Hollowmourn - The Wraith

Listen past the silence. Somewhere under the black water, a bell no one rang is still tolling — and it's counting you.

Role in Its Society

The Sunken Barrows don't have a hierarchy, exactly. They have Hollowmourn, and then they have everything that answers to her without ever being asked. The swamp zombies that shamble through the fog — the sodden corpses of adventurers and treasure-hunters who drowned chasing rumors of grave-gold — aren't her army so much as her overflow. Every one of them rose because the Barrows' ambient death-magic had somewhere to go, and that somewhere has always been her.

She was here before the mud swallowed them. Before the mud swallowed anyone. The half-drowned barrow mounds that break the surface of the Barrows are burial sites of a civilization no one in the Brinelands can name anymore — only that it sank, whole, long enough ago that "long-lost" is the kindest word left for it. Hollowmourn tended those graves once. She tends them still, in the only way left to her.

North of her domain, past a boundary she has never once tested, a different light hunts a different bog. Hollowmourn has never gone looking for it, and it has never come looking for her. Whatever keeps that border standing, she isn't the one holding it — she simply has enough of her own unfinished work not to go looking for more.

Appearance Description

Hollowmourn drifts as a tall, robed silhouette of grave-fog, thicker and darker than the mist around it, trailing the ghost-shape of funerary vestments rotted to ribbons centuries before the Brinelands had a name for the swamp that swallowed them. A corroded ceremonial collar — the kind once worn by those who spoke the dead into the ground — hangs crooked at her throat, its jewels long since gone black.

Where a face should be, there is only a deeper hollow in the fog, and within it, two points of cold, colorless light — not the warm amber flicker travelers whisper about elsewhere in the Brinelands, but something closer to grave-candles guttering in a sealed chamber. When she speaks, or intones, the fog around her throat moves like a throat moving, though nothing living remains to do the work.

Backstory

No record survived long enough to say who Hollowmourn was before, or what her people called themselves, or what finally took their city under the water. What's left is only the office she held: she was the one who saw the dead properly buried, who spoke the old rites over them so that whatever waited on the other side of dying would know them for who they'd been. It was slow, careful work, and by every account she was good at it.

She wasn't good enough, in the end, to finish it. When the water came for the barrows — and by every surviving fragment of local legend, it came for everyone, all at once, with no warning worth outrunning — Hollowmourn was still mid-rite over the dead she'd been tending. She never got to say the last words. Neither did anyone say them over her.

The Brinelands' own faith holds that Aides, the Gatekeeper who governs the passage of souls, is no cruel judge — only a fair one, who asks merely that the dead arrive properly sent. A soul buried without the rite finished simply isn't sent at all. It waits. Hollowmourn has been waiting, and working, and failing to finish, for longer than anyone left in the Brinelands can measure. Every traveler who dies in her fog becomes one more supplicant in an unshriven congregation that never stops growing, because the warden overseeing it never learned how to stop.