Failed Princelings
Lesser Dead
Dead by Their Own Hand
There is a pernicious rumour that goes around certain secondary schools in the Realm, despite the best efforts of all authority figures to stamp it out. The whispers claim that if an unexalted Dynast cuts their own throat on the stroke of midnight on their twenty-first birthday, while praying to the Immaculate Dragons, then they'll be reborn as someone who is guaranteed to Exalt. Someone desperate enough to try this ritual will not pass on, however, and the ghosts that rise from such tragedy are intensely malevolent. They haunt places the young frequent, killing those who show marks of strong breeding in malicious ways.
In truth, the rumoured method for such a suicide is a thaumaturgical ritual laden with the spiritual pollution of the Neverborn, and the death is a prayer to rotting murdered titans. The ghosts this produces are tainted and impure by their deeds, soaked in the filth of the Neverborn. Their passions become twisted towards hatred and revenge - which they inevitably turn on the Dynastic society that mocked them for their inability to Exalt. Most of all, they loathe those with strong breeding who bear the marks of foretold Exaltation.
For all their youth, the corrupt power of the Neverborn strengthens these ghosts and fortifies them. The ritual grants their wish in a perverse manner, and clads them in filthy power, derived from Primordial races slaughtered by the Terrestrial Exalted. They become nightmare figures, bloody handed weapons of vengeance of the murdered. Some reanimate their own corpses and hunt down teenage Dynasts, seeking to reap a bloody harvest. Others gain the power to pull an entire building into a Cyst of the Underworld, trapping everyone within inside a horrific nightmare realm to be picked off one by one. Others still forcefully claim the body of a single person, and lead them down the path of spiritual debasement and self-mutilation, making sure that the hated Dragonblooded see what their children are made to do by their own hand.
Necromancers must take care when binding failed princelings, for they are powerful out of proportion to their age and intensely malevolent. They are fortunately rare, thanks to the relatively few Dynasts who try this rumoured ritual and the hard work of Immaculate exorcists who seek to eliminate them all. Still, despite all this pages containing details of the ritual are found in old books in Dynastic schools and tales are passed from child to child, seemingly cropping up from nowhere.
