Dawn Spirit

Emotion Made Manifest

There are times in a person's life when the future becomes something feared and dreaded. Issues of health, work, money, relationships, and more pile up and become insurmountable. Some people coping with these struggles will fall asleep one night and enter a comatose state where their soul detaches from their body to act on their suffering. They become a dawn spirit, a living ghost.   Like their dusk spirit counterparts, dawn spirits retain all the memories of their living self, and appear as a semi-transparent version of them. That's where the similarities end, however. Dawns are the amplified emotions of their living host. They can only be seen by seers, and not only can be reasoned with, but must be: only if a dawn willingly returns to their body will their host wake up.   If the host survives, they retain no memories of their spiritual counterpart, but the near-death experience leaves them forever changed.  

Behavior

A dawn is classified as peaceful, tormented, or vengeful based on their emotional state, which can change wildly based on what's happening around or to them. A peaceful dawn can turn vengeful with a single unfortunate reminder. Anyone they feel has wronged them or can be blamed for their situation is a possible target, regardless of the soundness of the dawn's reasoning.   While dawns can't physically interact with living beings, the way they affect their surroundings can cause significant harm. Deaths from hauntings are thankfully rare, but injuries and property damage are unavoidable. Courts have decided that the living host cannot be held legally responsible for their dawn's actions, leaving groups like the Advocacy for Better Living scrambling to help those affected.  

Wynelle came by today. Asked what I was building. She truly doesn't know she destroyed half the tavern. I wanted to scream, but I asked her to leave instead. I hated seeing her sad about it, and I hate that I hated it. I want to hate her for what she did.

— A struggling barkeep confides in a friend

 

Treatment

Even with treatment like suspension, the living host of a dawn will die within a week spent comatose, and their dawn will disappear. To save them, seers track down the dawn to talk through their fears and find a way to convince them to willingly return to their body. They document what transpires to share with the host when they awaken. At that point, it's up to the host to decide and act on their new path forward.   Some dawns are comparatively easy to work with and can be returned to their bodies with minimal risk. Others are more stubborn, or even refuse treatment entirely. At times, there is no solution, such as when someone's ailments have reached the limit of modern medicine. Returning to their body means returning to a life of suffering, being in pain or confined to a bed. Dying as a dawn is their way to die on their own terms, experiencing a last bit of freedom.