Hearts of Stone

In previous posts, I stated that death is not final in The Fortress Eternal. The more complete truth of this is that death cannot be final within the walls of The City. The City lasts forever, and the Preservation that maintains The City also maintains everything within it - broken blades return repaired to armouries, empty branches soon bend under the weight of ripe fruit, and the dead live.
The City's magic preserves life as it preserves stone and steel, though the process is not without its cost to the newly-immortal visitors to The City. The simple way of looking at it is as follows: When a person dies within The City, be it through accident, carelessness, disease, or foul play, The Preservation will return them to life. Those brought back to life are more tightly bound to the fabric of The City, more in tune with the Preservation. They often find they are able to hear whispers from anywhere within a District of The City, or direct their wounds to the stone around them, or walk to any street they can picture simply by turning down a previously unnoticed alley.
In exchange for this power, The City preserves the returned visitor. Each time a character dies and returns, they gain a new power courtesy of The City. They also find it more difficult to increase their skills and abilities through the use of experience - each resurrection raises the XP costs of everything. The more times a character dies, the more they are made a static thing, struggling to advance or grow as a person while The City's unchanging character infects them.

As a second caveat to these powers, The Preservation only works within The City. Outside of The City, every wound a character has ever taken returns - the length of time this takes is determined by how frequently they have died. The screaming apparition in "The Silver Demon" is an example of a character who has frequently died, and then has left The City only to have his many fatal wounds immediately - and spectacularly - return.

At the moment, I'm unsure whether to refer to these unfortunates as Stonebound or The Preserved.