The Dead Dove Locker -- "I don't know what I expected."

[Mamorien]

At the end of yesterday's Headless Over Heels, a local approached Seth and Ofelia to report his employer for harboring unlit.

“There.” Harri—that was the man’s name, and his ratty scarf and fingerless gloves marked him as a manual laborer, not a waitstaff type—pointed past the fence and the low stone wall to a squat wooden lean-to in the bungalow’s yard. “In the shed. It’s his husband and someone I don’t know. Family friend, maybe.”

“In the shed. Couldn’t have been so friendly, eh?” Ofelia put her hands on her hips. “Thank you for your cooperation, sir. We will take it from here.”

She led Seth to the shed and opened it to a room full of gardening tools, the scent of pine shavings, and two gaunt, desaturated wraiths in upper-crust garments that were now far more crust than upper.

A man and a woman, both of middle age, standing vacant, the only sign of life on them the shallow rise and fall of their emaciated chests.

Scarecrows.

Ofelia sucked air through her teeth. “Scarecrows.”

Seth lingered at the threshold. “Should we get Annalise?”

“They’re harmless enough,” Ofelia said. “Just meat, now. Meat and bones and unfortunate ascots. Might as well get a look at them.”

She strolled into the shed and slow-paced around them. Neither moved, not even to track her with their eyes. These desaturated people were so stark and gruesome without the spark that animated the al Ydrises. “So the difference between you and them is that your soul is still around and theirs went back to the wheel, right?” Seth asked.

“The difference between me and them is a regimen of oral hygiene and a sense of fashion in-step with the current century.” Ofelia pinched the man’s lacy collar. “And that, too, yes. Such is the fate of an unfortunate who snuffs out when there is no psychelith to catch the departing soul. It’s why Tiago and I didn’t go unlit until we’d followed Mother to the Necropolis. Otherwise, we’d have ended up just the same.”

She stepped to the closest shallow-breathing zombie and delivered a sharp slap to his cheek. He remained still.

“You see? Nobody’s home.”

“I guess not.”

“The second emergence was when all this guff began. The unlighting. A seraph plague, everyone supposes. Back then, these empty vessels were perfect vessels for a disembodied seraph. They’d force their way into the shell and go hunting elsewhere for more kindred to infect.”

“That’s where the unlit get their reputation, huh?”

“Partially.” Ofelia perused the wall. She found a rope and uncoiled it. “These days, of course, the deathspell prevents most seraphs from working their havoc on the continent. And certainly any that were so weak as to require a vessel, rather than make their own. And so the unlit just stand, spent and still. Like scarecrows. Hence their nickname, you see? Fortunately for us, they retain some base function.”

She prodded the man in his black eye. It flickered shut.

“Blinking, for example. And if you leash them…” She tied the rope around his waist. “You can lead them.” She gave a demonstrative tug and he took a slow step toward the shed door. “That’s about the limit. It is otherwise an empty vessel. Perhaps there’s a way to stuff a new soul inside, but the sorcerers haven’t found one. Only possessor-seraphs have ever managed it, and any seraph that’d need a physical vessel wouldn’t make it through the deathspell’s barrier.”

“What is it that decides which seraphs can get through the deathspell, anyway?” Seth asked. “Is it just how strong they are?”

“Not entirely,” Ofelia said. “There’s any number of—”

Tackle her, the Fox said.

Seth plunged into Ofelia, sending her staggering to one side. The pitchfork that would have pierced her heart sank into her midsection instead.

The scarecrow to whom they hadn’t been paying attention ground her pitchfork further into the al Ydris daughter’s midsection. The unlit woman’s face was slack, her head drooping to one side like an inexpertly piloted marionette. No rage on her face. Nothing at all.

“YDRIS,” she howled.

Ofelia stumbled backward into Seth, her mouth ajar with shock and pain. He caught her; her blood coated his palms.

The scarecrow woman charged. Seth attempted a sort of heroic placing-behind of Ofelia—in practice it was more like he dropped her. He yanked his cutlass from the scabbard and okay, actually he yanked the scabbard off his belt entirely, because it was a mismatched scabbard and the fucking thing didn’t pull right. It rose to its occasion regardless, slamming between two ichor-soaked prongs of the pitchfork and halting the murderous woman in her tracks.

That broken wail again: “YDRIS!”

https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/173313...scarecrows