The Pallid Throne

From the Liber Reliquiarum Interdictarum, volume the first, in the hand of Brother Aymon Vercelin, keeper of the register
The Pallid Throne stands among the first pieces brought to this register, and it is on that account that I set it down ahead of many more fearsome objects. It is a mask worked in a substance our brothers could not name, and from which they have drawn two powers that I do not believe to be the only ones.
The first alters the bodily signature of the one who wears it, such that the masked man may pass for a dead thing among the dead, or for a living man among the living. This second use is of worth only to a wearer who has ceased to be one, and I counsel that no man ever presume the nature of the enemy he faces while that enemy wears this piece.
The second gives the mask its name, and I hold that the name is to be understood in its plainest sense. The dead who raise their eyes to it recognise in it a superior, not a master of their own choosing but a rank established before them, and they bow as one bows before an occupied seat. I add, for the safety of those who follow me, that this obedience is owed to the seat and not to the man, and that such of the dead as have kept their wits are reckoning, even as they bow, how the place might be taken from him.
There remains the age of the piece. The words of command governing its powers belong to occult tongues, and it is likely that several have been lost across the centuries, so that the mask retains virtues no man living now knows how to wake.