The Stillwater Stance

The Stillwater Order's empty-handed discipline: a martial art and a meditation in one, by which a monk empties every want in themselves that a haunting could seize.

The Stance is the Order's whole answer to the Sundering's leftover dead in one practice. Body emptied, wants set down, breath gone still as the tarn — and the Unclosed find nothing left in you to seize; a haunting feeds on what's unfinished in the living as much as on what's unfinished in itself, and an emptied want gives it no purchase. In a fight this reads as an unarmed style that cannot be baited, feinted, or frightened; near the Unclosed it is the only known way to stand in their presence untouched. The Drowned are those who used the Stance to get close to one and then, fatally, reached for it anyway.