For as long as the Ashwall has existed, so too have the Sisters of the Ashen Veil.

They were not always called that. Generations ago the Ashwall formed without warning, swallowing cities whole. Family members, neighbors, and entire cities of people were simply gone, and no one understood why. Before the catastrophe the Sisters were just a simple coven. They were women with magic in their blood living quietly among their communities.

The sisters were devastated by the loss of their loved ones. They dressed in black robes and mourning veils. They smeared the ashes blown in from the ashwall onto their faces. The women began to write down and recite memorials of the dead to each other. It began as a way to privately grieve with each other, but the practice grew as neighbors came to them carrying the same unbearable grief.

They became vessels for the grief of the lost. Drawing on their natural gifts with the arcane, they found ways to ease the passage between life and death. Their grieving robes became a uniform. They sat with the dying, conducted funeral rites, and served as mediums for those who needed one last word with someone gone. They became death doulas, historians of the dead, keepers of their names. Their work was cathartic, for those they served and for themselves. The dead would not be forgotten to time.

Nereza was born into the third generation of the Ashen Veil. Her great-grandmother had been one of the first women to begin writing. She grew up around death. As a girl she helped nurse the dying and assisted in the funeral rites of her community. As she grew older, she began contributing to the archive.

Like the women before her, Nereza had the arcane gift. She was mentored by her coven from a young age, shaped to use her gifts in service of others. She was taught how to hold someone else's grief without being consumed by it. She was good at the work. She had a quality of compassion that the grieving trusted.

The Sisters were not universally loved. Many in their communities held a deep respect for what the coven did and what it preserved. Others resented them. They did not understand why the Sisters continued to mourn people who had died generations ago, or why they insisted on keeping a wound open that everyone else had found a way to close. The necromantic magic the Sisters used to ease the transition between life and death unsettled people, regardless of how carefully it was practiced.

Tempers in their community finally broke, and a mob formed. Nereza and several of her sisters were dragged into the streets and sent to the gallows. Nereza died. Hours later, when the mob had dispersed, her mother and grandmother cut her down and brought her back.

She was living and breathing, not undead, but death had left its mark. Her skin never recovered its once rosy tone and settled into a permanent pallor. A streak of white grew through her raven hair, and her already slight frame took on a gaunt, skeletal quality.

After she died the villagers treated her as a pariah, but her Sisters believed that being death-touched was a mark of favor from the god of death. They believed that she had been returned for a purpose, and she was meant for something the living side of the veil still required of her.

When the Ashwall fell, the coven matrons came to Nereza. The Marches were open again. They asked her to go in and continue the work. To find out what had happened. To write it down.