Wight

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A wight is an undead humanoid creature and often one of the most powerful and feared.

Appearance

From a distance, wights can easily be mistaken for elves or humans, but upon closer examination, their true nature becomes apparent. Though they have a resemblance to the person they were in life, their bodies are gaunt and have the stench of death. Some have the appearance of dried up skeletal husks, while others are wrapped in stripes of cloth for mummification. But they all share the same white and milky eyes, which in almost complete darkness shine with a dim red, blue, or green glow. While wights are only shadows of their former selves, they are among the few truly intelligent and fully sentient undead beings and if anything, seem even more cunning and shrewd than the living.

Physical Traits

Wights are extremely dangerous creatures. Most feared and well known is the life draining quality of their touch. Simply by touching their victims skin they become weaker, as if losing parts of themselves, while the wight draws additional strength from the life energy it consumes this way. Few people can survive more than one or two hits from a wights claws and anyone who is killed that way will join the wight in undeath. Even if the wight is killed, the injuries it inflicted can mark their enemies permanently, their strength never to fully return again.

While those slain by a wight lose virtually everything of their former self, wights that came into being through other means often remember great parts of their pasts, including the skills they mastered in life and any magical powers they had. Mmany of them where once powerful chiefs and warlords, or sorcerers who were consumed by the corruption of the magic they attempted to master. While common wights are dangerous and frightening enough, these "wight lordss" are among the most terrible foes anyone can face.

Since they do not need to breath and can sit perfectly still for years, wights can be extremely quiet and are rarely seen before the moment they attack if they chose not to show themselves to intruders into their lairs. Like all magical creatures, wights are highly susceptible to silver and easily harmed by it.

Behavior

Wights are mostly solitary creatures who have a deep irrational hatred of all living things and despise any intrusion in their lairs. Even the spawn they create from intruders they have killed usually stay in different parts of the lair, staying as far away from their master as possible unless they need to protect him. However, while they prize their solitude, they are not above cooperating with others, usually other wights of similar age and power as themselves. For reasons they rarely care to share with others, wights occasionally set out for conquest. Leading hordes of undead and other corrupted creatures, they slay anything that has not already fled before their approach, carefully guarding the borders of their conquered territory. In some cases there had been some suspicions that they were trying to take control of rare resources or places of magical power, but more often nobody really has any clue what made them rise from their tombs which they had never left for decades or centuries.

When wights first rise from death, they usually kill or scare away anyone in the vicinity of their resting place and raise their victims as their first new minions. Those who were given a rich burial often make their new lairs in their tombs, while others take possession of keeps or manors. While often vain, many wights do not take much care of the structures they inhabit and most become ruins within a few decades. Cold and moisture are given free reign and destroy most wooden furniture and any tapestries, leaving only shadows of the wealth they once represented. Only in the most desperate of circumstances does a wight make its lair in a cave, but every place that hides it from the daylight will do. Wights cannot tolerate bright light, including sunlight, and avoid it at all costs. It does not, however, cause a wight any direct harm or weakens it in any way.

Corruption

Wights come into being by two different ways. One is to be slain by a wight, which infuses the dead body with a fragment of its own corrupted spirit which spreads throughout the corpse and turns it into a wight over the course of several hours before it rises again to serve its creator. The true origin of wights, however, are living people who are completely consumed by the corruption of sorcery and die from its destructive influence. The corruption keeps festering inside the dead body, twisting the last remains of its life energy before the spirit can depart it and restoring it back to its full strength to regain control of the corpse. Such a wight usually rises one or two nights after it had collapsed from the effects of the corruption.

As wights are very powerful creatures and utterly consumed by the sorcerous corruption, their lairs and the surrounding areas often become corrupted and twisted as well and are devoid of any animals or living plants.

History

Wights have probably been around since the earliest times, created from mortals too curious for their own good who stumbled into places where the touch of the Void left the land corrupted. They became the menacing horror they are today when mortals learned the secrets of magic and eventually discovered the Void and its dangerous but potent energies. Who the first sorcerers were, who became overwhelmed by powers they couldn't control and consumed by their corruption, has been lost in time. But in the thousands of years since, hundreds have followed them and became wights, both sorcerers and chiefs lured by the power that demons would promise them. Most wights were once elves or humans, but they lost everything that connected them to their former nature. With their extreme hostility towards everything related to the Void, there are no known kaas wights and skeyn wights are also extremely rare. From the southern lands, there are persistent rumors of lizardmen wights and many locals will tell visitors that these are not just rumors.

Many of the wights that exist today are ancient. Many became undead centuries ago and have isolated themselves in their lairs, brooding over problems and mysteries that make sense only to themselves, or lie motionless in their tombs for decades in restless torpor. It is widely believed that many ancient artifacts and tomes of arcane knowledge can be found in the lairs of the oldest wights, but almost nobody is willing to try their luck against them to steal their treasures.