Undead/Angels

Undead

Undead in the Barony are relatively rare, but, since they cannot be killed or easily destroyed, the population tends to grow slowly over time.

All undead (and all undead are physical - ghosts are something else) are created the same way. One of God's gifts to humans was its angels; beings who all have the ability to raise a body from the dead. This is actually how the academics define 'Angel' - they are the entities that are capable of raising the dead. If the body is clean, whole, and otherwise a good house for the soul, and the soul can be located and returned to the body, this is a resurrection of someone who should have died.

If, however, any of these conditions are not met, then the body remains animate but soulless. A body raised by an angel will never rest, until it literally decays to nothingness. It will start off as a confused (and probably maimed) human who does not need to sleep, breath, or eat, and will rot over time until it becomes a zombie, and then a skeleton, and then dust.

It is extremely rare for God to raise a body for the purposes of saving a soul and returning someone to life. When it does so the reasons are inscrutable, and it typically demands a heavy payment for the service. Angels will more often raise bodies for other reasons - often manual labour in the service of the church, or sometimes for quick standing armies. Because these bodies will never rest, they are often rounded up afterwards and burned, ground down, dissolved in acid, etc. etc. The church is politically motivated to keep the popular image of undead threatening and othered; most people think of zombies and skeletons as insane cannibal things. The reality tends to be more complicated.

Undead are generally more impulsive and aggressive than humans animated by their soul. There is debate as to whether this is something intrinsic to their unnatural being, or whether it is a result of discrimination, zero legal recourse, and the constant looming threat of being unmade. They can talk and think like anyone else. There is debate about whether the act of resurrection consists in the unseating of the intelligence from the brain (and also disconnecting it from its material dependencies), and instead binding it to the whole of the body. Zombie hands crawl, zombie heads bite, zombie intestines strangle. All of them are animated by the first and fundamental intelligence of God. This intelligence in its localised state seems to get more complex as the body it is tied to grows in mass.

The undead have a culture. Because they have no legal protection, they often attach themselves to existent institutions to escape persecution and material destruction. There are many undead in the service of the church, as labourers, scribes, and soldiers, and those who perform well and loyally are given access to preserving oils and chemicals to lengthen their 'lives'. They can be bought and sold as property, and most organisations can find uses for thinking beings who do not sleep or need sustenance of any kind.

There are, naturally, also undead who organise against slavery and arbitrary destruction, and who become bandits, freedom fighters, hedge knights, or wanderers. For all undead the trade in preservatives for the body is a keen focus. For many, buying or taking the freedom of other undead is their primary motivation.

As a byproduct of God's instantiation inside their bodies, all undead speak Enochian, and can do so without functioning organs for speaking or breathing. Since many undead loathe the church, they also use their own secret language of hand signs and gestures. Being caught using this by the church is grounds for summary material destruction.

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Angels

Angels are God's instruments in the world. They were created after humans, and all angels hold a sour understanding of their secondness in God's design. They are incorporeal, voiced, intelligent, and imaginative - they are actually materially almost indistinguishable from demons, and both can possess human and human-like forms to get more done in the world. Demons, however, cannot raise the dead.

Angels are in direct, often mundane contact with the church and its leaders. They make demands and give tasks and missions to their human collaborators. They can communicate with God directly, but only under the open sky (not indoors or underground, not too much cloud cover, etc.). All churches and most middle and upper class homes will have an 'angel room' - a type of furnished courtyard at the centre of the floorplan, where the presence of God is felt to be strongest.

Angels are associated with vision, and clarity of sight (as demons are associated with touch, taste, and smell). They can see through walls, bodies, falsehoods, good intentions. If you found a way to blind an angel it would be like killing it. 

Warrior and logistics angels are the most numerous in the Barony. Logistics angels rarely take on physical puppet-form, and when they do they are often crude, twiggy, lashed-together things built to hold pens or turn pages. They also rarely have the willpower to directly control a human body.

Warrior angels often demand bodies from the church - generally these are solid iron (or wooden, depending on the wealth of the particular church community) mannikins carved with great reverence into beautified human forms. They breath solar fire, often float a few feet above the ground, and kill the things that God tells them to. The bodies can be physically destroyed, but the angel will not be harmed by this. 

Angels can be dealt with like demons can - they are logical beings who you can trap in language or in contracts, and they get scared easily when cut away form their divine connection. Many adventurers who have come into contact with angels have noted, over time, a strange childishness or insecurity about them, which only becomes more pronounced the further they stray from their creator. 

Angels are also known to become stranger with age. It is not known how or why God chooses to make or destroy angels, but the church is aware that this turnaround happens fairly quickly. No one knows what happens to the angels 'turned around' this way. The new arrivals tend to be eager to please, full of can-do attitude, and slightly naive about the world. Those that do become old are deeply inhuman things of awesome and frightening power. They speak as bells speak, the remake the world in accordance with their strictly arranged vision. They have thousands of arms and thousands of eyes and thousands of heads and thousands of minds. The puppets that they commission when they walk our world are monstrous things as big as buildings. And sometimes they scream for days and weeks and cannot or will not explain why.