"You say the dead should rest. But what of those whose rest becomes unrest? Who die with a truth sharp enough to cut back into the world?"
I. Crimson Made Lucid
To become a death-knight is not to be embalmed. But the ritual echoes it: Not preservation, but refinement. A reduction. A distillation. Like lacquer. Like tincture. Like wine reduced to liquor.
You are hollowed out—not of life or by the embalmers knife, but by an excess. No longer the full spectrum of light, you return with a narrower light, but more vivid, more piercing: a single hue rendered holy. Ash-white resolve. Joy-gold longing. Venom-green betrayal. Bone-blue regret. Stark crimson vengeance.
A death-knight is not who they were. They are what mattered most about who they were, made sovereign.
But that sovereignty has a cost. To live as a death-knight is to live a glorious, horrid half-life— everything is tinted by the Drive and the Oath. The world becomes a single spectrum: not grayscale, but crimson-hued. You do not forget what you were. But you see it all through stained glass, and details unfit are made invisible: Only love near death is sharp. Joy aches around your once-choked neck. Justice is holy execution. Memory is loud. And that emotion is to be found everywhere.
Knighthood, Not Undeath
You are not a corpse animated by command.
You are not undead. You are unsurrendered.
Even if a necromancer offers the ritual—it is reverent, not controlling. They are your Witness, not your leash.
You do not return for instruction.
You return because something in you refused to rest.
You are not a warrior. You are a Knight: shaped by death, sworn by feeling.
Like the roadside-knight, the hearth-knight, the honey-knight, the millstone-knight are crowned by their craft.
You are crowned by refusal.
To some, you are sacred: the holy thorn that never wilted.
To others, you are blasphemy—proof that some loves, some grudges, never lie still.
II. The Threefold Binding
A death-knight is forged at the crossroads of three things:
Animus – The Drive
What surged in you as you died? Love? Fury? Longing? Joy?
This becomes your animating principle—your clarity, your banner.
Your baseline condition is no longer whole or hale. It is now affective, expressive:
“Striding with fury.”
“Mind alight with longing.”
This Drive drags you forward. Drags you behind it, a flesh-thing chained to an emotional banner. You may exert effort by following its pull. You may also use it to recover from harm or upheaval—but the emotion must visibly alter the condition healed.“Carried by shame like armor.”
Wounds that drip and stitch with seething rage. It must be seen, felt, known.
Endless perseverance in the name of the drive is the hallmark of a deathknight.
You have a Law of Your Drive. Something specific that bends it, or something you will never overstep. Something superceeding even the drive. The surviving ingot of human-meaningstuff lodestone dragged behind the flagging drive.
“I act for love.”
“I am the edge of their injustice.”
“I do not yield.”
And here is the scary thing. When another follows your drive, or exhibits it, You have dominion over them for the slightest second. You offer a command, or they move closer to death, are affected by your demain, or you may ask for your own drive surging.
Your choice.
Their response in what it means.
You drag them behind your drive, and they decide how they grind against the world.
Method of Death – The Bloom
The way you died marks you with a Stigmata: a visual or atmospheric tell. A bloom of ice, of rope, of salt. A crack in your voice. A heat in your skin. A stillness no one dares disturb.
The more depriving this stigmata, the more power it holds.
Eyes gouged. Body burned. Slow-poisoned to trembling death. These forms of loss grant access to immediate, chimeric otherness—especially when the Oath is called.
You can never be killed the same way again. You may fall, but you will rise again when you will it—seeming dead, but never claimed.
The method of death becomes your Domain: symbolic sovereignty over all that resonates with how you died. These things don’t obey—but they listen.
Rope, like your noose, coils and speaks of who braided it.
The fire that killed you hesitates at your fingertips.
Ice, wind, choking salt—they open and reveal.
Necks break so easily at your touch.
Someone can hold their breath for ever in seeming death as long as your gaze lingers on them.
You may draw on this Domain freely in alignment with your Drive or Oath, and with one specific invocation for each other strong emotion encountered or embodied (write that down).
Blooming stigmata
When you invoke your Domain outside your Drive or Oath, your stigmata blooms. The emotional spectrum widens. You begin to see your death in more things.
Your stigmata also blooms when:
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You use a Domain ability and experience a Victory or Misery, until it no longer feels relates to the victory or misery.
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You feel a strong emotion Different from your drive.
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The world (or another player) offers it as part of impact or escalation.
Each time your stigmata blooms, you may choose a new affect—a thematic shift or emotional echo shaped by your method of death.
When three affects have bloomed, they crystallize into Deathliness
A new bodily stigmata, thematically linked Expertise or skill, a Feat Heroic, and an Instinct, effective only when your stigmata blooms.
These may overwrite what was, or join what remains. They may all circle the same metaphor, or offer branching echoes. Let what feels truest emerge.
Stigmata and Domain examples
Your body remembers your death, and the world does too. The stigmata is more than a scar. It is your mark in the world’s memory.
And from this, a Domain blooms. Not magic in the classic sense—rather, symbolic leverage. Things that echo your death bend for you. They break where you strike. They hush when you speak.
Here are some Examples:
Hanged — Neck always marked, breath forever shallow. Domain: ropes, strangulation, silence, desperation.
Drowned — Hair damp, voice like tide. Domain: water, currents, fear of suffocation.
Poisoned — Veins darkened, breath sweet. Domain: toxins, secrets, slow unraveling.
Burned — Ash trails behind you. Domain: flame, passion, destruction.
Old Age — Bones luminous, eyes kind. Domain: time, memory, family, rest.
Ecstasy — Gasping smile, radiant skin. Domain: climax, hunger, pleasure, abandon.
These domains are narrow—but deep. You cannot command the sea. But the sea remembers you drowned.
The Oath – The Anchor
The Oath is not a leash. It is a weight. A memory. A shape that holds you. These are very much like a human oath, but a deathbed one
It may be:
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Self-sworn
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Spoken over you by a loved one, an enemy, a stranger - a witness
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Declared in desperation, love, fury, or silence
But it must be true.
It forms the axis of your return.
This Oath does not bind. It defines.
“I will never let them suffer again.”
“I will be remembered rightly.”
“I will not kneel, not ever again.”
You may invoke it for effort, resistance, or leverage, and act to interrupt when relevant. These oaths have a clear magical power. The way you died sustains the vow—felt by all sentient beings nearby, even if they cannot name it, when invoked.
To relinquish an Oath is to offer part of yourself. It always costs. You begin to fall apart
Breaking your Oath initiates collapse. The death-knight begins to die again. Only the Drive may sustain you—for a time. Unless their oath becomes true again, or they can swear a new deathbed oath.
The Witness
There is always someone, or something, who sees you return.
The Witness is not your master. They are your axis. They ground the transformation.
A Witness has their own interpretation of their oath written on their sheet, and may use it like an instinct too:
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Speak the Oath to remind you of yourself, giving you a chance to stop from following your drive to far.
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Share your vow and echo it for themselves.
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Reject your interpretation, giving you the choice to be shaped in contrast
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Reframe your purpose when the Drive begins to devour you
They may remind you of what made you human. Or sharpen you into what must remain.
They may mark themselves, making the oath chimeric.
A death-knight cannot reject a former Witness—but they may bind a new one by reenacting their death, ritually or symbolically, for the witness.
If the death-knight loves a witness, or pities them, or simply knows, they may take on the Witness' pain themselves by way of touch, or caring word, or an act of their drive.
The recipient does not bleed.
But the knight does.
The knight staggers.
Their stigmata splits wide.
“You don’t have to die tonight.
Let me carry it.
Let me be death for you,
until you’re ready to hold it yourself.”
This is the most intimate form of refusal and love.
It costs the knight dearly.
It binds new stigmata to them.
And the witness stays hale and whole.
Becoming death - how to become a death knight
Anyone who:
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Is dying, Is dead, or should be dead by all natural reckoning
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Has not let go of what they still feel. Something clings to the body, even if dead.It burns brighter than life and death.
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Can speak, be made to speak, or someone can speak their feeling out loud for them. Remember, everyone dead can visit the minds of others.
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Can be witnessed
If this ritual is done before death, or to summon the dead, it must include a devised, horrific, symbolically potent cause of death that grants power. This is one of the primary reasons for union-in-necromancy: Necromancer as Witness and designer.
This is a consensual co-creation—both ritual and doom.
What You Need
One to three Witnesses (players, NPCs who knew them, or parts of world willing to listen that the players will embody.)
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A symbol (of who they were or what they meant)
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A feeling that can cut back into the world
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A method of death, actual or imminent
The Four Steps of Becoming
1. Witnessing – “I Saw You Still Burning”
The dying character lies, stands, kneels, or curls.
Not yet dead, but past the threshold of healing. Or dead and somehow still speaking.
Speak what still remains
Each witness approaches, one by one.
They speak—not to revive, but to declare what they saw.
Each witness places a mark—a ribbon, ash, a pressed finger, a secret. These stay on the body even in undeath. They in any case pass it to you—or leave it by your body
“You held the gate alone.”
“You wept and made the world kinder.”
“You wanted to die for love, and couldn’t.”
“You struck back. I never forgot.”
Offer stigmata
Each witness describes a poetic wound, memory, or mark you now associate with them or their now dying body—a symbol of their death. This stigmata they pass written to the dying.
“Your eyes bled when you lied.”
“Your bones are too cold and drenched for the sun to dry.”
“You coughed flowers, that is how we knew”
If the dying cannot speak, let their breath or stillness answer.
If they can, let them answer in few words.
“I remember.”
“That was true.”
“Then let me burn for that.”
2. Swearing – “Let Me Be This Forever”
If you can speak, declare your Drive:
“Let my rage be enough.”
“Let my grief shape me.”
“Let my promise hold my bones together.”
Then choose or rewrite an Oath:
“I will return for her.”
“I will not let them forget.”
“I will not rest until it is done.”
This becomes your Vow—tied to your Method of Death.
Each witness writes their version of the Oath—Witnesses may echo it, affirm it, or reject it.
All three are holy.
3. Searing – “Make It True”
A blade. A bond. A name. A ring. A scar.
This is the core of your Domain. Everything that remembers it bends.
It is used to mark the body—cut, brand, crown, or consume.
This act hurts. It cements the feeling into flesh.
Then, declare your Method of Death—specific and poetic.
“Burned in her arms.”
“Hung by those I loved.”
“Froze waiting for them to come back.”
This then is your Domain and an implement to wield it, where the stigmata first spread from —you gain fictional power over things that relate to either. Not control, but reverence. They remember.
Fire hesitates your blister-etched skin.
Rope coils and dances.
Ice creaks and lets you pass.
4. Rising – “Let Me Be What I Meant”
The body dies. Or appears to.
Then stillness.
Name yourself again—or not.
Declare the Law of Your Drive:
“I act for love.”
“I am the edge of their injustice.”
“I do not yield.”
This Law is how others invoke you. How they see you. How they might one day call you back—or chain you down. How you remain you in the throes of your drive.
Witnesses may write it. Speak it. Swear by it. They write it on their sheet to, side by side with the oath.
You are now a Death-Knight.
You are not whole.
But you are sharp.
"You see only her scar. I see the thing she would not let die. And I kneel—not for fear, but in witness."
A death-knight is not the shadow of their death.
They are its still-bleeding edge.
Not the past walking.
But its most vivid consequence.
And sometimes—vengeance becomes her.
To Offer the Blade – A Rite of Death-Knighthood
Sometimes, a death-knight does not kill out of rage.
Sometimes, they do not rise from vengeance.
Sometimes, they come to you gently.
Sometimes, they are the only one who knows what you need to lose.
Sometimes, you don’t know how to ask.
But they smell it on your breath.
And if they see it—
in your trembling, in your begging, in your beautiful failure to stay the same—
They may offer the blade.
✶ The Rite
To Offer the Blade is a sacred act between a death-knight (or another versed in the death arts) and one who longs for transformation, to be driven by their drives, or a witness.
This is not murder.
This is not sacrifice.
This is release.
It is entirely voluntary.
It requires listening for:
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A Drive stirred in the recipient—longing, love, rage, regret
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A moment of surrender—spoken or enacted
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A blade, or a symbol of death—held by the knight
The Question
The death-knight touches them.
In the dark. In the midst. At the edge.
“Do you want this to end?”
“Do you want it to become something else?”
“Do you want to burn, like I burned?”
If the answer is yes—or an affirmation and redefinition, Death becomes a doorway.
Both Death-knight and released offer a Drive: what emotion flooded them at the edge. Released chooses.
Death becomes a doorway
What does is their choice. If there is pain or not, the emotion and sensation felt, is offered by the death knight, and renegotiated or chosen by the released.
a kiss may be enough.
Or they may lay the partner down.
Place the blade over their heart.
And press.
Not cruelly.
Just enough.
To open them in death.
To let what no longer fits bleed out.
To make room for what comes next.
This process should reveal two things,
A Method of Death: what the knight used to open them.
A Stigmata: what blooms now, visible or hidden, from the method of release.
Falling Back Into Reality
The recipient dies.
Or almost dies.
Or feels their former self die—
And then they feel themselves trembling, orgasming, sobbing, clawing at the skin like a cocoon they no longer fit in.
They fall into the knight’s arms.
Into the soil.
Into fire.
Into ash.
Into release.
Into Death
Let the first Oath be a whispered offer by the death-knight over their body.
“Let them rise, so they will never fall again.”
“Let them be as sharp as they need, as sharp the blade that i pierced their heart with”
“Let them remember only the joys they had, for they were far to few."
Let the released refine that oath. Let either provide the law.
And let the knight, who knows how to hold that moment, wait as the released takes in the oath:
The released play may rise as a death-knight themselves when they wish. Gradually. Instantly.
Smutting With a Death-Knight
You do not fuck a death-knight.
You test your worth against their fire.
You taste what has already burned away—and what could burn again, if you aren’t careful.
A death-knight smuts like someone who remembers how they died.
They fuck like they’re making sure it doesn’t happen again.
Or like they’re reenacting it in slow, ecstatic, grueling detail—so it never leaves their skin.
And they drag you like a banner behind that drive.
They are all instinct and Oath:
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“I will never kneel.”
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“I will return for her.”
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“I will act for love alone.”
Touch them wrong, and the stigmata blooms—scorching heat, a choking gasp, a flicker of drowning in the pit of your lungs.
Touch them right, and they soften like glowing steel, aching to be shaped by hands that remember who they were—or dare love who they’ve become.
To smut with a death-knight is not just to bed them.
It is to entangle yourself in what keeps them here.
Their Drive ignites beneath your fingertips.
Their Domain seeps into the air between your bodies.
You may feel it before you kiss them—a phantom noose, a salt-slick dampness, ash in your mouth.
And still—you lean closer.
They are not safe.
But they are exact.
And they will always remember how you made them feel.
To smut with a death-knight is to court a holy edge.
And sometimes,
to fuck them
is to die by them—
but with reverence.
with consent.
with trembling trust.
And to rise
with your own Drive
burning in your throat.
To Be Touched By Them
When a death-knight touches you, it is a vow in motion.
They may press a blade to your throat—not to cut, but to test whether you flinch.
They may fuck you without a word, because their breath is sacred now and swore only moans should leave their lips.
They may cradle your face like the last thing they saw before death.
And that touch may burn. Or freeze. Or awaken something you forgot you buried.
They don’t ask if you want it.
They ask if you’ll survive it.
They fuck with purpose, with oath, with history.
They do not chase pleasure.
They enact it, like a rite.
When they take, they do so with the full weight of the Drive behind them.
When they give, it’s like offering blood to the earth. Holy. Wasteful. Reverent.
You are not their release. You are their proof.
To Be Fucked By Them
To be fucked by a death-knight is to become part of the reason they came back.
They may be slow. They may be rough. They may not even move—but the way they breathe, the way they say your name, will brand it into the space between your ribs.
Sometimes they don’t undress you—they undress who you are.
They may whisper your shame and kiss it.
They may hold you until the trembling stops—and then start the shaking again.
They may come without sound, without rhythm, just a sharp intake of breath and the tremble of someone trying not to break again.
Their climax is not an end.
It is a reminder:
They are here.
They chose this.
And you will not forget it.
They will have your little death—or theirs.
And if your climax sings like theirs once did,
they may offer the blade.
Not as punishment. Not as mercy.
But as invitation.
Let me make you as sharp as I am.
Let me be the witness of your death,
and to how you rise again.
They may take your hand in theirs, guide it to your chest, and slide the blade between your ribs.
Softly. Perfectly. Without fear.
Your breath will catch.
Your pulse will spill.
And you will fall—
into them.
Into Drive. Into Domain.
Into your own fucking Oath.
To be their Witness in Smut
To smut with a death-knight as Witness is to be their witness again.
You do not dominate them. You do not surrender to them.
You enter ritual.
Every caress is a chance to calm their Drive—or to stoke it.
Every kiss is an invitation to remember who they were.
Or to help them forget in heat.
You may say their Oath aloud as you enter them.
You may press your hand to their stigmata and ask:
“Is this still where it hurts?”
You may hold them down and whisper:
“You don’t have to be sharp with me.”
And they may sob.
Or burn.
Or take you in their arms and vow,
“I will not leave you like I left them.”
And that vow will become true—
if only for the span of your shuddering bodies.
But know this:
To witness them like this is to risk being written into the next Oath.
You might become the one they refuse to leave.
Or the reason they burn again.
Smut As a Death-Knight
To smut as a death-knight is to wonder if your body is still your own—
and to make it yours anyway.
You are not soft.
But you can be gentle.
You are not cruel.
But you are honed.
You may lay back and let someone ride your rage until they cry.
Or you may kneel and offer them your stigmata to kiss, to tongue, to bleed for.
You may fuck with the single-minded purity of someone chasing only one emotion,
over and over,
until the world remakes itself around you.
And when you come, it is not relief.
It is—
an Oath reaffirmed.
Your Law letting you be yourself fully, for a moment.
Before the spectrum again collapses.
You roll away.
Or you do not.
But your hand still grips their wrist.
And they know:
For that breathless instant,
you were not only alive.
You were true.
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