Cryptlord

Type

Undead

Base HD

5

Terror

3

Height (cm)

200 (Normal), 1500 (Maximum)

Every village and every city has one. The oldest of the old men, or the first among the mothers, who has a voice at every council because nobody could ever imagine kicking them out. They remember everything about everyone, so long as they’re from a generation ago, and they have an answer to every question, so long as it’s about when they were young. They have an opinion on everything, and their every opinion is out of date. Nobody is old enough to remember a time before them, and even when they were newly arrived nobody remembered their coming. They wear a skull for a face and have dust for a body, for every village and every city has a cryptlord, and a cryptlord is nothing but the collected dead.

And so in time you will join him, and in time he will be a bit of you. Your favourite turn of phrase will be his favourite; a grudge you never cleared will colour his own opinion of the bastards beyond the river; and when people ask about the loudest hound the village had ever known, he will point at your dog’s grave, and say, “that one was called Howler,” until the day even your bones turn to dust and he forgets you a second and final time. He wears the face the Dead should wear, and whatever face he wears is suitable for the Dead; his honours are those suited for the Dead and he demands the ones the Dead deserve. All that he is, is what the Dead believe he is, and all he knows to be true is what the Dead knew, once upon a time.

But he is the Dead, not a dead man or a dead woman or a dead dog. His opinions are that of the gathered corpses beneath your feet and trapped in urns — and though your mother and your father and your cousin who died young are part of him, they are only a part. Whatever old man Henry or the widow by the mill would've thought, a cryptlord cannot know, except by his impression of them; and who consults a cryptlord may know whether the gathered knowledge and memories of the ancestors, and only that, approves.

And it is the knowledge and memories only: for as everyone knows, the Queens rule the underworld and are the final tyrant that the souls of the dead answer to. A cryptlord is the gathered ancestors wearing a face of bone: and there was never, in the end, a person who went by that name, in particular.