Nomad jumped despite himself. Even though he’d been expecting it, seeing a shade was unnerving. When he’d been on Threnody, these things had been incredibly dangerous. Society contorted around their existence, living by strict rules to avoid angering them. When the eyes went red, these things were deadly, seeking to kill. Yet here, the people of Beacon kept them like…pets?

“We fled the Evil,” the ghost said in a whispering voice, like rustling papers. Another appeared over its shoulder, just a vague, smoky outline of a person with red eyes. “Then we fled Threnody. We are your Chorus. We remember. We came here, to the land of the twilight rings, to make our own world. Do not forget. Adonalsium will claim us eventually. Live. And remember.”

Well, the knight says, at least we know how they keep their lore straight through the generations.

“On your homeworld,” Nomad said, “these things kill people.”

“They’d kill us,” Zeal said, “if we went into the Reliquary.”

“Are they self-aware?” Nomad asked.

“I sustain an uncertainty in that regard,” he replied. “They’ll answer questions sometimes. Other times they give no answers, only recitations.”

“They mostly only talk about the past, though,” Rebeke said. She’d stepped up beside him and watched intently through the glass. “About lore, history. Almost nothing about themselves. Each member might as well be interchangeable. We don’t know if they remember their individual lives. They’re like…living history books.”

“‘Living’ being a loose term,” Zeal added.

Nomad nodded, thoughtful. “That’s far more than what I’d expect from them, knowing the shades of Threnody.”

“We were the first who died on Canticle,” a shade whispered to him. “The first to live in this land and devise the designs of flight—based on the ships that brought us here. But then we died and rose as shades. Remembering.”

“Shades do not remember,” another said. “We are not shades. We are the Chorus of the people.”

The Sunlit Man Chapter 22