Death is the summit of the path, to which leads a ladder of those who first gathered corpses, then spoke with spirits, then carried the afterlife within themselves, truly died and became a name that the living call the end.
This path stands out among the others by how consistently it takes life from its bearer. The Corpse Collector only grows cold in body; the Immortal loses memory every sixty years; the Ferryman dies in the Afterworld and remains a part of it; the Pale Emperor parts with his own name, giving it to death. To the summit comes one who is no longer human.
Death has five powers, and all of them are ultimate in meaning:
Death — the very authority over it rises to the level of a concept;
Pallor — the final form of withering, the fading of all that exists;
Limit — Death is the final destination of every thing and the common limit of every life;
Undead — it is the source of the very existence of the undead and the mistress over them;
Enslavement — everything that has a soul submits to it.
The rite of ascension formalizes this literally: one must create for the dead a true final refuge — or merge with one that already exists — so that all deaths within the domains lead precisely there. Not to kill, not to subdue: to become the place where they come.
