Undead stalker

A Undead stalker is one of the Wanderers, a foreign soul whose released core left room for a heart demon. It comes out of the Mist each Turning and hunts for whoever pays. It serves in Lumen, the affinity of order, law, light and protection. Umbra lies across the ring, and the two repel each other.

Its quarry is the restless dead: the natives' dead, stranded at the threshold of the Deep since the Breaking. Since Odrin Half-Core first raised them in the Age of Odrin, they have walked on borrowed life while living folk faded. A raised form is unmade in the end, and its remnant falls back to the threshold. The hunters call that a mercy. Every raised form they unmake goes back to wait for the road down instead of being spent in someone's army. Healing the Scar would open that road again, and the dead could pass down through Deopa, the Deep once more.

It strikes with holy light from a distance, and it grows stronger the longer it serves. In time, before battle, it burns every company of the restless dead in the enemy's army. Later it teaches its own army to hunt the dead, and later still to hunt the creatures of the Deep. The card shows what each stage does.

It is paid well in geld and costs mana too, more as it grows, and it leaves when the pay stops. Kill one, and its service ends for the Turning, but its soul goes on, and so does its kind.

The hunters say the demon wants to see the threshold empty and will not rest while one of the dead still waits there. Whether a hunter can be freed is not known.

Player-visible facts