Tomb warden

A Tomb warden is one of the Wanderers, a foreign soul carrying a heart demon where its core used to be. It comes in from the Mist each Turning and serves whoever pays. It serves in Umbra, the affinity that reaches the restless dead.

Those dead are the natives' dead. They have been stranded at the threshold of Deopa, the Deep's Deep since the Breaking, and they rise on life borrowed from the living. The keeper is not one of them. It is a foreign soul. But it stands close enough to the threshold that, Sealborn say, it lives partly on borrowed life itself. That is why its service costs people as well as geld and mana, and why all three rise as it grows.

It strikes with poison, and it grows stronger and harder to kill the longer it serves. With service, it restores part of its employer's fallen dead after each battle. Later it makes those dead less costly to keep, and at last it draws more mana into the kingdom. The card shows what each stage adds.

The keepers say they learned their trade from Odrin Half-Core's ground. In the Age of Odrin, his dead rose while his living folk faded, and Deopa, the Deep took him as the first mortal master of Deep Hand. The lesson the keepers took is plain: tended dead eat the living more slowly.

Keepers say the demon wants the downward road opened again, so that its charges can finally go down. Healing the Scar would do that. Whether it would free the keeper is not known.

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