-dilsdragons

I'm sooo smart and hugebrained and I had to go hunting down my rambles on this to find my placeholder name for them— I do like it so I may keep it, but I was calling them the Grave Wardens!

like I said in the previous post, the shade is too multifaceted & tenacious in my lore to really destroy completely, so a lot of shade hunters focus on eradicating it from areas/creatures & containing it. the Grave Keepers specific job is removing errant bits of shade from the village, usually the part closest to the Hewn City, which is... the grave site where the last Very Many Years of inhabitants have been interred. sometimes this means removing shade-touched plants from the area. mostly this means putting the shade-touched dead back to sleep.

mind you, the wards they keep around the village are very good at keeping the shade out, for the most part. sunlight collected on the solstices and equinoxes, the only time light penetrates the dark woods, is strung up in lanterns around the village throughout the year. and generations-old wards must stay lit around the grave sites to keep the dead at rest.

still, sometimes the shade sneaks in. it's often small, relatively harmless fragments, and they simply love the care placed into interring the dead, the fact that these denizens were loved, and the lives they lived. shade-touched corpses will amble out of their graves and simply go about their lived as though nothing has changed, whether it means sitting on the porch in their favorite rocking chair or going back to digging the foundation for a home that has been gone for decades.

the villagers have come to accept this; it's been going on longer than most of them have been alive, so it's simply another part of their lives. it's not really the dead come back, just an echo of their patterns and habits that was written into their bones and is now being replayed. yes, it's weird that great-grandpa shows up in front of the fire in his old armchair from time to time, but it's nice that he loved it so much his body remembered, right?

most of the time, the Grave Wardens will come and use enchanted bells to quietly lead the dead back to their resting places. sometimes they're a little resistant, but it's pretty much unheard of for the dead to get truly aggressive, or even beyond stubborn.

Selena (ft. her son Moth) is a Grave Warden, but her story is a whole other thing and I've rambled much too long here.

I gave Tamat a proper design and slapped him on a canvas with Yoran :3 I might focus these two (mostly Yoran) in Mothsgrave, since they're outsiders?

Yoran is a former shade doctor born in plague and raised in light. the magic he uses to remove shade infections whittles away at his body and life force, leaving him with the ghostly limbs he has. he's seen some shit.

Tamat is a shade eater! very literally! his method of containing the shade is to put it. in his own body. and use his magic to keep it there. he does occasionally have to purge himself of it, but not usually until it can be properly contained elsewhere.

generally speaking, furniture is wood! there's not a huge demand for it because 1) it's not exported 2) the village is small & 3) because it's an old village with heavy focus on history etc. a lot of people keep furniture around for a LONG time! this means everything is kind of dated though, picture more victorian era type furniture. what is made is usually by a local craftsman from local trees, or sometimes imported via the trade route** that runs past Mothsgrave.

as for trinkets, it varies from person to person but maximalism & heirlooms are very popular. similar to above, things get passed down for generations and kept, new things are added, and the mantle becomes covered in clocks, figurines, decorative knickknacks, paintings/daguerreotypes, etc. decorating with candles & dried flowers is also common! and there are several denizens who like more obscure/(ostensibly) scientific things like pinned insects or wet specimens...

there's also the leatherbound library and its many books & mimics, but I know you know about that :)

slaps a little placeholder graphic down, well i'm GLAD you asked! really good questions!

Mothsgrave as a name was (for me) (accidentally) (I swear accidentally) inspired by @bonepriests' Mothsmantle. no other relation I swear. it's been there longer than anyone can really remember, one of the first settlements out of Dragonhome, and it's been there longer then the Hewn City has been corrupted. when the City fell to the shade—I have my lore for this but it starts to diverge from canon—Mothsgrave simply... stayed. and dealt with the consequences.

the major consequences are the reanimating dead. anything else, as far as anyone is concerned, is minor. actually the walking dead is fine too. that's normal. they can deal with that.

someone else asked a question about this, so I'll delve into it in that answer, but the specific role for dealing with the shade largely involves putting the dead back to sleep. the way the shade works in my lore is that it's a not-quite-sentient, not-quite-hivemind multifaceted living entity that simply adores life on Sornieth so much it consumes everything it touches. I've themed it a bit after fungus/cordyceps in it's network multiplicity, but I imagine it more as something that can be split into the smallest piece imaginable and still remains a connected part of the whole, the shade.