The Unquiet

The Unquiet are the dead who do not remain where they are laid. The first clear risings belong to the Grey Years after the Sundering, when famine emptied villages faster than they could be buried and mourners woke to find the newly dead standing at the threshold. They are not, as chapbooks would have them, a hungering horde with one mind. Most wander as though searching for a road mislaid in sleep. They know neither name nor kin. Yet they gather towards breath, lamplight and music, and when they are barred from whatever they seek, their gentleness fails all at once.

Appearance

An Unquiet body keeps the wounds and leaness of its last days, though decay seems slowed rather than halted. Flesh greys; lips draw back; mud stays in the seams of the nails no matter how often rain washes them. Many wear the clothes in which they were buried, but battle-dead rise in rusted mail and plague-dead in the sacking of the pits. Witnesses agree on one detail and little else: the eyes are vacant until some living thing draws near, and then the head turns before the shoulders do, like a hound catching scent.

Most are no stronger than the body was in life, and a frail grandfather risen is still frail. But the archive keeps reports of larger and older things: barrow-dead that wear bones not their own, drowned sailors climbing from the western shallows with weed in their teeth, and the marrow-bearers said to walk with several spines lashed inside one skin. Whether these are true kinds or only fearful names given to the same sorrow at different distances, no Warden ledger settles.

Habits

They are drawn first to the living, then to fire, then to songs. A cottage with shutters barred may be passed by for weeks; the same house, if a child sings at dusk, may find three figures at the garden gate before moonrise. This is why wake-fires are kept low in the northern marches, and why the old burial hymns of Varrow are now hummed through clenched teeth or not sung at all. The Pale See tells its missions to chant loudly when the dead are near, calling it defiance; villagers nearer the Glassmere call it feeding them.

• They do not sleep, but they falter in hard frost and may stand stiff until thaw, which has saved more than one winter road.
• They avoid running water less than peasant belief holds, yet many will not cross a marked boundary of ash, salt and iron filings.
• A single Unquiet often follows one house or field as if tied to it; groups behave strangely, pacing in rings around a place none of them can name.
• Fire destroys them readily once caught, but a burned thing may smoulder for hours and still crawl if the work is hurried.

Encounters

The commonest encounter is not a fight but a presence: scratching at a door before dawn, a shape at the edge of a harvest field, wet footprints crossing a chapel floor though no rain has fallen. Violence comes when they are prevented. A miller of Thornwick, whose deposition survives in Caldmere, swore his dead wife came each night to stand by the cradle; when he buried the child elsewhere, she broke the stair with her hands. The archive does not repeat the second half of his testimony, which was written in a shaking hand and later crossed out by a priest.

Do not ask what they want. Ask what was taken from the ground with them, and why the ground will not keep quiet.

Certain names recur in the margins. Along the Choir roads travellers speak of the Psalter Dead, risings that pause where mission-singers rehearse the Wound-litanies, though the Pale Choir condemns the tale as slander. In the north there is the Ashen Wife, a bride burned too late who is said to knock three times at weddings and leave white flowers made of frost. Such figures may be many dead wearing one story, or one story wearing many dead; the archive records both possibilities and prefers neither.

How the Wardens deal with it

The surest prevention is old and simple: burn the body before the third night. The Hask have done so for three centuries and call it mercy; elsewhere families still argue whether flame frees the soul or robs it of grave-rest. Where burning is refused, Wardens salt the threshold, ring the grave with cold iron, and set a lantern above the door. Their lanterns are not remarkable to look at — horn sides, thick oil, a blackened wick — yet each carries within its case a written record of the bearer: names, debts, faces, roads. Wardens say the dead feed on forgetting and turn from a life kept whole on paper.

• First bell: mark the house, count the missing, sing nothing.
• Second bell: ash-line the doors, bring children and old folk to one room, keep one fire only and feed it sparingly.
• Third bell: if burning is lawful, burn; if not, bind, weigh and watch until a Warden or winter takes the thing.
• Afterwards: pay the Warden, name the dead aloud once, and do not answer if the name is repeated from outside.

Unanswered matters

No law explains why one corpse rises and its neighbour does not. Age, holiness, violence and burial rite have all been blamed and all have exceptions. Ash-burners fear their trade is accused of thinning the boundary between memory and flesh, and point out that risings were recorded before ashcraft was widely taught; their enemies answer that the first accounts are late, frightened and incomplete. Wardens note that risings thicken after cruel winters and in places where great memories were spent, as at Hollowfield after Maera Tor's last working, but note is not proof.

The strangest pattern is the westward drift. Most Unquiet circle home, grave or battlefield. A rare few, hollow even beyond the common emptiness, set out towards the Stair of Ilm and are mistaken at a distance for Grey Pilgrims until the smell gives them away. Whether they follow the pilgrims, envy them, or are called by the same pale brightness that opens over the sea in winter, the archive has no record that can be trusted.