(Advice from the Green Man:)
“The Shadowlords are insane. Never forget that. Their Gift is handed down from person to person, and it carries with it all the memories of those who possessed it in the past. All their prejudices and obsessions, their hatreds and fears and uncertainties, melded to the brain of one who was born and bred for such a process, and who has been told from childhood that he must submit to it…think what that would do to a man!” He looked up toward the mansion high above us. “I’ve been told that some become lost in the process and that they wander places like this in a haze, unable to fix on a single identity, or even a single time frame. Others appear to be more rational. But even with the latter, there’s still madness at the core of them. Dozens of ancestral voices clamoring inside their heads every waking moment, each one derived from a Shadow who was himself insane. Madness layered upon madness, all of it trapped within a soul that must walk the borderline between life and death, committed to neither…
“Never forget what they are,” he warned us. “Never forget that no matter how human they may appear to be, they ceased to be that long ago.”