Wakes Are For the Living
For over a decade, the conspiracy has been funneling slaves around the Nexus routes and laundering them through Nightfall—but the relationship the Academy has with the Guild goes back much longer. Since the school's inception, necromancers have been dependent on the Guild for reagents, supplies of fresh corpses, and an ad-hoc intelligence network—when factors hear of promising students or rumors of powerful practitioners of the dead arts, they can expect a finder's fee for letting Nightfall know. Should another Balorian Crusade arise, the conspiracy will begin acting openly, corrupting the Virtues of Wyld barbarians with more powerful necromancy and throwing them directly into the oncoming tide, choking invaders with poisoned souls. It will buy some time to arrange a dimensional exodus to the Underworld and Malfeas, if nothing else.
The Academy also sees a great deal of traffic from factorial funeral caravans on their way to Sijan, even if the deceased passed far from Nightfall; often, these caravans are funded by the factor’s successor, though as to why, few can say. Raiton Academy is important to the Guild entire, not just for the conspirators.
Wakes Are For the Living
Cost: 10m
Target: One deceased being
Not all necromancy was codified by dead Primordials or curious Celestials of the First Age; like the Guild, the necromancers of Nightfall found startling success in methods overlooked by more puissant savants. This spell effectively replicates the Consume the Mind step of the Dark Path of Consumption, consuming a dead mortal's brain to gain access to their memories. In a raucous ceremony in which tales of the deceased's life are related, the necromancer consumes a mortal's brain (dead no longer than a year, though more than a week's decay necessitates a Resistance roll) and gains access to the mortal's memories as if they were faded remnants of the necromancer's childhood. Remembering minor details requires an Integrity roll with a difficulty set by the Storyteller, but as retaining a mortal's memories indefinitely requires a commitment of 5m, there's time enough. This spell cannot be used on a being without a brain or one that had a higher Permanent Essence rating than the necromancer. The Guild dislikes the Academy knowing so many of their secrets, and loathes that the necromancers charge for them, but there's few better ways to tease secrets from the dead—no one wants to consult the Timeless Order without especially good cause.