You set up shop wherever there's opportunity, but you never stay for long.
When asked about her story
Diana Cambio's response is simple: When you make plans for after you finish college, you don't really consider dying to make the list.
But that's exactly what happened less than a year after marching with the rest of her class, twenty-one and high on possibility.
Her move to the US had been sponsored by her cousin Philip. And while he repeatedly told her that she'd done all the heavy lifting—securing a scholarship, complying with all the necessary paperwork and requirements—she vowed to never forget that the offer to bankroll her dreams of pursuing medicine was out of the good will of someone who loved her.
So while he kicked up a fuss when she told him that she'd take on a job—
to help with rent, to buffer groceries—he eventually conceded. After all, taking on a job as a medical assistant at the local hospital was one more step towards her dream.
But the universe has a sick sense of humor. Without any fanfare at all, Diana Cambio dies in her sleep.
They tell her later that it was one of those one in a million cases. For all her eating well and staying healthy, bodies are fickle things that never let you know when there's a problem. She'd suffered an aneurysm. It would have been sudden, they said. Painless. She would have gone to bed and just never woken up as a blood vessel ruptured underneath her skin.
She remembers none of it.
Instead, what she does recall is the creep of a nightmare over her sheets. The weight of a shadow hovering over her prone body. The lights on her bedroom ceiling from the street lamp outside.
She'd woken to morning feeling achey and worn, brushing it off as
bangungot—a bad dream—and went about her business for the day.
They call her the Maiden of Sorrows. As one of the Abiding, she took the Bargain because she
wasn't done yet. Hers are the Keys of Plague and Pestilence, with the Shadow Man lurking right at her feet.
It helps that her family had a touch of the strange. That her cousin Phil had contacts with those who deal with the Dead and Unseen. He'd called in a personal favor to land her apprenticeship with Jack's Lantern himself, and while her mentor tells her she's ready to strike out on her own, Diana figures she has more to learn still.
So she'll continue to inch towards her dream. And if there's another reason behind her work at the clinic, another layer to why she befriends coroners and her seniors in the ER, only those who know need to know. When she's not working, you'll find her sitting quietly in the chapel, a rosary bracelet on her wrist and a gentle smile for the ghosts who need it.
Every Dead Dominion has a Kerberos to enforce the Old Laws. Nobody knows whether the Kerberoi wrote the Laws, or the Laws birthed the Kerberoi — they’re the
chicken and the egg, but that doesn’t stop every Sin-Eater from having a theory.
Most agree that Kerberoi must be a natural product of the Lower Mysteries, vital as they are to the functioning of the Dominions, but a few Sin-Eaters mutter of lost Bound corrupted by the Mysteries, trapped there as punishment or simply by bad luck, molded to the will of the Dominions they now serve.
Wherever they come from, Kerberoi are as old as the Dominions they guard, and just as varied. Each is a creature bound to its Dominion, and each is dedicated to enforcing its Old Laws, but that’s where the similarities end.
Every Dominion shapes its Kerberos into a fitting denizen, a symbol of justice and fear in keeping with the landscape it watches over, and Kerberoi range from the unsettlingly innocuous to the viscerally terrifying.
Though they’re some of the most vicious denizens of the Underworld, Kerberoi are easy to avoid — if Laws aren’t broken, the Kerberoi aren’t interested. They have no motivation outside the pursuit and punishment of lawbreakers, and ignore any conflict or transgression that remains within the bounds of the Laws they enforce. Kerberoi are completely removed from the politics of their Dominions and the ghosts that reside in them, doling out punishment regardless of Rank and standing.
On the other side of that coin, Kerberoi are impossible to reason with. A Kerberos doesn’t care if you broke its Old Laws for a good reason. It especially doesn’t care if
you didn’t realize you were doing anything wrong. They have their atavistic drive to hunt down and punish, and anything outside of that is beyond their scope.
When they’re not hunting, each Kerberos tends to have a favorite place to settle in its Dominion. It’s often
a place it can use its physical assets to augment its natural Dominion Sense — assuming it has any other way to survey the world around it.
Groups of Bound can pass by a Kerberos at rest with no repercussions, as long as doing so is in accordance with Dominion Law, and they rarely seem bothered by the presence of Sin-Eaters, in particular. Peaceful Kerberoi are not necessarily any more unsettling than the rest of the Underworld around them; frequent
travelers often appreciate a Kerberos’ predictability in the midst of chaos.
Finally, a Kerberos’ Laws might look nothing like the laws back home, but the principle is there, the familiarity of cause and effect to help ground visitors from topside.
On Crime and Punishment
When a Kerberos comes into existence, it knows its Old Laws the way an animal knows how to breathe. It knows every intricacy of its Domain, always instinctually aware of the goings-on in its territory. If a Law is broken within the borders of its Dominion, it immediately knows which Law it was, who did it, and where they are.
Despite this local omnipotence, Kerberoi are still single creatures, and they’re limited by their bodies. Once a Kerberos senses a lawbreaker, it still needs to physically hunt them down. It might be nearby, or, as is often the case with larger Dominions, it might be on the other end of its territory, dealing with another transgression. Some Dominions have multiple Kerberoi to help share the load, but even then, a lucky Sin-Eater might manage to escape the Dominion before they can be caught.
Once a lawbreaker has left a Kerberos’ Dominion, it no longer has an exact lock on their location, only a general impression of how far they’ve gone, and in which direction. Kerberoi will follow their quarries outside their own borders, but they draw power from their home Dominions, and lose strength the longer they’re away—not to mention the risk of other Laws being broken while they’re away on a chase.
A Kerberos gives up a hunt outside its borders if it grows too weak to keep pursuing, or if it senses another lawbreaker within the borders of its Dominion. That doesn’t always mean the lawbreaker is home free, however; some Kerberoi have agents to help them pursue escapees, anything from Reapers to other Bound who hunt down lawbreakers as punishment for their own lawbreaking.
But for all that escape is possible, it’s rare. Kerberoi are built to catch their prey. If they’re not distracted by another trespass, they will track a lawbreaker to the edges of the Underworld. Though they can’t leave the Underworld themselves, they’ll send their agents topside to drag the lawbreaker back. And an angry Kerberos is not open to negotiation.
Kerberoi don’t kill as punishment if they can avoid it—after all, many of the creatures they punish are already dead. Instead, they assign a task or limitation, something that will repeatedly hinder the lawbreaker and force them to regret their crime. Kerberoi are in the business of teaching lessons, making examples, reminding every witness exactly how hard the hammer of justice falls in their Dominion.
A dead Sin-Eater can’t pass along their warnings.
When it comes to discipline, each Kerberos has its own internal logic, and to anyone else, the link between crime and punishment can seem tenuous at best. But once the punishment is assigned, the lawbreaker feels it like an itch. They’re physically unable to resist following the Kerberos’ demands. The task might not make sense, and it might not be something the lawbreaker would ever do of their own volition, but for as long as the Kerberos deems necessary, it’s compulsory.
Because Kerberoi exist to serve their Dominions, their strengths and abilities are based entirely around the complexity of the Old Laws they uphold. A Kerberos with more Laws to enforce has a wider range of abilities by necessity. This doesn’t mean a Kerberos with fewer Laws is less dangerous—a Kerberos with only a handful of Laws to worry about can become a single-minded machine, relentless as it exacts the same perfected punishment over and over again.
Larger Dominions have more laws governing them, and more powerful Kerberoi protecting them. Sin-Eaters traveling through the Underworld won’t encounter the most formidable Kerberoi right away; those live in the sprawling, shifting Dominions closest to the Ocean of Fragments, difficult to find and almost impossible to escape without breaking at least one Law.
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