Bone caller

A Bone caller is one of the Wanderers, a foreign soul whose released core left room for a heart demon. It comes out of the Mist each Turning and serves in Umbra, the affinity of death and its aftermath.

Bone callers name Odrin Half-Core their first teacher, though none of them claims to have met him. In the Age of Odrin, he laid his affinity over ground where the stranded dead pressed close. They rose on borrowed life, his living folk faded, and Deopa, the Deep took him as the first mortal master of Deep Hand. The callers inherited his method and his price.

The restless dead borrow life from the living, and that costs a kingdom people. The caller is a foreign soul, not one of the natives' dead. Still, Sealborn say it keeps a little of that borrowed life running through itself, so it costs people as well as geld and mana. All three rise as it grows.

It strikes with magic from a distance. It is easily wounded, but it grows stronger the longer it serves. In time, before battle, it lays a killing cold on one enemy company, selected by chance, and weakens that company's blows. Later it makes its employer's dead less costly to keep. Later still, it restores part of them after each battle. The card shows what each stage does.

When the pay stops, it leaves. Kill one, and its service ends for the Turning, but its soul goes on, and so does its kind.

The callers say the demon wants to call up one dead soul it cannot reach, and it will not say whose. Whether a caller can be freed is not known.

Player-visible facts