Overview
The Enthralling is a collective of necromancers founded centuries ago, some even say millennia. Their number is unknown, but their methods are well understood. Under the eye of their most senior, most powerful members, The Lords of The Dead, they swagger through the world, stacking the fallen like dominoes. By and large, exceptionally few people are aware of their existence because of their uniquely treacherous discipline.
When The Enthralling kill someone, they are enthralled. If that sounds like a vague description, it’s because it’s extraordinarily versatile. The amateur and unskilled often kill someone before ordering the rotting husk to perform a task but the more creative of their number took a trick from the modern world and wholeheartedly adopted the practice of automation. By creating comprehensive sets of rules that can range anywhere from labor to preventing their own decay on a cellular level, the forward-thinking Enthralling can make a reasonable imitation of a living, albeit quirky automaton. After all, it’s fairly hard to test if a shambling passerby is, in fact, dead inside or has simply been defeated by life.
Due to the daunting workload of designing scripts capable of imitating human behavior, the Enthralling generally keep relatively few thralls in the routine of engaging with the associates they’d known intimately in life. If carefully instructed, however, thralls can make for excellent spies. In fact, many thralls hold positions of great influence.
On the other hand, the more abstract thinkers among The Enthralling can command the flesh, bone, and sinew to reassemble itself in an entirely distinct shape, even incorporating the remains of multiple thralls, assuming the designer in question has the creative capacity to work out the new anatomy and physiology of their aberrations. More practically, some opt to retrofit their thralls into living tools, such as a scalpel made of muscle and sharpened bone, taken out of a thrall that had once been a surgeon, or even a leather jacket that protects its owner.
Much subtler is the fact that the Enthralling are in possession of the very souls of their victims. While the default destination for the souls of a thrall is the very headspace of their master, from there they can be dropped off to any point of their choosing, including The Library of Souls, an archival storage facility maintained by The Lords of The Dead, from which souls can be borrowed for a time in exchange for the service of maintaining them, much like a bank.
When a soul is within the headspace of one of The Enthralling, they can engage in a dialogue that only their keeper can hear, while they, in turn, see through the eyes and hear through the ears of their master, if allowed to do so. A keeper may choose to consciously allow one of the souls sharing their headspace to seize the reigns of their body, as is sometimes the case if they possess a special sort of skill or body of knowledge, while a particularly dedicated soul may, in some instances, non-voluntarily overtake control of their keeper’s body. If a soul is bound to an inanimate object, the object may slowly take on increasingly human characteristics, such as a car that smiles or behaves erratically. Avoiding inadvertent hauntings is a primary reason why The Library of Souls is generally seen as such a bargain.