Undead
"These days, there are angry ghosts all around us - dead from wars, sickness, starvation - and nobody cares. So you say you're under a curse? So what? So's the whole damn world."
— Jigo, Princess Mononoke (1997)"Undead" is a general term for sentient or semi-intelligent manifestations of a soul after leaving its mortal coil. Like dreaming souls, these entities are properties of the Spective layers of reality or "The Wyrm" (in Waking Materia's case, a sprawling and diverse realm known as the Duskscape).
In their essential form, these souls manifest as incorporeal ghosts, but can also occupy physical shells, for example with zombies, skeletons, haunted armour, and others. By default, ghosts almost never have a desire to cage themselves in this way: they are instead driven to seek out the realities beyond even the Spective, where only the dead may go. These enigmatic, largely theoretical realms are sometimes called the Twilight Eternities, the Farfields or the Lands Beyond the Horizon.Description
See also: Undead of the Duskscape Image Gallery (External)Ghosts are fully mutable and shells that can hold them are myriad, making the potential forms of undead effectively limitless.
Existence Beyond Death
Souls of the deceased usually cross from Mundane Reality into the Spective Layers beneath: realms of the dead and dreaming, of concepts and possibilities, as well as their own endemic species like spharai, qlippoth and fae.
Waking Materia's Spective Layers manifest as a sprawling, alien world known as the Duskscape. Here, undead souls are under the protection of a powerful and ancient Duskscape Regent named Overshepherd Rom, assisted by the Twelve Valkyries of Hesperion. These protectors mainly war against demonic societies like Dis and Kloster Storkenfels, who continue the traditional ways of soul enslavement in contrast with signatories of the Old Accords which ban the practice.Spirits in the Material World
Though they're usually driven to continue traveling past the Duskscape to the Twilight Eternities beyond, ghosts can, with minor difficulty, cross the Veil back into Material Reality. However like most Duskscape creatures, they find Waking Materia inhospitable and are susceptible to a phenomenon known as "reality corrosion" over time. Material bodies or objects are of course resistant to this effect, so necromancers who want more permanent servants will often force ghosts into corpses or other shells.
Ghosts that choose to haunt the Material world are driven by goals so intense that it overrides their sense of self-preservation (hence why hauntings are rare).Famous Undead
Some brave unliving souls choose to delay their journey to the Twilight Eternities, instead fighting on behalf of other dead/dreaming souls, usually against the afore-mentioned demonic societies that still practice soul enslavement. A few even act as "protectors beyond the grave" of some Waking peoples. Most often these are military squadrons under Overshepherd Rom; there are thought to be twelve such armies, each commanded by one of the Twelve Valkyries. Famous examples include the Pale Vigil, the Honoured Dead, Seventh Soujourn and the Eshuma.
On the Material side of the Veil, The Skull Knight is a demigod of repentant monsters and vengeful former slaves: his church bears undeniable similarities to that of Rom and the Valkyries as grave enemies of necromancers and demonic soul slavers, though the Knight of the Thistle's focus is more on freedom and revenge, as opposed to ancient dogmas on the sanctity of deceased souls. Nonetheless, Repentants of the Skull Knight and Seraphites of Rom often collaborate.
Art credit: Ryan Yee
Banner centre: The Skull Knight.
Art credit: Lee Jung-Myung
Banner left: A ghost Seraphite, or paladin, of Rom.
Art credit:Svetlin Velinov
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