What Fell Between the Cracks of Time

An essay on the Nighthaunt and Pyrrhonism

I. Introduction

Before they are seen, the Nighthaunt are felt. They move with the weight of endings that are not finished. Carrying the past each time they step onto the battlefield. Each figure shaped by things that could not be fixed, like a broken promise, an unspoken sorrow, or a truth that was too heavy to tell. In the Mortal Realms, they drift, uninvited and unforgotten.

Their stillness is tense. A silence that is wanting. If you look at them long enough, they start to look like an accusation instead of a memory, like something that happened before death.

Pyrrhonism, too, is always on the edge of certainty. It was born in the quiet corners of ancient thought and neither affirms or denies, but remains suspended in inquiry. Where other philosophies build, it floats. It stops before others finish. In this space between knowing and not knowing, it finds a different kind of clarity.

This is not really an analogy. But when you think about the shape of this army and the way that thought is standing, it is hard not to notice the silence that they both share. The common refusal to settle. Not gone. Not understood. But in the silent middle ground, where truth holds the balance of lies.

II. The History of Pyrrhonism

There are ruins in philosophy too. Thoughts that once stood in the halls along side Stoicism and Platonism, were left half-buried under arguments, felled by forgetfulness, and weathered by time. Some structures fall because they are weak. Others fall because they refuse to become temples. Pyrrhonism was philosophy that refused temples.

Its name comes from Pyrrho of Elis, a 4th-century thinker who travelled east during Alexander’s conquests and returned changed. Mystery surrounded his return, some saying he studied with naked philosophers in India^[1]. What we know about his time studying is sparse. His students said he taught through his manner of life. That he suspended judgment on everything. Did gods exist? Was knowledge possible? Could justice be known? They claimed that in these suspensions, he found peace.

Pyrrhonism is the philosophy that asks what happens when the noise of certainty fades?

He called it ataraxia - the absence of disturbance. A kind of stillness from refusing to grasp conviction.

Most of what we have comes from Sextus Empiricus, a physician and philosopher writing some five centuries later. His works, Outlines of Pyrrhonism^[2] and Against the Professors^[3], demonstrate a practice: for every claim, there exists a counterclaim. For every reason to believe, there exists an equal reason to withhold belief. From this suspension of judgment (epokhē) naturally arises.

Sextus did not urge disbelief. He did not dismantle the truth. He merely walked along the edge of it and pointed out the shifting of the stones beneath. The grey between polar opposites.

“Scepticism is an ability to set things in opposition... whereby, because of the equipollence of the objects and reasons opposed to one another, we are brought firstly to epokhē, and afterwards to ataraxia.”

— Outlines of Pyrrhonism, Book I

Where others tried to explain how we know, Pyrrhonists tried to show how easily we think we know. Their criticism was deeper than science or ethics or politics. It was directed at the very confidence with which human beings assert anything.

And perhaps that’s why the school did not survive the way Stoicism did. Philosophy, like any structure, rewards those who build something visible. Pyrrhonism builds no systems. It leaves no statues. It simply watches. It questions. It waits.

By the rise of Christianity, it was nearly gone. Its method of doubt was absorbed into the work of theologians, often to be used and then discarded. By the Enlightenment, it returned only in fragments, glimpsed in Montaigne, echoed in Hume, resurfacing in modern scepticism, often stripped of its gentleness.

What remains is a philosophy of refusal. A stance, not a doctrine, or a worldview. It neither asserts nor denies. It holds the two in tension, and chooses not to collapse either.

III. The History of the Nighthaunt

There was a time, long forgotten, when the dead passed peacefully into silence. When grief belonged to the living, and the realms gave rest to those who had departed. The Nighthaunt are not the dead. They are what remains when death is denied. Not by mortals, but by a god.

In the realm of Shyish, where the magic of death itself folds and multiplies, the Supreme Lord of the Undead made a decision. Nagash, who once walked among the Pantheon of Order, turned inward. In his view, Death was his alone to claim. Across every realm, in every moment of expiration, he saw theft. Souls bypassed his dominion, slipping upward, or outward, or anywhere. He considered this an affront.

The Black Pyramid was meant to correct the injustice. A monolithic structure, a conduit, inverted into the crust of Shyish, it pulsed with necromantic power beyond reckoning. A spell to redirect. Nagash intended to bind the ley lines of the realm and reroute all soul-energy, past, present, and future, into his own keeping. A god’s claim, etched into the fabric of death.

It did not go as planned.

The spell broke. The ley lines shuddered. The Necroquake sent a shockwave through every realm. The dead rose. The borders between living and lost thinned. Spectres poured through the cracks.

The Nighthaunt were echoes of death mismanaged: traitors, cowards, mourners, oathbreakers, murderers who never confessed, kings who feared dying, lovers who refused to let go. Each of them caught in the moment between life and afterlife, turned inside out by grief, shame, or denial.

They became a legion of consequences.

Unlike the soulblight vampires who hunger, or the bone-crafted Ossiarchs who strategise, the Nighthaunt drift. Their feet never touch the ground. Their limbs are sculpted in gestures of unspent emotion. Their mouths are open, but they do not speak. They emerge from shadow, pass through stone, swing through flesh, and vanish again into fog.

The underworlds of Shyish each promised different fates. But the Nighthaunt are the remnants of faith undone, twisted by denial, broken mid-prayer. They have no temple, no place that holds their grief or takes their pain. Their leaders are not generals, but exemplars of failure. Lady Olynder, Kurdoss Valentian, The Briar Queen, are more cautionary tales, not aspirational figures. Their power comes from their failures in life, and echo into death.

They enter into battle as warriors and accusations, whether it is because of Nagash's will or the weight of their own destruction. Their armies do not charge. They surround. They arrive from nowhere. They phase through fortress walls and encircle the living with silence. A blade without a hand. A lament without a breath.

IV. The Disappearance of Pyrrhonism

Not all philosophies are refuted. Some simply fade. Pyrrhonism did not die in debate. It did not lose to logic or religion. It was not overthrown. It simply stopped being spoken. And in the realm of thought, silence is the same as vanishing.

It never offered laws. It wrote no systems. It proposed no path to salvation or reform. It did not challenge kings. It did not uplift empires. It had no architecture. And perhaps that was its flaw.

In the great machinery of philosophy, ideas are often kept alive by how well they function. Stoicism helps emperors rule. Platonism builds cathedrals. Utilitarianism justifies policy. Even absurdism, in its rebellion, gives voice to a kind of survival.

But Pyrrhonism was not a tool. It was a posture. It could not be wielded. It could only be lived. And lived quietly.

Its decline may have come simply because there is no institutional reward for doubt without agenda. A Pyrrhonist would not lead a school, found a city, or die for an idea. They would ask what death is, what leadership means, whether the city exists in the way we think it does, and then walk away from the podium before applause could decide.

The later philosophers preferred systems. Christianity, rising in the same centuries as Pyrrhonism's final breath, required declarations. The Enlightenment needed structure. Science needed confidence. Skepticism was rebranded as a position of doubt, rather than a balance of arguments, and often weaponised to assert superiority.

Pyrrhonism could not survive in a world that rewarded certainty, because it asked for no reward at all. So it lingered. In footnotes. In fragments. In the margins of Sextus’s old books. As if waiting for someone not to decide.

V. The Mirror and the Muster

Philosophies usually live on the page in axioms, dialogues, and quiet debates behind cloistered walls. But sometimes, a worldview does not wait to be written. It forms. It gathers. It moves. Armies are also philosophies. Their message is motion. Their stance is shape. Their truth, a broken bond carried forward. They are how a worldview moves with weight.

There is no thinker in the Mortal Realms who drafts a theory of afterlife. There is no symposium on the ethics of grief. But there are the Nighthaunt, rising in their hundreds, carrying sorrow like a banner. Each one is a statement. Each movement, an unanswered question made visible.

The Nighthaunt are what remains when belief collapses. A military of regrets. In the distant silence of forgotten manuscripts, there is another formation. A philosophical stance that claims no doctrine, declares no enemies, but stands still when all others march. A way of thinking that suspends, rather than strikes.

Neither demands obedience. Neither proclaims victory. Neither ends with applause.

VI. The Return to Suspension

There is little quiet left. Every thought is framed. Packaged. Pushed. There is a velocity to belief now, a pressure to decide, not so much to reflect. To take a position. To speak. And once spoken, to defend. Certainty is rewarded. Even silence is measured.

In such a place, the old philosophies feel ornamental, odd, skeletal things carried from older rooms. The kind that seem out of place when placed near touchscreens. The kind that never went viral. The kind that asked too many questions and sold too few answers.

And yet, there is one that still lingers. Not behind. Not beneath. But just beside.

Pyrrhonism asks nothing from the world except the space to watch it move. No call to attention. No position to amplify. And, there is something unsettling about that. A thought that neither resists nor affirms. That listens, without collapse. That neither retreats, nor engages, in the ways we are told one must. It does not fit cleanly in our time. Its rhythm clashes with the tempo of headlines and feeds. It is not a stance, not a signal, just the old reflex to hesitate before we speak.

VII. What Still Remains

Some things do not vanish through conflict or collapse, but simply drift beyond the edge of memory, eclipsed by the sheer noise of what follows. A philosophy can fade like a breath held too long, not because it failed, but because the world no longer paused to listen.

In the turning of intellectual seasons, Pyrrhonism was overlooked, stepped past, bypassed by systems louder, more certain, more willing to draw lines. And yet there are shapes that remain even after they have been forgotten, outlines that linger where structure once stood.

The Nighthaunt were not born of what went unresolved, ghosts formed from what was left unanswered, unacknowledged, ungrieved. They are not an army in the traditional sense, but they gather. They move. They return. And perhaps that is what philosophies do, too, when left untouched for long enough.

Scepticism, in its modern form, is rarely held with reverence. It is handed to the margins, spoken of as if it were a failure to decide, a weakness of will or clarity. But it may be something else entirely. It may be the willingness to remain in ambiguity without demanding that it yield. To exist in the tension between claims without collapsing into either.

In a world where every thought is claimed, branded, weaponised, the refusal to take sides may be the last quiet form of defiance. The Nighthaunt do not campaign. They do not occupy. They do not explain. And, like Pyrrhonism, they persist, hovering at the threshold of every truth too quickly settled.