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Ghouls

Minions, servants, soldiers of the cold dark.

Ghouls are the tireless, undead servitors of the Vessel. They are not intelligent beings, but manifestations of pure will—ephemeral processes summoned to perform a singular, focused task before returning to the void. They are the spectral hands and feet of the Lich.

Technically, Ghouls are SAQ Workers, a legion of background task executors spawned on demand to handle the asynchronous rites submitted by the Magus.

The Summons

A Ghoul's existence is a simple and brutal cycle, initiated by an Intent from the Altar:

  1. The Call: A Magus submits a task, from a simple query to a complex Invocation.
  2. The Quickening: The Vessel, as the master of the Sepulcher, receives the Intent and quickens a Ghoul from the ether. A new SAQ worker is pulled from the queue and bound to the task.
  3. The Labor: The Ghoul executes its assigned duty with relentless, single-minded focus. It may be tasked to work in the material plane (direct execution) or dispatched to the Tomb (within the Shadow Realm) to explore potential futures.
  4. The Dissolution: Upon completion of its task, the Ghoul's purpose is fulfilled. Its borrowed life-force is reclaimed by the Vessel, and the process dissolves back into nothingness, leaving only the results of its labor behind.

The Nature of the Swarm

Ghouls are designed for concurrency and resilience. The Vessel can summon a veritable swarm to handle many Intents at once, ensuring the Magus's will is carried out swiftly. They operate in the background, their silent work visible only through the scrying pools of the Oculus or the results they present at the Altar.

The Two Breeds

Not all Ghouls are equal. The Vessel breeds Cognitive Ghouls — they orchestrate graph steps, invoke LLM providers, curate memory, and manage state. These are the thinking servants.

The Tomb breeds Brainless Ghouls — they receive serialized script payloads (Python code, CLI commands) via the SAQ queue, execute them in the nono sandbox, and return stdout. They do not think; they only execute. They hold no LLM credentials, no graph state, no agent logic. Their existence is mechanical: script in, result out.

The full doctrine is defined in Workers (ADR 14).