Death
No one living can occupy death. No one dead comes back to tell it.
Death is the Horizon above all others: the most certain thing, and the most inaccessible.
Every age has seen it differently — a weighing of hearts, a river to cross, a dance where kings take beggars by the hand, a heart stopping on a monitor, a profile that keeps on posting. And every age has invented figures to approach it: psychopomps, revenants, vampires, judges of the dead.
Why Agents
The difference of scale. Nothing is more stable than a Power of Death: it already is what it is, and it does not negotiate. But humans never stop changing the way they die, accompany the dying, keep or forget their dead. None of this happens at the scale of a Power. There must be beings who stand on the threshold.
What each side experiences. Through Agents, the living approach death without dying: they speak to it, delay it, see it pass. Through them, the Powers of Death encounter what they do not contain: grief, attachment, refusal, care, the ways of remembering that the living invent.
What is transformed. A guide who has spent too long among the living no longer carries the dead across in the same way. A Power that welcomes what they bring back changes what dying means.
On this Horizon, Bond Bets are as sure as anything can be: nothing is more certain than what passes through Death. What belongs to the Agent — what they have loved, cared for, lost — remains uncertain. The tension of the Bond finds its barest form here.
Powers
Several Powers share the Horizon of Death. These are playable examples, not a canon: a table can ignore some, add others, or invent its own.
The Weighing
What a life is worth. The scales of Anubis and the feather of Maat, the judges of the underworld, the Last Judgment.
- Every life has a weight
- The verdict is final
- Judges only the dead
- Knows only what was done
The Passage
The threshold itself: what carries from life into death. Charon and his river, Hermes guide of souls, the Valkyries, the Ankou.
- Everyone passes once
- No one passes alone
- Holds no one back
- Knows nothing of what comes after
The Eldest Blood
Life taken from the living so as not to die. The origin of a vampire lineage.
- Neither dies nor lives
- Feeds on the living
- Passes on through blood
- Fears what begins again
The Memory of the Dead
What remains of the dead among the living: ancestors, household spirits, ghosts, engraved names.
- Nothing that is named disappears entirely
- Lives on what the living keep
- Claims its due
- Can create nothing new
Families of Agents
Each family is a way of occupying the threshold. The suggested traits are Bond traits: each comes from the relationship itself or from the Attribute shown. The Agent's Anchors belong to them and remain to be written.
Guides — the Passage
Psychopomps, watchers, those who accompany. The Bond is an office.
- Sees everyone's hour, from Everyone passes once;
- Crosses the threshold, from the office itself;
- The dying hear them, from No one passes alone.
What the figure lets us think: the very moment of dying, and what it means to accompany someone.
Vampires — the Eldest Blood
Descendants of a lineage. The Bond is kinship through blood.
- Does not age, from Neither dies nor lives;
- Feeds on blood, from Feeds on the living;
- Burns in sunlight, from Fears what begins again.
What the figure lets us think: an existence that does not end; desire that lasts; what we owe to those we live on.
Revenants — the Memory of the Dead
Dead who have not left. The Bond is an attachment: a debt, a promise, a name that has not been forgotten.
- Cannot leave the place of their death, from the attachment itself;
- Appears to those who think of them, from Lives on what the living keep;
- Remembers everything, from Nothing that is named disappears entirely.
What the figure lets us think: what the living and the dead owe one another; grief that does not resolve.
Assessors — the Weighing
Witnesses, clerks, and judges of the dead. The Bond is an oath.
- Sees the weight of a life, from Every life has a weight;
- Cannot lie, from the oath itself;
- Hears the confessions of the dead, from Judges only the dead.
What the figure lets us think: what a life is worth, and who has the right to decide.
What appears
Humans never stop bringing forth ways of dying, accompanying, and remembering that no Power of Death contained:
- embalming, the epitaph, the will;
- the danse macabre, where death becomes equal for all;
- the cemetery outside the walls, photographs of the deceased;
- resuscitation, organ donation, palliative care;
- the accounts of the dead that stay open, the voices of the dead rebuilt by machines.
Each of these novelties may be wanted, feared, or claimed by several Powers at once. That is where Agents have something to do.
An Agent
Maïa is an Agent of the Passage.
- Bond: an office. Traits: Sees everyone's hour, Crosses the threshold.
- Anchor Palliative care night nurse: Sings to the dying, Stays once the families have gone.
- Anchor Lost her sister young: no trait written yet.
Her player asked herself what this figure let her think. Her answer, which she did not say at the table: what you do when there is nothing left to do.
The Passage holds no one back and knows nothing of care: it carries across. If Maïa manages to have the accompaniment of the dying recognized as belonging to the Passage, Stays once the families have gone may pass into the Bond. She will still be a nurse; but from then on, it is the Passage that accompanies when she accompanies — and other guides will learn to stay.
Situations
The directions a Situation can take find concrete faces here.
Bringing a novelty. A guide discovers palliative care; a revenant discovers that they can be photographed; an Assessor attends a trial where a living person is judged for what they did to a dead one.
Contending for a novelty. A company makes the dead speak: from their messages, a machine rebuilds their voices. The Memory of the Dead wants these voices. The Passage sees dead who no longer pass over. The Weighing wonders whether a life that keeps on speaking can be weighed. None of these Powers can act directly: their Agents will do it for them.
Transforming one's own Power. A vampire has grown old alongside a human he loved, without ageing himself. She has died and passed over; he cannot follow her. He wants to be able to truly die, and join her. To do so, during a moment of Presence, he must lead the Eldest Blood to transform one of its Attributes without denying itself: Neither dies nor lives.
Other situations:
- a revenant refuses to leave, and the guide who comes for them understands them all too well;
- an Assessor must weigh the life of an Agent of another Power;
- a Power of Death discovers that no one remembers its rites anymore;
- a living person has seen their own hour in a guide's eyes, and wants to change it.
Tones and time
Death lends itself to every tone: tragic, gothic, intimate, satirical — the danse macabre was already a satire.
Above all, it lends itself to campaigns that cross the ages. A guide from ancient Egypt may accompany the dying of a medieval plague, then those of a hospital ward today, and discover in every age that people no longer die quite the same way.