Sootwain

Sootwains are born from domestic tragedies: an unattended hearth that consumed a household, a long illness tended by a single grieving care-taker, or the sudden collapsing of a family's life. Folktales say a Sootwain is the remnant of someone who equated worth with service; their spirit clings to the acts that defined them. Over generations, households with Sootwains either come to accept the spectral help (and the subtle sorrow that accompanies it) or they move away, leaving a spotless, stale shell behind. Scholars of the occult like Master Archivist Tolen of Brindlemarch have recorded Sootwain activity around ruined manors and renovated cottages. The order known as the Pale Sweepers studies and, when necessary, exorcises stubborn Sootwains; their ritual is both a funeral and a deep housekeeping, designed to give the spirit something final to clean. Those who oppose exorcism often do so because the Sootwain will, for a time, keep their homes impeccably safe and warm — until the obsessive mourning seeps into the household's minds as melancholy and forgetfulness.

A Sootwain appears as a hunched, human-shaped silhouette of soot and pale dust, about three-quarters the size of a living person. Its edges blur into little motes of ash that drift away and settle like dandruff on surfaces it has marked. Instead of normal hands it has long, tapering wisps that end in brush-like fronds and flattened cloth shapes: phantom mitts, a spectral mop, and a whisk broom that looks fused to bone. Its face is featureless save for two dim, coal-like eyes and a mouth that never quite forms words but hums in a cracked lullaby. When it moves, its trailing skirts of soot reveal patterns of old stains — tea rings, burn marks, and faded handprints — as if wearing the home's memory like clothing. Texture notes: the body should look like layered soot and lint with occasional glints where polished metal would catch the light; scale reference: stands slightly shorter than a human, often depicted at elbow height to a standing adult, usually shown in a kitchen doorway or by a hearth with floating cups and cloths around it.