You might say I like to follow energy trails back to their source. Revenants in particular are fun that way. Resurrection Beasts feed like revenants: they find thalergenic planets and guzzle them up wholesale, crack them open like clams, and take the soul for meat. Then they turn all that remnant thalergy into what we call the corpus, or the hive, and the thanergy—the dead clam itself—for armour. You can ask the Saint of Duty about the thanergy transfer.” (You did not think this would be viable.) “When you look at a revenant on this side, what you’re seeing is the thanergy mass that it’s gathered. Usually revenants can only inhabit things connected to them in life—the best and most desirable would be its own corpse or skeleton, or planet if you’re an RB: you’ve formed a bond with that thing through habit and genetics, it’s your soul’s preferred housing. Unfortunately, apopneumatic shock makes most of us do a blind dash away from the site of our deaths—Resurrection Beasts included. The card up the sleeve of the revenant, and the Resurrection Beast, is that it can inhabit anything it’s got a connection to. Anything thanergetically connected with their death.”

      Ianthe suggested, in what you saw as a low-value suck-up play: “Burial implements. Grave goods. Any possession that they kept over time, that was exposed to their thalergy and thanergy. If they were murdered, the murder weapon.”

      “Bang on,” said Augustine. “Even things that touched the murder weapon, though the connection’s fairly weak there and the revenant would have to be particularly bloody-minded.”

Harrow the Ninth - Act Two, Chapter Sixteen