Innocents doomed by no fault of their own, the fate-dead are a break from the natural order. They pose a threat to those around them with the disruption they cause to the flow of fate, meaning that their life and death are often plagued by calamity.
Creation Process
In the normal process of life and death, nobody dies alone; when a person dies, they're met by a servant of
Siarus to guide them to the afterlife. For reasons nobody truly understands, this isn't the case with the fate-dead. Upon dying, their spirit inexplicably rebels against the natural process of leaving their mortal life behind and will violently attack the servant-guide awaiting them. Those who manage to destroy the servant-guide return to their body and resume living with no memory or knowledge of what they've done; however, by escaping their appointed time to die they become something unnatural, outside the flow of fate and disrupting the world around them in increasingly devastating ways.
Living As Fate-Dead
A fate-dead mortal is physically indistinguishable from the person they were before their 'death', and continue their lives as normal. There's no correlation between personality and the likelihood of being fate-dead, and many are the last person one would suspect as a source of disaster; it's equally common to be kind or cruel, peaceful or violent, an innocent or a villain. While the 'death' that made them fate-dead might have been recognizable in their life as a supposed near-death experience, it's just as common for it to have happened in sleep without ever being noticed. Most fate-dead have no idea of what they are.
However, the consequences of what's happened to them are dire. If fate is a smoothly flowing river, the fate-dead are disturbed stones whose ripples spread ever-wider; they naturally begin to disrupt the lives that touch theirs, and disaster becomes ever more likely. Simply being close to someone who's fate-dead is potentially dangerous. The world around them becomes a tangled mess of random violence, freak accidents, and natural disaster, spreading ever wider depending on how powerful an influence the individual exerts. Even the fate-dead themselves can find themselves caught in this web, and many die as the result of their own self-spawned disaster.
On Death
When a fate-dead mortal dies for the second time, there's no indication of it in the flow of fate, and accordingly nobody waiting for them. This means that upon dying again, there's nobody waiting for them to lead them to the afterlife and they have no way to leave this world; some simply dissipate into nothingness, but many transform into powerful beings known as
Freed Spirits who no longer draw disaster. An exponential step up from even the most powerful ghosts, Freed Spirits are unique beings fully capable of roaming the earth... and are strong enough to obliterate those who cross their path, should they choose to do so. All Freed Spirits are distinct and individual, and many are neutral or benevolent towards mortals; the ones who aren't, however, are true horrors not easily overcome.
Destruction of the Fate-Dead
Due to the risk they pose both in life and death, the destruction of the fate-dead is the primary purpose of
Fate's servant known as the
Reaper. The Reaper is uniquely suited for this for several reasons; they have the power to face off against Freed Spirits, they have a weapon known as the Red Blade which can send a soul directly to the afterlife, and they have the crucial ability to see the weave of fate. This last is of vital importance because it's the only certain way to identify someone as fate-dead; while all other beings have a glow or tracery of fate lines tying them to all other things, the fate-dead are a void. They appear as a corrupted, corrosive emptiness in the light that surrounds all things, and this absence of fate is immediately apparent to the Reaper's eyes.
The task of destroying the fate-dead isn't easy. While most are never even aware of what's become of them until the Reaper's arrival, some may realize in time to fight their destruction or conceal themselves by constantly moving or using illicit magical items such as
dampeners. Since the Reaper can't directly track them beyond a general draw towards their presence, this can sometimes result in elaborate games of cat-and-mouse that prolongs the inevitable.
Even moreso, however, is the sheer difficulty of rationalizing their death. The Reaper isn't without pity, and even knowing that the fate-dead pose enormous risk to countless others doesn't make things any easier when it comes to killing people who've become what they are through no fault of their own; they try to give the fate-dead merciful deaths when possible by using the nonviolent blood offering that their dagger allows. When it comes to Freed Spirits, for whom the Reaper has come too late, many Reapers will look the other way so long as the spirit in question doesn't seem to actively harm those around it.
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