Ashen Ghosts
No one can confirm the Ashen Ghosts exist. The Board denies it. Associates of the underground railroad deny it to their own colleagues. No one has identified a single Ghost or described what they look like. And yet cages keep opening in the slave pits of Aysea, and slavers keep turning up with slit throats in the surrounding areas.
The Ghosts are a whispered legend within the already secretive underground railroad, rumored to comprise small numbers of radical Sainthood of Ashes members and some Fallow Hopes followers who covertly free slaves from the city. Escaped slaves who reached the Cooper lighthouse on Elbee Island have told of men and women quietly whispering escape routes into their ears, opening cages in the dead of night, and incapacitating guards without sound. Others heard of figures visiting slave pens on nights prior to breakouts, leaving information about the safest routes out of the city.
Some speculate the Ghosts are not real at all but a rumor concocted by the Board to keep slave morale high: a fairy godmother figure to watch over the desperate, forestalling rebellion with the hope that rescue might come. Whether the Ashen Ghosts are radical abolitionists, Board propaganda, or something else entirely, the effect is the same. Slaves believe in them. Slavers fear them. And the truth remains exactly as unknowable as whoever is behind it intends.
The Ghosts are a whispered legend within the already secretive underground railroad, rumored to comprise small numbers of radical Sainthood of Ashes members and some Fallow Hopes followers who covertly free slaves from the city. Escaped slaves who reached the Cooper lighthouse on Elbee Island have told of men and women quietly whispering escape routes into their ears, opening cages in the dead of night, and incapacitating guards without sound. Others heard of figures visiting slave pens on nights prior to breakouts, leaving information about the safest routes out of the city.
Some speculate the Ghosts are not real at all but a rumor concocted by the Board to keep slave morale high: a fairy godmother figure to watch over the desperate, forestalling rebellion with the hope that rescue might come. Whether the Ashen Ghosts are radical abolitionists, Board propaganda, or something else entirely, the effect is the same. Slaves believe in them. Slavers fear them. And the truth remains exactly as unknowable as whoever is behind it intends.
