Eclipsed race

The Eclipsed — Those Who Refused to Fade

“Some lights do not die when their wick burns out; they simply learn to burn without flame.”
— Scholar Virel Marn, On Spirits and Sentience

Origin

The Eclipsed are not born so much as remembered into being.
When a soul dies yet its will outweighs its surrender, its essence condenses instead of dispersing.
This compression of spirit yields a body of ectoplasmic matter — a medium between energy and flesh.
Where mortals breathe air, the Eclipsed breathe meaning.
They are what happens when memory refuses silence.

Each Eclipsed’s manifestation begins at a moment of great attachment or unfinished purpose: a promise unkept, a love unresolved, a duty unfulfilled.
The resulting entity stabilizes only when its will shapes a rhythm strong enough to bind its essence into form.
Thus, every Eclipsed carries within them the pulse of their defining emotion; it is both heart and anchor.

Physiology

Though their forms mimic the living, they are not sustained by blood or breath.
Their bodies possess weight and texture, soft yet strangely resilient, cool to the touch like moonlit stone.
An Eclipsed’s heartbeat does not follow respiration but cadence — a personal rhythm echoing the emotion that forged them.
Their body temperature mirrors mood: warmth rises with passion, chills accompany fear or grief.

They do not tire through exertion, nor age in mortal terms.
Physical fatigue means little, but emotional strain can erode their cohesion.
Sleep serves them not for rest but for reconstruction — their essence settling back into ordered rhythm.

Nourishment and Mass

Eclipsed do not require food to live, yet nourishment maintains their density.
What mortals call eating is, for them, an act of anchoring — absorbing sensations, warmth, and life’s flavor to remain solid.
Without it they grow light, their bodies translucent, voices echoing as if spoken through water.
In advanced deprivation they drift toward spectral form, a state scholars call The Waning.

A famished Eclipsed cannot mend through sleep alone.
To rebuild, they must draw upon living soul-energy, touching or feeding upon the vitality of others.
Most take only what they need — a brush of warmth, a heartbeat’s spark — but darker legends tell of those who devour entire lifespans to rekindle their own.
This hunger is not malice; it is entropy seeking balance.

The Essence Within

Their “blood” is liquid aether, faintly blue and luminous.
When wounded, it seeps like condensed starlight and releases a scent unique to the individual — the distilled memory of who they are.
To encounter a wounded Eclipsed is to be surrounded by the perfume of their soul: rain on stone, wild honey, cold iron, sea salt — whatever essence defines them most.
To mortals, this aroma is both haunting and intimate, as though inhaling the memory of another life.

Emotional Thermodynamics

Emotion fuels stability.
Calm grants clarity and translucence.
Anger burns bright — their light intensifies, skin glowing from within, but such fury consumes ectoplasm rapidly.
Fear freezes, dimming their glow and slowing rhythm until form begins to flicker.
Joy harmonizes: it balances heat and light, restoring cohesion faster than any other state.

Among themselves, the Eclipsed measure spiritual health not in pulse or breath, but in tone — the faint hum that resonates in their chest when centered.
A steady tone means unity; a tremor signals unraveling.

Death and Rebirth

To “kill” an Eclipsed is to scatter their condensed energy faster than they can reassemble it.
Yet even then, fragments persist.
If enough emotional resonance remains — a song unfinished, a lover’s memory — those fragments may reconverge over time, reborn with dim recollection of their former life.
For this reason, Eclipsed graves are rare; their people say, “We do not bury stars that still remember how to shine.”

Behavior and Culture

Eclipsed communities are transient, built around rhythmic sanctums — places where sound and motion keep their essence stable: drum circles, chanting halls, or dance floors lit by cold flame.
Music and rhythm are sacred acts; to lose one’s rhythm is to invite dissolution.
Their art is fluid and cyclical, mirroring their belief that existence itself is a dance between presence and memory.

They do not eat together but share warmth — a gesture where two press foreheads or palms, exchanging fragments of vitality through resonance.
Friendship among the Eclipsed is literal sustenance.
Loneliness, conversely, can starve them faster than hunger.

Relations with Mortals

To most mortals, the Eclipsed are unsettling yet mesmerizing.
They cast reflections that blink out a heartbeat late, leave footprints that fade before the next step.
Some see them as omens, others as saints of endurance.
Healers prize their touch for its cooling calm, while zealots hunt them as false undead.

An Eclipsed’s feeding instinct makes diplomacy delicate; even harmless contact can draw warmth from another’s soul.
Still, many serve as performers, spirit guides, or scholars of death, finding purpose in the boundary they embody.

The Hollowing

When one neglects rhythm, emotion, and connection, their form begins to fray.
The skin pales to glass, the voice becomes echo, and memories bleed into mist.
Should they cross the threshold into full Hollowing, only a pulse of light remains — a drifting will seeking resonance to rebuild.
Rescue is possible but dangerous: feeding them too much vitality too quickly risks binding donor and recipient together in a single unstable soul.

Scholarly Theories

Arcanists argue that an Eclipsed’s ectoplasmic matrix may contain fragments of the souls they loved in life, woven unconsciously into their body.
This would explain their heightened empathy and why feeding restores more than mass — it rekindles connection.
Clerics of the Veil dispute this, claiming the Eclipsed are divine instruments of memory, meant to remind mortals that emotion outlives flesh.
Neither side has proven the other wrong.

Legends

Stories speak of the first Eclipsed: a dancer who died mid-performance but finished her final step as spirit, the motion itself binding her back to the world.
From her rhythm all others learned the art of persistence.
Her name is lost, yet every Eclipsed heartbeat still beats in triple time — life, death, and will.

In Summary

The Eclipsed are will made flesh, rhythm given form.
They do not live as mortals do, nor die as ghosts should.
They endure through emotion, rebuild through connection, and fade through neglect.
Their existence asks a single, haunting question of every world they walk:

“If your love was strong enough to defy death… what would you become?”