Shadowed Spirit
The sinister shadow skirts the border between the gloom of darkness and the harsh truth of light. The shadow prefers to haunt ruins where civilization has moved on, where it hunts living creatures foolish enough to stumble into its territory. The shadow is an undead horror, and as such has no goals or outwardly visible motivations other than to sap life and vitality from living beings.
Long, dark fingers stretch out across the wall, reaching toward light, life, and all that they do not have, but long to possess. The shadows move and hunger, for their very essence is gluttony and greed.
Causes
Rampant covetousness and grasping greed lead some people down the dark path of evil and betrayal, eventually ending in a reprehensible death scene or a lonely expiration. While most such petty and despicable souls travel on to their final rewards the same way everyone else does, in some cases gluttons, misers, and thieves waste away into nothing but shadows—undead things that reach and grab but cannot hold. Over time, spellcasters have discovered that these avaricious souls make perfect servants and guardians, immortal creatures doomed to watch over “their” treasure for all eternity.
Symptoms
Shadows are incorporeal undead, distorted like their namesakes and able to float or slide silently along surfaces, blending in among the true shadows there. This allows them to approach unnoticed, and those trespassers not caught completely by surprise rarely get more than a glimpse out of the corner of an eye—a flicker of movement and the sense of something out of place—before they strike.
Sequela
n addition to guarding the haunted ruins they lay claim to or serving more powerful undead capable of cowing them, shadows devote themselves to attacking any living creatures they encounter, draining their victims of all vitality with their chilling touch. Victims become weaker and weaker until they finally perish, but their suffering is only beginning. For as the victim of a shadow’s touch expires, its own shadow detaches from the corpse, taking on the same half-life as its killer, hungry for the essence of the living and operating under its killer’s command.
Like all undead, shadows are timeless creatures. As they have lost all concept of their previous life in the transition to undeath, the passage of centuries means almost nothing to them, and no one can say what shadows may do or think in the long wait between victims. However, unlike lesser undead, shadows do appear to “grow” over time. A shadow that has fed on the lives of many victims, or that dwells long enough in a place suffused with sufficient negative energies, may grow in power, becoming a greater shadow. These “shadow lords” often command swarms of their lesser kin, typically spawn of their own making. Rarely is more than one greater shadow found in a particular place, as the creatures compete fiercely for prey. Some believe that in especially fallow times, shadows even consume their own, but this is almost certainly false, as consuming other undead would grant a shadow neither the energy it seeks nor a new spawn, and gangs of shadows have been found that survived sealed into lost tombs together for millennia.
What awaits powerful shadows is a question even the sages can only speculate about. Some believe shadow lords may eventually become shadow demons, drawn down into the Abyss by the weight of their sins to drown in the eternal darkness. Torn apart by the forces of chaos, they emerge as malevolent monsters of pure envy and avarice. Others claim shadow lords steal the vitality of the living to become more corporeal, eventually transforming into other undead creatures or half-real shades.
Cultural Reception
On their own, shadows arise from the souls of greedy but lackluster evildoers—those whose crimes are heinous, but who lack the rage of a spectre or the exultation in evil often found in wraiths. The bandit who unemotionally slits her victims’ throats because it’s convenient, the petty diplomat who orders a witch burning to cover up his adulterous affair, and the miserly headmaster who lets orphans starve to save a few coppers all make good candidates for becoming shadows. Yet while such spontaneous transformations do occur, the vast majority of shadows are instead created by magic. Necromancers have long seen the value of relatively weak, pliable, and unambitious undead servants—especially incorporeal ones—and most shadows currently in existence were originally called to undeath by the spell create undead (or else by the life-draining attacks of other shadows created in this manner).
Shadows sap strength from the living in an effort to feed their dark hunger and satisfy their eternal desire to touch the world once again. Because death at the hands of a shadow means becoming one, places plagued by the creatures are either already desolate ruins, or else quickly become so once enough shadows have infested the area. Newly created shadows seek out and drain the life from others, creating yet more shadows, until all living creatures have either fled or joined their ranks. This leaves shadow-haunted places isolated as word of the danger spreads, and ensures that the shadows there are ravenous when the next living beings appear.
Fortunately for the living, shadows rarely spread far from where they first appear. Creatures of twilight, they can withstand the sun’s rays far better than some of their incorporeal cousins (such as wraiths and spectres), though they are much less comfortable out in direct sunlight or wide open places where it’s harder for them to sneak up on their prey. As such, a place consumed by shadows might lie only a few miles from a living settlement, with the shadows not bothering to cross the miles of open country, instead preferring to subsist off lone travelers and those unaware of their presence or the threat they pose. Their tendency to hole up in dark places also gives adventurers a much-needed advantage, as although the shadows are incorporeal, they cannot pass directly through walls thicker than they are, meaning that sealing a shadow-haunted tomb with enough rock can effectively bottle the spirits up for eternity—or at least until the next foolhardy treasure-hunter ignores the warnings and opens the tomb up.
Also fortunate for the living is that although shadows can and sometimes do drain energy from animals or even vermin found in their lairs, only humanoid creatures that fall victim to their touch become shadows themselves. This is because of the nature of the humanoid spirit or soul and the magical similarity between the shadow and its prey. Consequently, unless truly bored and starved for energy and entertainment, shadows rarely bother to feed on livestock or mounts, reserving their hunger for humanoid prey.
Although their theft of strength is often called “feeding,” shadows do not “starve” and often continue to exist for decades or even centuries without prey. No longer living creatures, they have no physical needs, and are not even touched by some of the harsh environments that can rot or wear corporeal undead to dust. The only environments that harm them are ones with an abundance of positive energy, such as consecrated graveyards, undefiled churches, or other holy ground.
Type
Supernatural
Parent
Children
Origin
Magical
Cycle
Chronic, Acquired
Rarity
Uncommon
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