The Affliction Refrain was once the Divine Antiquity. It has also been known as Yesterday's Reprise (by the NEH) or the Ghastly Chorus (by the ancestors of the Divine Principality).
Like the other Afflictions, it can summon minions; its pawns are ghostly recordings. Its effect causes electronics to break and rust over, although Refrain seems to have some control over whether this happens.
Appearance[edit | edit source]
It takes the form of "an abandoned theater which appears as if from nowhere. Upon the stage, a spectral projection of a person that no one knows."[1] Inside the theater, electronic ghosts wearing garments from the Divine Fleet mill about. The spokesperson changes each time, but is never someone that the viewer could have known. In "The Canvas of Dreams Pt. 2", the speaker was Lattice.
When Brnine encounters it a second time, they push the archive to let them speak to 'the director', which causes the spokesperson to flip through various appearances rapidly.
History and Involvement[edit | edit source]
Antiquity once allowed people to leave parts of themselves, or their memory, with it. When the Fleet's decline became clear, it created and/or advocated for "a Divine archive, a sacred archive, of what life was really like to begin with",[2] which it preserved when it fled with the Divine Palisade. As such, Refrain effectively became an undead archive of snapshots of the consciousnesses of members of the Divine Fleet from thousands of years ago, prior to the Fleet's collapse.
Refrain opposes the Principality and the other forces that have tried to conquer Palisade over the millennia, but is not convinced by Kalvin Brnine's first attempt to persuade it to support the Cause, because they don't think it will succeed.[3]
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Brnine's second attempt at persuasion is more successful, partially because Refrain has become less discerning about the people it adds to its archive following its forced displacement to the Quire system, making it desirous of additional perspectives. It agrees to support the Cause in exchange for permission to ask Cause members if they would like to join its archive.[2] Refrain does not get as many people to join it as it expected, but the effort of working with the Cause is healing for it.[4]
Later, Thisbe kickstarts negotiations between the Chimeric Cadent and the Afflictions. Eventually, the Chimeric Cadent, Chimera's Lantern and the Afflictions disappear from Palisade; the Afflictions' integration into the Cause and Palisade society is interrupted.