Countess Morgrun

Countess Morgrun is said to be the result of an ill-fated pact between a fallen noble house and a roaming giant clan. When House Verroth's lineage dwindled during a famine and a rebellion, the last countess bartered her name and blood to a mountain wyrm of secrets; ritualists from both the house and the hills fused the countess’ soul to the husk of a slain hill giant to preserve her lineage. The experiment froze her mind between courtly cunning and a giant's appetite, and the ritual's dark byproduct warped her womb into a factory for undeath. Morgrun haunts ruined estates that sit where high moor meets stone, making lairs in collapsed manor houses where giant bones prop open broken doors and tattered tapestries cling to damp stone. Local gravediggers and the lodge of giant-herders called the Broodwardens trade whispered tales of caravans suddenly followed by hollow-eyed corpses. Scholar Neris Halvryn of the University of Fyren has cataloged two encounters; he warns that Morgrun's brood binds to the odor of hearth-fire and will flood any occupied homestead until the matron is confronted. The Broodwardens claim they can track the matron by the pale ribbons she wears — tokens stolen from the living and the dead alike.

A towering, misshapen noblewoman whose torso is that of a hill giant cut down to a large, hunched form. She wears a shredded, fattened dress whose bodice is stitched directly into rumpled, callused flesh; the remnants of a powdered wig are fused to a scalp of stretched, necrotic skin. Her face is an unsettling composite: aristocratic cheekbones and a hooked noble nose set above a giant's wide jaw, her lips cracked into a perpetual, contemptuous sneer. The central feature is an enormous, distended abdomen ringed with old surgical stitches and faded lace; from gashes and folds crawl pale, newborn limbs and the mouths of tiny, toothless necrotic fetuses that are briefly held inside before being pushed out. Flesh textures alternate between dry, papery skin of a corpse and the knobbly, scarred hide of a giant; veins dark with necrotic tinge pulse under translucent patches. Scale: she stands roughly 12–14 feet tall, filling a large manor doorway; newborn zombies she births are roughly the size of an adult human. Visual accents: broken family crests sewn into flesh, bits of mourning ribbon threaded through her hair-stump, and a ring of tiny carved bone charms around her widest belly scar.