Diana’s Bio – Foundry Campaign Compendium

Duskwalker Human – Summoner / Reborn Soul

Got a letter. Some professor with a name I still can’t spell asked me to check out a crypt. Real sketchy, but sketchy is kind of my whole thing. Besides, trapped souls don’t free themselves, and crypts always have interesting specimens if you know where to look.

That’s the job. Has been for about forty years now, give or take. I die, I come back, I help the dead move on. The “coming back” part is a long story I don’t feel like telling and the “helping the dead” part is less charitable than it sounds. Somebody has to do it. Most people are too squeamish or too religious or too alive to understand what the dead actually need. I’m none of those things.

Well. I’m alive. Technically. It’s complicated.

I travel with HIM.

No, that’s his name. HIM. He’s a psychopomp. An eidolon. A guide of souls from the world of the living to the River of Souls where Pharasma sorts out what happens next. He is my other half, and he has been with me for as long as I can remember being… this. Whatever this is.

People keep asking me to give him a proper name. Kiren especially. She reads my journals when she thinks I’m asleep. (He has excellent vision, Kiren. Elk eyes. He sees you rummaging.) The answer is no. He does not need a name. He is a psychopomp, a guide, and the other half of my existence. Names are for things that need to be distinguished from other things. There is nothing else like HIM.

He is compassionate in a way I sometimes forget to be. Patient in a way I cannot manage. When a soul is frightened or confused or angry, HIM sits with them. Asks gentle questions. Listens to answers that are sometimes barely coherent and sometimes heartbreaking and sometimes just petty grievances from someone who died mid-argument and wants to finish making their point. He treats every single one of them with dignity. Even the ones who don’t deserve it.

I handle the parts that require less dignity. The fighting. The investigating. The occasional deposit of tribute to sewer monsters.

We work well together.

The others found me in a crypt. Or I found them. Depends on perspective.

They were beating a slime to death in the dark. It was like watching an advanced playground slap fight. I introduced myself, handed over the professor’s supplies (blank paper, a potion, and roughly zero useful explanation), and told the priest about salt. The professor had been very insistent about the salt. She’d also been talking to people who weren’t in the room and referencing events that hadn’t happened yet, so I wasn’t entirely sure the salt advice was for this century.

The party:

Mutu is an automaton who serves Sarenrae with the kind of earnest devotion that would be annoying if it weren’t so obviously sincere. He cannot lie, which is both his greatest strength and a source of constant entertainment. He once burned a scarecrow I made out of bones while I slept. His goddess apparently smote him for the disrespect to my craft, which I found deeply satisfying. I would have sent a thank-you note to Sarenrae’s temple, but they won’t let me in after the rabbit incident. (It was not raising the dead. It was just a rabbit. These people have no sense of proportion.)

He asked me to join the party on the road back to Lepidstadt. I said yes because the work was interesting and the souls needed tending. Also because he has no self-preservation instinct whatsoever and someone needs to keep him operational long enough to finish swinging that sword of his.

Charles is a priest. He glows when undead are nearby, which happens constantly because this city is apparently built on top of several centuries of unfinished business. He is earnest and decent and occasionally capable of surprising ferocity when sufficiently provoked. He once told Jenny Dreadful to “bring it on, hag” and I almost fell over. There may be something worthwhile underneath all that golden light. Something with a bit of shadow to it. I’m keeping an eye on that.

He’s also the only person in this group who can heal worth a damn, which makes him indispensable and also very tired.

Kiren is agreeable in the way that people who steal things from your pockets while making eye contact tend to be agreeable. She is clever and dangerous and cares far more about the rest of us than she would ever admit under threat of death. She worships a spider goddess whose tenets include “always get paid,” which I respect on a philosophical level even if it occasionally makes me want to lock my bags.

She is looking for her sister. On this subject she becomes someone entirely different. Softer. More fragile. It makes me uncomfortable because I don’t do well with fragile things that aren’t already dead.

She reads my journals. I know this. I’ve addressed her directly in the entries and she still does it. At this point I think she considers it a bonding activity. Fine. Just don’t touch the collection, Kiren. Those specimens are organized.

My collection is important.

Bones, specimens, samples, components. I gather them the way other people gather memories. Every creature I encounter, every soul I ferry, every battle I survive leaves behind something physical that I can study, catalog, and understand. The others find this unsettling. Mutu in particular seems concerned that I’m one bad day away from building something out of the leftovers.

He’s not wrong. But the things I build tend to be more useful than the things that died to provide the materials. A skull here, a few ribs there, and you have a perfectly functional scarecrow. Or a set of specimen jars. Or a reference guide to the skeletal structures of seventeen species of bat (all of which tried to kill us, so I consider their contribution to science a fair exchange for the inconvenience).

The point is: death leaves things behind. Ignoring those things is wasteful. Understanding them is the entire reason I exist.

I died once. Or twice. The details are fuzzy.

What I know is this: I went somewhere. Somewhere dark. Somewhere that was not the River of Souls, because the River is orderly and this place was not. I was there for a while. Time doesn’t work the same way when you’re dead, so “a while” could mean anything from minutes to years.

Then I came back. Not the way people come back from drowning or from a healer’s table. I came back different. HIM was with me, or waiting for me, or somehow always had been. The edges of my memory are soft in places where they should be sharp, and sharp in places where they should be soft. I remember things I probably shouldn’t and can’t remember things I definitely should.

I don’t dwell on this. Dwelling is for the living who have the luxury of certainty about what they are. I know what I do. I ferry the dead. I fight the things that pervert the natural order. I catalog what I find. I keep moving.

If there’s a deeper truth about what I am, it can wait until the work is done. There’s always more work.

The black sand is the worst thing I’ve encountered.

I’ve seen corruption before. Undead, haunts, cursed objects, souls trapped by negligence or malice or just bad timing. Those are problems with solutions. You fight the thing, you free the soul, you clean up the mess. There’s an order to it. A process.

The black sand doesn’t follow the process. It takes dreams, which shouldn’t be possible. It creates things that are neither alive nor dead, which shouldn’t be possible. It harbors souls in a state that HIM cannot reach, which should absolutely not be possible. The sandstone hearts we’ve pulled from corrupted toys reconstruct themselves. The veins spread like roots through whatever they touch. And the whole thing reeks of false life. Not undeath. Something worse. Something that mimics the warmth of living without any of the substance.

I have been ferrying souls for decades. I have never encountered a substance that makes me feel this inadequate.

Whatever is behind this, whether it’s the Withering Man or the King in Yellow or something we haven’t met yet, it needs to be stopped. Not because of justice or vengeance or any of the reasons the priests would give. Because what this sand does to souls is an abomination against the natural order that I have spent my entire second life defending. The dead deserve to be dead. The living deserve to be living. The in-between is my jurisdiction, and I will not tolerate trespassers.

Forty years of what I now realize was tutorial. Then I met these idiots, and the real work started.

The Pendergrast manor alone produced more trapped souls than my previous three decades combined. Fifty casualties. Seventeen nameless souls stuffed into an improvised mass grave beneath a flower garden. An altar to the King in Yellow. Music boxes filled with stolen dreams. Women murdered and turned into singing corpses. A man so twisted by cosmic horror and his own cruelty that when we finally killed him, something snatched his soul before HIM could ferry it.

That last part keeps me up at night. (Not that I sleep well to begin with.) What being is powerful enough to snatch a soul on the doorstep of Pharasma? I don’t know. But I intend to find out, because if I cannot ensure that the dead reach their rest, then what exactly am I still doing here?

Gregor’s soul is out there somewhere. Stolen. Held. Used.

I made a promise to Lena, the woman he destroyed. I intend to keep it.

If I’m being honest (and I usually am, since lying requires more social energy than I’m willing to spend), I sometimes wonder why I’m still borrowing this life.

Forty years is a long time to walk around in a body that you’re pretty sure isn’t entirely yours. HIM doesn’t age. I don’t seem to either. The work never ends because people keep dying in terrible ways and the things that cause the terrible dying keep getting more creative about it.

But then we find another trapped soul. Another child locked in a sandstone heart. Another spirit that’s been screaming for years and nobody heard because nobody was listening. And HIM approaches them, and asks their name, and listens, and guides them to the River where they can finally rest. And I think: this. This is why.

Not for the glory or the gold or the approval of gods who won’t let me into their temples. For the look on a soul’s face when they realize the pain has stopped. For Samantha, who died alone in a chest and whose father was waiting for her on the other side. For the children Gregor trapped. For every unnamed spirit in every unmarked grave that HIM has gently, patiently, compassionately guided home.

That’s the job. Somebody has to do it. Might as well be the dead woman who keeps coming back.

Also, if Kiren is reading this: stop touching the bat specimens. They’re sorted by wingspan and I will know.

Tagged: Diana, Gatewalkers, Player Character