(Caed Nua fetches the sword from half a country away, and Neketaka is complete in itself from the very top of the mountain to the very bottom of the old city, even though the old city’s been abandoned since the Engwith cast it down.)Ĭaed Nua, in particular, is unusual in how quickly it became haunted (almost immediately), not in that it was haunted at all, as I’m fairly sure everyone except the original Erl of Yenwood and his crew took one look at the idea and said ‘hmm, that seems like it won’t go well’, but given Breith Nua(9) had a couple of millennia to stew, the fact it stretched out as the walls went up isn’t really unexpected, much less a surprise, though given most Engwith ruins aren’t as well explored or as notably haunted it probably felt like one.

Older places can also trap ‘bigger’ soul bits (Neketaka and Caed Nua have both been known to take whole souls entire), and tend to have stronger options for trapping them (Caed Nua can canonically teleport things (the Whispers of Yenwood, to be precise), and presumably uses that trick to get what it wants, and we’re shown that Neketaka sweet talks surface citizens into leaping into the depths on an irregular basis, at least) as well as broader definitions to what constitutes ‘themselves’. Places that are already haunted have enough critical mass to keep new ‘dust’ as it comes, but anything that isn’t is as likely to keep it as lose more than it gained, which is why objects, being smaller and requiring less critical mass in the first place, are more likely to host modern hauntings. This is, of course, entirely thanks to the gods and whatever causes bîaŵacs(5), the former of whom eat up all the ‘beyond side’ dust, the latter collecting up anything not firmly stuck already on the ‘near side of the veil’ and packaging it into bights, which are more like ghosts than anything else, and slow down the haunting process exponentially(6).

Pillars of eternity 2 modwyr