Fume’s builders had known how to work with the veil. They had raised the city in an age when the body and the spirit were seen as two separate aspects of one whole. It was a time before superstition, before people learned to close their minds to the truth that surrounded them. Fume belonged to the dead. They were what mattered there. All they truly needed was for the living to stay out of their way. The shades settled above the city in one vast spiraling mass, but not all the souls there had been trapped against their will. Some truly had been in Fume since long before the first stone had been laid, and they would remain there long after the last stone crumbled to dust. These old souls stood peacefully around the waters of the Sunken Lake, gathered together near the few lanterns still burning in the streets, and congregated in the oldest shallow graveyards, where large patches of earth were still exposed. They were the city’s oldest guardians, overlooked by history and time, whose own stories reached back further than the written word.
