Lachryms are units of crystallized suffering used as a supernatural currency. The formal singular is lachrym; the common street term is lark. All lachryms count as one unit in trade, regardless of physical form. Some look like quartz, some like sealed vials, some like small worked objects, but denomination does not vary.
This simplicity is why they became useful. A broker can count larks without arguing exchange rates, but no one with sense believes they are all the same. Every lachrym carries an imprint from the suffering that made it.
Pressing
Pressing is the process of extracting suffering into a lachrym. It requires a helpless subject, a personal bodily medium such as blood or tears, and intent to capture suffering rather than merely cause it.
Not all suffering produces a lachrym. Pressing does not require death, can be repeated on the same subject, and often looks mundane to Unaware observers. This mundanity is one of the practice's horrors: a pressing can resemble ordinary abuse, interrogation, medical restraint, grief, sex, punishment, or care from the outside, depending on its circumstances and cover story.
The subject's loss of agency matters. A person who suffers freely or knowingly may produce an emotional residue, but not a reliable lachrym. Pressers therefore work at the boundary between ritual, coercion, and captivity.
Imprint
Every lachrym carries a source signature. This is qualitative rather than mechanical: grief, fear, betrayal, longing, pain endured over years, panic crushed into a minute, guilt, innocence, intimacy, hatred. A trained reader can often sense the character of a lachrym, but the result is described in language, not measured on a scale.
This makes provenance socially important even though value is fixed. Two lachryms both buy one unit of supernatural work. One may be clean, quiet, and acceptable at a Syndicate table. Another may be loud enough that no one wants it in the room.
Trade Language
Common trade terms include:
- Clean: stable, reputable, or at least plausibly sourced.
- Hot: fresh, volatile, or dangerous to move.
- Cold: aged, settled, easier to launder.
- Loud: carrying an intense imprint.
- Flat: weak or emotionally thin.
- Cut: mixed, tampered with, or ritually adulterated.
Common slang includes burning larks for wasteful spending, bleeding larks for losing value or supply quickly, and not quiet for an imprint that troubles the holder.
Social Context
Pressing is normalized in the supernatural economy and morally contested almost everywhere it appears. The line between justified and predatory pressing is thin, and most people who profit from it have strong incentives to keep that line blurred.
Common justifications include sanctioned punishment, enemies captured in conflict, criminal debt, terminal mercy, negotiated sacrifice, and intimate arrangements whose consent is often questionable after the fact. Provenance matters socially, but not mechanically: a clean lark and a predatory lark both spend.
The Authority sanctions pressing in limited cases involving supernatural criminals. Officially, this is a controlled penalty imposed on dangerous offenders whose powers or crimes place them outside ordinary human incarceration. In practice, the policy gives containment agencies a legal supply of lachryms while making them complicit in the same economy they police. Authority personnel who defend the policy argue that sanctioned pressing is regulated, documented, and preferable to the Syndicate's predation. Their critics argue that a state monopoly on ritualized extraction is still ritualized extraction.
The Syndicate treats lachryms as ordinary business and provenance as reputation management. It moves clean larks when clients demand respectability and dirty ones when no one asks questions. The Unnatural Front is divided: some cells reject the trade as collaboration with oppression, while others use seized or pressed lachryms because revolutions are expensive.
Economic Roles
Pressers extract lachryms. Some are ritual specialists, some are criminals, some are Authority technicians, and some are desperate amateurs who learned just enough to hurt people.
Brokers and factors trade lachryms, track provenance, launder supply, and decide which stories buyers are allowed to hear.
Refiners stabilize, settle, or process lachryms. Refining can make a hot lark easier to move, but it cannot make the source innocent. At best, it makes guilt quieter.
Design Notes
Lachryms are a single-denomination currency for setting clarity. Their imprints add narrative weight without creating a second price system. Pressing should feel procedural rather than spectacular: the horror is not that it looks like a grand ritual, but that it can be made bureaucratic, intimate, or ordinary.