Neroth Umbralist

Neroth Umbralists are zealots born of the Shadowfell's more devout cults — priests who pledged their flesh to the Umbral Covenant in exchange for power to remake life into shadow. Legends say they are dispatched through narrow, blood-black rifts to the Material Plane when the Shadowfell seeks to expand, arriving with rites in tow to convert villages, hunters, and even beasts into servile nightspawn. Their conversion is not merely necromantic: it is an ideological contagion, a ritual that strips purpose and replaces it with a single cold command. Encounters with Neroth Umbralists are chronicled in the journals of Master Jorren Vile of the Veilwrights, who once tracked a trio of them across the broken marshes of Fen Grath. The Veilwrights call the zealots "hollowsingers," and the Order of the Black Lanterns hunts them when they appear near contested borders. Neroth cells often lair in ruined churches, drowned farmlands, or beneath hillforts where shadow-stained altars can anchor their rites; they fear bright, sanctified flame and the disruptive rites recorded in the codex of the Veilwrights, but they zealously avoid direct challenge, preferring to corrode a region through stealth and conversion.

A Neroth Umbralist stands roughly 6 to 6.5 feet tall, swathed in layered, tattered robes that seem woven from smoke and old night. Where skin shows — at wrists, throat, and face — it is ashen and withered, marked with fine black sigils that pulse faintly when it speaks the rites. Its head is hooded but not empty: two coals of shadow burn where eyes should be, reflecting no light. The zealot's primary weapon is an umbral scythe — a curved blade like hammered iron, its inner edge fissured with a seam of living black that drinks highlights; the haft is bound with strips of dark cloth and bone. When it walks, the hem of its robes doesn't always meet the ground — the lower portion seems to lag, as if trailing in another plane. Scale: drawn next to a human figure, the Umbralist's robes fall to the ankles and its scythe is about as tall as a short spear. Textures should emphasize coarse woven cloth, cracked bone, and soft, ill-defined shadow edges that blur into the paper.