On the soul-hold

On the soul-hold

The second breath, the ordinary recovery of the restless, is slow, costly to the body, and not always granted. A restless one who wishes for better than the second breath — a cleaner return, a faster return, a return at a chosen place — has the soul-hold to draw upon.

A soul-hold is an inscribed thing carried in pocket, pouch, or on a cord at the throat. Pendants, charms of bone, woven tokens, small graven stones — the forms vary, the craft is the same. When the wearer takes the death-stroke, the soul-hold consumes itself and draws the breath back into the failing flesh immediately, without the long lying-still of the second breath. One soul-hold, one return. A restless one may carry as many as they can afford; at the moment of dying, they choose which to spend, or none. A friend, finding a fallen restless during the grace, may spend one of their own to the same effect.

The makers grade them by tier, and every market in every kingdom we have travelled in agrees on the broad shape, though each settles on its own names. The common soul-hold returns the bearer to the spot where they fell. The hearth-bound soul- hold returns him to a place he has consecrated against this hour. The burning-stone (sometimes the combat-knot) returns him standing, with fire in his veins, ready to take up again the fight he had begun to lose. The quiet hold returns him without provoking what killed him. The hollow hold returns him briefly invisible to nearby hostiles. Pre-cycle holds, the rarest, recovered from the workings of an older age — some say these still function, but their cost is sometimes paid in places the wearer did not know they had.

The newly-born of any country wear a first soul-hold that no inscriptionist made and no guild collected coin on. It fades as the wearer matures. Whether something of the same kind guards others — under what circumstances, and how often — is a question our correspondence has not been able to settle; we have heard tell of such protections in surprising places, and the accounts will not agree. The mechanism we do not understand. The fading is real; augurs in four kingdoms have confirmed it, and once, unwillingly, the careful death of a stubborn apprentice confirmed it again.

If no soul-hold is spent, and no friend comes, the restless do not yet depart. They lie, instead, in the state the folk call the grace: the body silent and the breath loose around it, neither in nor away. If left untouched the breath settles back into the flesh and the body rises by itself — late, hurt, fevered, but the same body and the same person. This is the ordinary recovery of the restless, and it is how the common saying of the second breath came about. The recovery is slower and rougher than a soul-hold’s catch; that is its price.

The recovery may be denied. A body burned before it has risen cannot rise; a body buried during grace cannot rise; a body dismembered, dropped from a height into deep water, or marked with a grave-Stone properly inscribed cannot rise. These are the practical finishing rites of the trades that fight the restless, and any soldier who has been in the field for two seasons knows them.

There is, separately, the wending: a rare and dangerous inscription, taught only in certain shrines and certain hidden masters’ workshops, by which a restless breath may be unwound from its body altogether and cast outward, taking up another body somewhere else. This is the only honest path by which a restless one leaves the flesh they have been living in. It is not done casually. The body left behind dies as empty matter and drops what it carried, and the breath, where it next wakes, is in another life in another place — among strangers, in a body that was someone else’s, with the inventory and station and friendships of one’s old life left behind on the corpse. We have spoken with two such wenders; their accounts are consistent, and both said the decision was the gravest they had ever made. In some kingdoms the rite is a sacrament; in others, the workshops are hunted, and a wender who is identified is held to be the abandoner of his prior obligations, and the law will sometimes follow him into his new face.

Some deaths the soul-hold cannot catch and the second breath cannot answer. Of these we will not write in detail. Some are caused by what lives below.