Petitioners

Becoming a low-ranking exemplar is no detriment to resurrection. Lantern archons are Lawful Good petitioners, and Paladins get res'd all the time.

Didn't Maanzecorian's petitioners die when their deity was put in the dead-book? I don't have Dead Gods with me right now, though, so I could be wrong.

I'm surprised they took out memory bodies. If the memories stay with the corpse, then that would change the Astral Plane quite a bit. It would at least change the Psychic Winds, anyway.

Open water spread without end beneath a jet black sky. There were no stars, but three moons, all of them full--a white moon, a silver one, and a moon of frosted green, each lunar face pocked and ravaged with craters. The moons cast enough light to provide a clear view around us: the waters of the Styx, as foul and fetid as ever, streaming out like a malodorous black stripe across an otherwise crystal sea. Two paces away the sea water glistened with the dappling of moonlight, as calm as a windless lake. The sight made me yearn for a swim in the soft, beckoning waters; but even as I tried to touch the cleanness beyond the polluted path of the Styx, a body bobbed to the surface.

The body was naked and female, possibly human...but it was difficult to be sure, given the bloat of the corpse, plus the damage done by fish and eels. The woman's ears were completely eaten away; the fingers were simply bones held together by gristle, and the cheeks were both torn open into ragged holes. As I watched, a delicate silver pilchard darted in through one of the cheek cavities, bit into the dead woman's tongue, and tried to wrestle away a piece of pink meat.

I had to look away. When I did, I saw other bodies drifting up out of the sea, as if our arrival had loosed them all from some confinement fathoms below. Each corpse was tattered with bite marks; each belly was swollen with the gases of decay.

"A pocket in the Astral Plane," Garou said. "The Sea of the Drowned."

But Yasmin looked at the woman closest to us and whispered, "Mother."

The woman's half-eaten eyelids opened. I saw now that her eyes had a tiefling cast: blood-red and feline, with no discernible whites. She did not move a muscle, but her body circled on some undetectable current until her face was focused on Yasmin. "I have been recognized," she said, in a breathy voice that released the stink of gases from her gut. "What do you ask?"

"Nothing," Yasmin answered immediately. "I don't want anything from you. Go away."

"What do you ask?" the woman said again. Her breath fouled the air like sewage.

"I told you, I don't need anything. I don't want to talk to you." Yasmin snatched up her sword, though the body was floating just too far to reach. "Go back wherever you came from."

"Impossible," the dead woman said. "I have been recognized. What do you ask?"

"I ask you to get out of my sight!" Yasmin's voice was becoming shrill. "Now!"

"That is not within my power," the floating corpse replied. "What do you ask?"

Yasmin balled her hands into fists and covered her eyes. I put an arm around her shoulder and growled at Garou, "What's this all about?"

For a moment he didn't answer, perhaps debating whether the truth would cause us more pain than ignorance. Then he said, "Nothing truly dies in the multiverse. When a soul is killed in one place, it is merely re-embodied on another plane...but with no memory of its former existence."

"Any leatherhead knows that," Miriam muttered.

"But if the memories are gone, where do they go?" Garou asked. "They can't just vanish--the multiverse doesn't let anything slip through its fingers so easily. Every dying person's memory drifts like flotsam on unseen tides, until it fetches up in a holding basin like this one. Here lie the remembrances of all those drowned on a million worlds. I could show you other such memory sinks: the Poisoned Jungle, the Plain of Knives--"

"What do you ask?" interrupted the floating corpse.

"Why does she keep saying that?" Yasmin whispered.

"The memories are drawn to those who knew their owners in life," Garou replied. "If you recognize and name them, they are compelled to reveal a secret to you. Your mother-- or rather, the cast-off memory of your mother--will not rest until she has discharged this burden."

"What do you ask?" the dead woman said. She spoke in a monotone, devoid of emotion; yet I suspected she would follow us the length of the Styx until we had let her disclose something of her past.

Hmm, you guys make some good points. After all, if rocks can keep memories (like with stone tell), I suppose corpses could, too, without interfering with the formation of memory bodies.

Geez, Kaelyn, did you just type that whole thing up? :shock:

Some people play it so that even skeletons and zombies have souls trapped within them, explaining why such magic is considered evil. I prefer to think that they don't, and it isn't, although raising someone's corpse as a zombie without permission could certainly be considered impolite.