are not their own - a pull, a sense of being called toward somewhere specific. Those who follow do not return. Those who resist describe the experience as though something was dying inside their head and pulling at them as it went.
I believe the Caller is suffering. I believe it knows it is diminishing and does not want to. I do not believe it understands what it is doing to the people it reaches for.
That does not make it less dangerous. It may make it more so.
The Temple has no established rite for a Caller. Aldric has not told me why. I have not asked again.
On Other Phenomena
There are things I have encountered in this research that fit none of the above.
The sandborn peoples speak of a category of phenomena they have named. I will not record the name here as I have likely mangled the pronunciation and do not wish to compound ignorance with disrespect. The term encompasses a wide range of unexplained events. Voices in desert winds. Fires that burn without fuel. Animals that lead travelers to water they should not have been able to find. Their understanding of these things is, from what I can gather, very old and very specific, and I am not the right person to document it.
What I can confidently say is that not everything reported to the Temple fits the categories above. Some phenomena appear to have no connection to the dead at all - no history of death at the site, no identified source, no pattern that suggests residual energy of any kind.
For these, I have no framework. Aldric, when I pressed him, said only that the gods work in ways that are not always legible to us, and that the appropriate response to mystery is humility, not taxonomy.
I am trying to take that to heart.
I am not entirely succeeding.