COMMANDMENTS OF GHOST SKIN.

         In common continental nomenclature, a ghost was a rigid, reflective plate that grew out of a fossil’s skin to provide protection from various kinds of damage, such as loss of water or abrasion from waking entities.  In many once-living organisms, these forms offered an initial barrier to the external environment and compromised the outermost layer of afterlife tissue.  Beneath this, a ghost had many functions, including to waterproof, cushion, and conserve deeper tissues, regulate post-death temperature, or serve as an attachment site for breathing relatives to detect pain, sensation, and pressure.  Anatomically, the same erosion involved in tooth and hair development was also responsible for most ghost growth and reproduction.
          Throughout all eras of chronological drift, ghosts were quite common and evolved many times with diverse structure and appearance.  In Themis and Amphitrite, ghost skins covered much of the continental surface and provided support for certain recessive organs, such as those with significant exposure to sunlight or radiant heat.  In Eris, coalescences of ghosts (group ghosts, hive ghosts, or collective ghosts) were capable of simultaneous envelopment, a process that resulted in almost complete loss (or lack) of individual vulnerability according to established shedding patterns, integumentary systems, and circumstances of habitat.  By the coastlines of Nyx, even foreign or fragmented ghosts were free to move throughout the deeper layers of the Hereafter, and were widely used to facilitate error correction in afterlife camouflage or tissue discoloration.  
          Though the role of ghost scale was constantly evolving, these myriad forms often worked in an interconnected manner to maintain the conditions essential to fossil protection.  In this respect, many, if not all commandments of ghost scale may be envisioned simply as an outer surface where “hard life” has evaporated, with further adaptations in structure and function developing primarily in response to the challenges of chronological drift.  These unpredictable ruptures were known to outlast both fossils and ghosts and could be overcome only through repeated, varied attempts at closure, such as trial and error, brute force, or burying the scales.