Wraith affliction / spectral possession

Specters out of Wraithblade Keep gather on a man, cling to him, and then go inside. It is not an aura and it is not proximity: the curse in the Wraithblade Khopesh reaches for the hungriest and most driven person within its range, takes hold there, and seeds outward through the people that person has power over. What it puts in a host is nothing new. It finds the anger already there and makes it very much louder, and a man made that much angrier is much easier to steer.

Beltran Grayeras carried the blade from the day a mercenary brought it out of the keep to him, and it hollowed out the men around him, his guard first. The sword was struck out of his hand in the street, shut away in a lead-lined box, carried north and broken on the anvil at Wraithblade Keep. It shattered, and the souls bound into it went free. There is nothing left to spread from.

Whent would not stay down: thrashing, biting, clawing, with the magic that should have put him under simply sliding off him, and Dwayne counting two or three specters circling before two of them went in. Killing him might have turned the specters loose, so the party took him alive with three inside him (S4E47). The next morning, in a tunnel on the Westwood estate, Yara burned them out, and by daylight Whent was scalded, lucid, answering questions, and remembering nothing of the possession (S4E48).

What It Does to a Host

• Eyes: sunken, and ringed dark.
• Temper: feral aggression, which is the host’s own anger amplified rather than a new one.
• Resistance: magic that should put a man under stops taking. Sleep and Daze slide off.
• The specters: visible to two kinds of people only, those the blade has already touched and those with Peren eyes.
• Number: more than one can ride a single host. Whent carried three.

The Purge

• The rite: Barren-Lands work, used at home on the shadows that pass through armor and flesh.
• What it wants: a fire, a hot pot, silver, and the blood of the pure, meaning those close to the god.
• What it cost: fifty silver pieces shaved into the pot, and four people opening their arms over it. It cost every one of them something to give.
• Spoken: over the flames, in the harsh tongue of the Karruk of the Barren Lands.
• Result: the spirits burn out of the host. He wakes scalded and coherent, with no memory of what rode him.

The Dead the Blade Kept

A separate thing, and the two get confused. The affliction is what the sword sends outward into the living. What gathered at Wraithblade Keep was everyone the blade had ever killed, kept rather than released, and they came out of the walls and floors as pale translucent shapes. Most of those are spent and harmless, and a hand passed through a man does nothing to him. A dark one has not fed, and its touch takes the strength out of a body: one of them took six points of it off Koa in a single reach at the water-gate. Once a dark shade feeds it goes pale like the rest and settles permanently.

They move fast and pass through most walls, and they cannot find a man they cannot see. Consecrated ground stops them outright, which is why the Peren shrine built over the keep’s old anvil held them out entirely while nobody in it could explain why, and the Elder could hold a turning circle around himself at a cost that rose steeply the weaker he was. The important part is the last: whoever holds the sword commands them. With no wielder the blade was still gathering its dead and could not tell them to do anything, and Koa, having recognized one of them, reached for the Khopesh before remembering it was in a box outside the walls. When the blade shattered they were all let go.