Last day of the 12th month, 220 years after Amarax pledged himself to Deadhaus. For many nights I have held discourse with the archliche, and much has been divulged to me of the house of the dead. While it has always appeared to me as a monolithic force, this could not be farther from the truth. Deadhaus is comprised of many individual wills. Some serve mindlessly, while others seem barely constrained to the greater whole.
It is an alliance of dark and ancient forces, often with conflicting agendas, all united beneath a religious superstructure. An inspection of the highest levels of organization within Deadhaus reveals several distinct factions, each with their own specific function. The military of Deadhaus, which is the only branch Thacea has ever seen, is known as the Shambling Hordes. The bulk of it is made of what the archliche refers to as the reanimated.
These are created by liches who tear souls from the realm of the dead and forcibly bind them to corpses. Left to their own devices, the reanimated are mostly harmless. In most cases, they wander aimlessly until their bodies disintegrate to the flies and elements. But liches can compel these mindless corpses into battle. More specifically, they can compel the souls within them, which in turn compels their rotting flesh to battle.
When I asked the archliche if any soul could deny his command, his only answer was, “they can try.” There are other undead besides the reanimated and liches within the Shambling Hordes, as the only prerequisite for marching with them is the ability, if not the desire, to serve. Revenants are drawn to this faction more than any other for their warlike nature, but ghouls also attach themselves to the hordes in greater number than other factions.
Where the Shambling Hordes march, ghouls tend to follow, hoping to scavenge abandoned battlefields. But sometimes revenants will feed fallen survivors to the trailing ghouls, who learn that there are better meals to be had by marching with the hordes directly. Much to my surprise, Amarax claimed the use of the Shambling Hordes is typically a last resort.
Deadhaus would much rather deal with an enemy from the shadows than commit its military resources, which he astoundingly claims are spread thin. This is why there are two factions devoted to subterfuge. The first faction Deadhaus sends to interact with outside forces is known as the Darklight Enclave. Its purpose is to gather information unseen, or if need be, to assassinate a high priority target.
The Darklight Enclave is mostly made up of wraiths, though it is suspected that there are other undead among them. I say suspected because that is the word Amarax used. Apparently, the Darklight Enclave does not spy only on outside forces. I was also informed that the Thaceans who managed to cross the Deadhaus Gate by land were dealt with by these wraiths, for they serve as silent sentinels along the boundaries of the dead.
If ever a human should see one of the undead, chances are a wraith has seen them first. When I inquired as to the wraith that accosted me in the capital two years ago, Amarax revealed that the Darklight Enclave had marked me for assassination. There was concern within Deadhaus that Amarax had opened a channel by which I might glean his secrets when he bound our eyes. Apparently, with the requisite knowledge, I could have seen through his eyes as easily as he saw through mine.
He assured them that I did not possess such knowledge, but they feared I might acquire it in my search. For these past two years, he has been concealing my presence from the Darklight Enclave, just as he has concealed from them the fact that I did see a vision through his eyes once--though this was in a dream, where mortals know truths unremembered in the waking world.
My close encounter with the wraith in the capital, he explained, was due to a “lapse in attention” on his part that was unlikely to occur again. I take little comfort in such assurances, however, especially given that I was also assured the wraiths “most certainly” know how to destroy vampires. The second faction devoted to subterfuge is the Faceless Court.
This is an assembly of vampires that use their guile and glamor to infiltrate the enemies of Deadhaus, a function which vampires alone are suited to. While they often work in tandem with the Darklight Enclave, passing information for the wraiths to carry back to Deadhaus, the Faceless Court’s primary purpose is subversion. They whisper in the ears of leaders and rebels, sewing seeds of doubt and confusion, spreading misinformation and sparking uprisings.
Wherever an enemy is susceptible to subversion, Deadhaus prefers the Faceless Court to the Shambling Hordes, as entire cities have been toppled by their honeyed words. Sigstrand was one such city. This is why they sent no aid to Beller when we called for it so long ago. This is why the Beltlands rebelled against the Northern Provinces in the War of the Yoke. It is why the Thaceans were seduced to secede when Ustilia fell.
It was all a grand orchestration… the darkest impulses of man bestirred by whispers from faces worn as masks for the dead, corroding us from within. Other factions within Deadhaus have little to no dealings with the outside world. Corpus Artificum is a sort of craftsmen’s guild among the dead. They oversee the building of all structures, forging of all weapons, and assembly of all mechanisms Deadhaus might need.
They are also keepers of history, which they see as a sacred duty… perhaps that is why their faction alone is named in Ustilian. Like the Shambling Hordes, any kind of undead may join Corpus Artificum, so long as they are capable of some sort of craftsmanship. But how do the dead keep their history? Even the most well crafted and well kept books break down over enough centuries, and even centuries are meaningless increments next to the eternal.
And memory is too dangerous a vessel for history, for even if its ink never faded, the flesh that bound it could still be destroyed. So instead of words and books, the archeliche told me, Deadhaus keeps history in stone, and not just any stone, but the same kind from which Way Stones are crafted, a material known as aevitanium. And Way Stones… Deadhaus does not know where they came from. They were there before their oldest records. Amarax describes them as doors between worlds.
He says that to step through a Way Stone is to leave Malorum. Some of them lead to the other celestial spheres, and some lead far beyond that. Through the Way Stones, there are paths that lead to where aevitanium may be found, far beyond the ninth sphere. When this material is returned to Malorum, Corpus Artificum then shapes it into obelisks and engraves those obelisks with historical records, whereupon they become known as a Lore Stone.
And just as the position of celestial spheres can open the Way Stones, an injection of magick can open the Lore Stones. One cannot cross through the Lore Stones as one does the Way Stones, but one can gaze through them into the past. This way, history can be observed as its events unfolded, however long ago they might have transpired. Of course, the engravings must be true, must accurately depict what happened, or the Lore Stone will not open.
This means that the vision I saw through the eyes of Amarax, that of the lightless chamber of countless pillars, was in fact a sort of library. Each of the pillars was a Lore Stone, each capable of gazing upon some moment in the past. I mentioned earlier that Deadhaus was ultimately a religious superstructure. This religion, which they call the Pale Doctrine, is conveyed to them through the Death’s Head Coven. This faction is only 12 banshees that are rarely seen outside their temples.
The dead come to them to hear prophecies, or receive instruction in what they call “the rituals,” which as far as I can tell are synonymous with law. One of the few things that will provoke the sisters of the Death’s Head Coven to leave their temples is when an undead has violated the rituals. When that happens, reprisal is nearly immediate, no matter how far away the offending undead might be.
To violate the rituals is to be struck down to a lower rung on the caste system to which all undead belong within Deadhaus. At the very highest are the Sovereign, who are so named for their acquisition of great power, whether that be in the form of knowledge, might, influence, anything that makes them especially valuable to Deadhaus. The Sovereign alone may sit as leaders in the aforementioned factions, though there is a great range of authority and power from one sovereign to the next.
Beneath the sovereign are the Sentient. These are the dead that are self aware, capable of complex thought. They are protected under the rituals, as no undead may harm another that is at least Sentient, but they may not hold positions of leadership. At the very bottom are the Servitors, the undead that are mindless, or whose minds are too simple to be recognized as Sentient. If an undead should damage a Servitor, then restitution is owed to the one who owned it, as defined in the rituals.
If a Servitor should damage a Sentient, then responsibility lies with that Servitor’s owner. It is possible, through great effort, that a Sentient may become Sovereign. I was told also, though very rare, that Servitors do sometimes gain sentience, at which point they receive protection through the rituals. And, as I mentioned before, it is through the violation of these rituals that a Sovereign can be stripped of its title, just as a Sentient may be stripped of its will.
Yet as terrifying such a fate might be, violations of the rituals are not unheard of. There is crime within Deadhaus, if you want to call it that. By defying the will of the Darklight Enclave, Amarax has violated the rituals. His violation has simply not been discovered as of yet. And what am I to make of my desiccated guide of Deadhaus? He answers anything I ask of him, pausing, expanding, or rewording as many times as I might need… but why?
To gain my trust, I suppose, to make me think I can trust him. I say him because of the way his voice sounds when it echoes in my thoughts, but Amarax himself does not know whether he was a man or woman in life. He considers it an irrelevant detail. Man and woman are aspects of life, he says, mechanisms of procreation. Death has no need of such distinction. It is opposite to life.
And yet, he had no answer for why banshees are clearly women, nor why, as he informed me, that revenants are always men. And I have seen and read of vampires both man and woman, but again the archelich had no comment on this. The whole matter seems beneath his notice, as is anything removed from magick. His knowledge and interests are specialized to the point of obsession--what he knows, he knows in explicit detail--but most other subjects disinterest him to the point that he simply forgets.
This is because his memory, like the rest of him, is a function of conscious will. A liche does not remember the way mortals do, by reflexive imprinting of memory upon the brain. Amarax has no brain; his skull is hollow, and so instead he encodes what he wishes to remember through magick. He binds the memories to his consciousness, which itself is sustained by magick, and may release them to make room for other knowledge should he so desire.
He has released most of the memories of who he was before he was a liche, including how long he has been one. “One century is much like another… and another,” he said. What he knows of Deadhaus is incidental in a way. He knows of it because it helps him further his own goals, but I doubt he would even care if it were destroyed, except that it might delay his research.
He was offered leadership positions in various factions, his caste being Sovereign, but declined them because he “could not be bothered with such tedium.” Once he was even offered a seat on the Pentarchy, a body of five rulers, one pentarch to represent each faction. Together they decide the path of Deadhaus as a whole, but again, Amarax was disinterested. If other liches are like this, and I suspect they might be, then this is a definite weakness.
Not only would they be unlikely to hold leadership positions, but they would be disconnected from Deadhaus in a way that makes them almost a liability. It may be that the most effective way to begin destroying Deadhaus is to target the liches first. Given their tendency to isolate themselves, how many could be destroyed before Deadhaus even noticed? And by then it would be weakened, for the Sentient dead are few, and of those only some are liches.
But the destruction of Deadhaus is a matter for another night. There is still much I must learn, and from sources other than the archliche, no doubt. After he had satisfied my initial questions, he informed me of my first task in the war against the Awakened. Well, I suppose technically it’s a much larger war than that, but for my purposes the Awakened are the only enemy I need concern myself with… besides Deadhaus.
My first task was to retrieve an object for the liche, something he calls a Soul Prism. This object, a sort of crystal as he described it, must be extracted from one of the Pillars of Malorum, which lie far below the surface. To reach them, I would need to enlist the aid of the ghouls, which I would find in their mound to the northeast, beneath the mountains that flank Deadhaus Gate.
They would guide me to the pillar, but I would need to be the one to extract the Soul Prism, as silence was of the essence for such an undertaking… though why he would not say, other than one must tread lightly in the darkness of the depths. As for why he needed the prism, the archliche said he would explain when I returned. And so I waited for the sun to set and left the great spinal columns behind.
I moved through forests and clearings as swift and silent as a shadow, having grown somewhat more accustomed to the speed of which I am capable. With only brief pauses to orient myself, I am now able to cover distances far greater than I ever could in life, even on horseback, and in less time. Of course, I do not see much of the world when moving at such speeds.
It blurs past me, trees and hills and stones melting together in streams of color-- only the stars remain fixed--but the blood avoids all obstacles effortlessly. It did not take long in my journey north for the charnel fetor of the ghoul mound to assail my senses, and I resolved to cease breathing as soon as I had found it. I began to move more cautiously as the stench deepened, unsure of what would await me. Certainly ghouls, but how would they respond to me?
Amarax had said I need only mention his name, and I would be granted passage, but there is no telling with these creatures. I found at last a low opening at the base of the mountain, a wide mouth from which the horrid stench bellowed, its throat a tunnel raked with claw marks. I stooped and peered inside. Empty. Seeing little other choice than to move forward, I hunched down and crept into the tunnel.
For a time, I moved soundlessly and alone, but at length I heard a sharp sound echoing through the tunnels, a frantic sniffing, and it was growing louder. I stopped moving, hoping that my intrusion would not raise an alarm. Soon after, a ghoul came clambering down the tunnel unimpeded by the low ceiling as it went on all fours. There were some similarities between this school and the one I captured. The general underlying structure remains the same.
It was deformed, twisted and elongated like the other ghoul, but was the one I captured was covered in tattered flesh that hung from its body in shreds, exposing bloodied sinew and yellowed bones beneath this ghoul was clad in bizarre armor. As it drew closer, I realized that this armor was in fact part of the ghoul itself. Its bones had overgrown much of its body like a chitinous shell.
Spiny protrusions jutted out along its back, and much of its head was encased in something like a second overgrown skull that flared into a crest toward the back. It clattered as it clambered, sniffing along the ground from nasal slits that were the only openings in its skeletal faceplate. "Vampire," It said, coming to a halt a short distance from me. “Not welcome, no.” “I was told to come here.” “Told wrong.” “Amarax sent me.” It rattled in its throat,
but said nothing. “If you’re listening, I could use some help here,” I thought to myself, but there was no answer. “Well…” I began, wondering what might happen if I simply ran past the ghoul. “I am here to help Deadhaus.” “Not welcome,” it said, and turned to clamber back the way it came. “Well, I’m not going to leave,” I called after it, but it ignored me, clattering away down the tunnel. “Wait! I need your help!” I began following the ghoul.
“What is your name?” “We are ghoul,” it said, not looking at me as it moved. “Which ghoul are you?” I reworded the question, remembering the way the other was named. “We are Bo-Ghoul,” it answered, rounding a portion of the tunnel so that it slipped out of sight. I hastened my pace to keep up with the armored ghoul, but as soon as I came around the corner, it was gone. Then, no sooner had I taken a few steps forward did I hear the tunnel floor shudder behind me.
The armored ghoul burst up from beneath the soil and clasped its claws around my ankles, yanking them out from under me. Once I was flattened, another pair of claws erupted from the tunnel near my head and seized my wrists. I struggled to loose myself, but quickly realized it was no use. Even as a vampire, I found ghouls to be impossibly strong. “I suppose I should’ve seen this coming,”. “Vampire is simple, yes. Does not know what welcome means.”
“I know what it means!” “Only ghouls pass into the mound… or food… and vampire is no ghoul…” The armored ghoul stretched itself over me, a single claw gripping my chest as I might grip an apple. I saw the nasal slits beneath its mask of bone flaring, and strangely enough I felt my blood recoil from the creature’s mouth. “Wait!” I shouted as the ghoul drew its gaping maw closer, and to my surprise, it leaned back.
“I know Falk-Ghoul!” It was the only thing that came to mind, given that this ghoul either did not know or did not care who Amarax was and seemed to have no interest in Deadhaus. At the sound of this name, the armored ghoul tilted its head. “Friend of Falk-Ghoul?” The ghoul brought its jaws mere inches from my face, and I could see a crude symbol of three curved lines etched into its white mask, just between the eyeless pits that lay beneath. “Yes… yes, great friends!
He would be distraught if you were to harm me!” “Distraught?” Angry, upset, sad. It tilted its head in the other direction, clicking deep in its throat as it considered what I had said. “We will see.” At this, the claws that grasped my wrists released me, and the armored ghoul began to drag me by my ankles down the tunnel. “I can walk! I will go willingly!”, but it ignored me, pulling me along without so much as glancing back.
I watched the tunnels flow past me, winding and branching so that I had no chance of finding my way out again on my own, but the ghoul seemed to know where it was going. Now and then it would pause to smell something, some patch of dirt or other, nothing that I could discern, and then abruptly it would jerk me onward. Sometimes other ghouls would pass us in the tunnels. I could hear them sniffing in my general direction.
Then they would click in their throats, the armored ghoul would click back, and they would move on. After a few such encounters, I recognized a sort of pattern in the clicks. Those of the passing ghouls were rapid and fluctuating, but the armored ghoul always made the same sound back, a throaty hiss followed by three clicks. I suspect they were communicating something, a question and answer.
I noticed, too, that the tunnels were gently sloping downward as I was dragged further, and eventually the soil and stone gave way to another material, something smooth, almost wax-like. Enclosed as they were, the tunnels lay in utter darkness, but with my vampiric sight I could still discern shapes and shades, though only in tones of gray. As it was, I could see the gradual lightening of the tunnel walls and began to notice strange flowing lines, groove-like formations that ran their length.
At last, these strange tunnels opened into a chamber large enough that I could not see the top of it. Here too the walls and floor were coated in the swirling, wax-like substance, which also hung in thick cords that stretched across the length of the room, crisscrossing so that they formed a tangled net of waxen rope. And along these lengths of cord I beheld the hunched and twisted shapes of ghouls climbing, as well along the walls.
Here and there I saw them retching, and their vomit was excreted as pulp onto the walls, or floor, or cords, and they would mold this pulp with their misshapen hands to form ever more of their mound. The walls here were riddled with openings, and ghouls came and went through so many passages, clicking and hissing to one another in such number that the mound itself trembled, the guttural croaking of an enormous throat that had swallowed me whole.
Some of the ghouls carried corpses, or pieces of corpses, slung over their backs or clutched in their jaws. They did not devour their cargo, as I might have expected them to, but whisked it away to other tunnels. Some carried other materials, great stones, great chunks of ore, of which they could manage quite a cartload by their enormous hands and jaws alone.
Still others bore scoops of dirt, and though streams of ghouls ran up and down and back and forth and intersected again and again, never did they collide, nor even slow. This would be quite a feat for the living, who have eyes to guide them, but the ghouls managed this frenetic efficiency by scent alone. The armored ghoul dragged me into one of the many openings lining this central chamber, and I was taken at length past another chamber that revealed a more gruesome industry.
Here, the walls, and floor, and ceiling were interwoven with a lattice of hexagonal cavities, roughly the size of wine casks. Many of these cavities were covered with a waxy coating, concealing their contents, but a few were empty. It was to this chamber that the corpses were brought, to a group of ghouls that hunched in a circle, clicking rapidly to one another. I watched as they dismantled the dead with their massive jaws, methodically removing and dividing each limb, each head, each torso.
Each component was then sorted into a pile of its like, and these piles were carried, piece by piece to the uncovered cavities. Thankfully, I was dragged past this macabre larder before too long and brought at last to the chamber where the armored ghoul came to a rest. Cautiously, I raised up on my elbows, but I could not distinguish anything of note.
So many of these tunnels and chambers were indiscernible from one another, a disorienting sameness that was exacerbated by the ever swirling lines of ghoulish resin. This was not a place that was made to be navigated by sight. “Well, well, well…” A familiar voice rose from the darkness. "Look who’s come crawling to the ghouls.” I saw it then, crawling down from the ceiling, onto the walls, and finally the floor.
It circled around toward my head until its horrid face was hung just above mine, each upside down to the other. “If it isn’t Alaric von Beller, Grand Inquisitor… of the ashes.” “That is not my name any longer, nor is it my title.” "Oh... give us your name then.” “I am Alaric the Damned.” The ghoul’s gaping maw twisted slightly. Could this have been a smile? “So… you have learned your name at last.” “I suppose you’ll tell me you knew it all along.” “We told you…
we told you.” “Then perhaps you already know why I’m here.” "Perhaps..." Just then, the armored ghoul made a series of clicks in its throat. “Slow-speak, for our guest.” "Vampire wants to feed us,” the armored ghoul spoke in words I could recognize. “I most certainly do not! And this is no way to treat a guest!” “Alaric speaks the truth… take him to his suite,” and I was immediately yanked so that my head struck the floor and dragged away.
Falk-Ghoul followed along, its head bobbing quite near to mine as it crawled. “I can walk to the suite, damn you!” “Vampire can slide." Bo-Ghoul answered without looking back. “I never thought I would meet a creature more wretched than you,” I said to Falk-Ghoul through my teeth. “Vampire is distraught.” After a time, the dragging ceased, and I was promptly seized by the chest and tossed like a sack of potatoes. I struck a metallic surface and rebounded to the waxen floor.
Before I could right myself, I heard the sharp click of a metal latch close. I then realized I was in a cage. As I stepped forward and gripped the bars, I realized it wasn’t just any cage. “Dead man’s iron… specially crafted at Ft. Serenus,” Falk-Ghoul said, watching me through the bars. "How?" “Payment from the liche.” “The liche! Amarax, he sent me here!” “Another favor?” “Yes. He wants a Soul Prism.” “Big favor,” “Big payment,” “Yes” “He told me you would help me find it.”
“Amarax assumes… But we have never tasted a vampire…” Hearing this, Bo-Ghoul rattled in its throat. “You can’t harm me--the rituals do not allow it.” “The rituals are for Deadhaus.” “I am here to help Deadhaus!” “You are here to help yourself, always.” “Vampires always lie,” “This one lies even to himself.” “Fine, you want the truth? I’m going to destroy Deahaus. But first I’m going to destroy the Awakened, because they destroyed Thacea.
I could not protect it, but I can damn well avenge it, and then I’m coming for you, for all of you.” “The truth shall set you free, Alaric the Damned,” “Then… you’ll let me out of this cage.” "Oh, no, no. You can be free inside the cage.” “Then what do you want?” “We are not certain just yet. The ghouls must sing and together decide, yes.” I slumped back against the bars of my cage, overgrown with ghoul’s wax from the wall.
I could not consciously make myself into mist, though even if I could, I would not know how to return to physical form. For the time being, I was trapped. -Alaric the Damned