Faction overview: Nightstalkers – nightmares given flesh

Every village in Pannithor has a bedtime story the children fear more than any other. About something that lives in the darkest part of the woods and demands offerings. About a shadow by the graveyard wall. About a creature that comes in the night and carries naughty children off to a place no one comes back from. Parents tell these stories so the little ones won't wander outside after dark. Then the children grow up and forget.

Only not entirely. Somewhere deep down, the fear stays. And on the other side of the veil that separates the world of the living from whatever lies beyond it, something is waiting for that fear. It has a thousand shapes, and every one of them has been seen before – in someone's worst nightmare.

These are the Nightstalkers.

Part one: the Conclave of Heaven

Oskan's pupils

The story of the Nightstalkers begins in the Time of Light, when the Celestians – gods who had come to Pannithor from beyond the stars – still walked among mortals and the elves were at the height of their power.

The Conclave of Heaven was one of the strangest undertakings of elven civilisation. Secretive and rarefied, it was devoted to studying higher consciousness and the nature of divinity. Its members were arch-mages and scholars, and its greatest triumph came when it caught the interest of one of the Celestians. A young one, apparently curious about everything. His name was Oskan.

Oskan seemed to feel a bond with the elves. He hinted at great changes to come and at wonderful gifts that would soon be bestowed on the mortal world. And he began to teach them. He showed the arch-mages the paths between worlds and taught them to walk in the footsteps of the gods. He led them ever further from their bodies and tested how much their minds could take – for his own amusement.

The day the Mirror broke

One day Oskan invited the whole Conclave deeper into the paths than ever before – beyond the mists of time. He went first, and the elves followed with almost childlike delight, eager to see the wonders of the stars and other, unimaginable planes of existence.

And then Elinathora, a human noblewoman, smashed the Fenulian Mirror – the enchanted mirror the elf Calisor Fenulian had built on Oskan's advice to win her heart.

Chaos broke loose. A storm of sorcerous power swept across land and sky, and many of the Celestians were torn in two – into the noble Shining Ones and the dark Wicked Ones. As Oskan's body split, the backlash of cosmic energy shattered the bodies, minds and souls of the elves around him. The arch-mages' mortal bodies became a conduit for that devastating power – and the epicentre of an explosion that wiped out the city where the Conclave had gathered. The souls of everyone who lived there, and of every living thing for miles around, were ripped out of the mortal world and scattered across countless dimensions. The victims' screams echoed through time and space.

And Oskan fed greedily on the minds so cruelly sacrificed to him. So was born the one the world would soon call the Father of Lies.

He earned that title with his first deeds in the God War that broke out once the Mirror shattered: posing as wounded and lost as the rest, he won the trust of one Shining One after another, then killed them with a hidden dagger. But the first to pay for his lies were his own pupils. The elves of the Conclave did not die. Nor do they live. They were left somewhere in between.

A wound in the fabric of the world

The end of the God War brought another wound. In the final duel Domivar, son of the Celestian Mescator, wrenched the axe from Oskan's hands and struck the earth with it. So the Abyss was made – a hellish chasm in which Oskan and the other Wicked Ones were imprisoned. But that blow split open not just the earth but the fabric of the universe itself. The paths between realities twisted, tangled and swelled with power. In places the veil between worlds grew so thin that the shadows of countless strange creatures could be seen flickering in the air.

The Abyss isn't the only place like that in Pannithor, but it's the Abyss whose power – sometimes waxing, sometimes waning – draws these beings in and drives them back. There, behind fragile barriers between realities, unimaginable things gather and lurk, desperate to find a way into the world of the living.

What's left of the souls torn from the world when the Father of Lies was born. And whatever they met on their wanderings.

Part two: dreams given flesh

Hunger

In a world soaked in magic, ravaged by war and touched by the gods themselves, there's no shortage of ghosts. The Nightstalkers are something more. They are the dreams, nightmares, fears and terrors of mortals that have managed to take shape. The monsters of the darkest forests that demand sacrifices from superstitious villagers. Ill omens come true.

They feed on the strongest of mortal emotions: fear, hatred and pride. Their essence burrows deep into the mortal mind, so every crossing of the veil leaves a little more of them behind in the world – seeds buried in someone's head. When the power of the Abyss swells again, those seeds sprout violently, until dark shapes tear themselves free of their hosts and start terrorising the land around them. Sometimes they gather into vast hosts of unimaginable horrors. They come out of the shadows and feed on the fear that runs ahead of them.

When their grip on the world weakens, they cling desperately to the bodies of the dead – or even the undead. That's part of the reason ghostly spectres are so often seen in graveyards and on old battlefields. Necromancers seek such wretched spirits out, because if one can be bound, it can teach a practitioner of dark magic a great deal. But binding one is a terrifyingly difficult and deadly business.

Everyone sees their own

Nightstalkers take many forms, and different peoples often see them differently – depending on the superstitions and fears of a culture, or of a single person. Sometimes they're a hideous perversion of the body they once had. They come in countless kinds, as varied as the beings they arose from, and some are still shaped by scraps of memory and personality that they've kept.

No one knows what, if anything, remains in them of the elves of the Conclave. They are desperate, tormented beings, denied both life and death by their cruel half-existence, and long since driven mad.

The star-gods

The vast majority of the host are hollow remnants of Pannithor's distant past. But far more terrifying things come through the veil behind them.

They come from other planes, other universes, even other worlds beyond time and space. They are alien, cold and unfathomable, and their twisted shapes speak to the people of Pannithor on some primal level that few can understand. The oldest elves believe these creatures serve vast, ancient beings that were once gods. They were worshipped even before the Celestians, by cultures that are mercifully forgotten, wiped out long before the elder races began writing down their history. The elves whisper their names, almost impossible to pronounce: the Ch'wthall'thoi. Tsatt'huul, the fear-demon.

The dread of these dark star-gods and their servants has survived like a racial memory, though no one remembers where it came from. The mere sight of them can drive weaker minds mad. They follow the shadows to wherever the veil is thin, eyeing Pannithor as a new world to conquer, full of new souls to devour.

Part three: the shadow-hosts

The gate of despair

Sometimes, when the power of the Abyss runs strong, the mere presence of the Nightstalkers tears the fabric of reality and opens a doorway between dimensions. The power of the Abyss pours through such a rent, which seethes and boils in the air. Looking at it directly hurts. From the corner of your eye it looks like a cage of glossy black serpents, writhing and screaming in endless agony, while purple lightning dances across the tear, feeding the creatures around it with dark energy.

Out of such a portal the shadow-hosts burst into the world like a gibbering, cacophonous explosion of fear. The baying of spectral hounds runs ahead of them. Above them rise the bone-chilling screams of banshees.

Echoes of the Conclave

The most numerous are the Spectres – hollow remnants of the long dead. They're the ones that haunt the places where the dead are buried: mournful, wraith-like figures in cloaks of mist and shadow. They're cowards, so they huddle in vicious packs and lash out at any mortal who comes too close with tendrils of soul-draining mist. They aren't wholly physical – they exist partly in this world and partly in another. Their arrival is often heralded by squirming swarms of bloated blood worms, which gather around the Spectres' victims and suck the blood of the dead and dying.

From their mist the Scarecrows emerge. They shamble like corpses, and they're always right behind you – no matter how fast you run. They make up the bulk of every incursion, gathering in great hordes that drown their prey in sheer numbers. They're named for the farming tools and rags they carry. Why they carry them, no one can work out.

Doppelgangers are faceless, silent and deeply unsettling. However desperately the enemy fights, they match it blow for blow and turn its own fear back against it. As the fighting drags on, soldiers watch in horror as this otherworldly infantry slowly changes to look more and more like them – until they find themselves staring into their own grinning faces. Wherever Doppelgangers appear, mistrust and bloody murder soon follow.

Phantoms are apparitions that look like cloaked bodies floating in the air. Under their half-drawn hoods you catch glimpses of the screaming, bloody skulls of people trapped between worlds. They're often seen dragging their victims into their own shadowy forms – to a fate better left unknown.

Hunters in the dark

Many Nightstalkers are drawn to strong human emotions like anger and fear. They stalk their prey across many dimensions, then emerge into the mortal world and tear it limb from limb, or drag it back to their own shadowy realms.

Reapers, armed with a whole collection of wicked claws, limbs and scythes, haunt the dreams of those who loathe needless violence, torture and pain – and are hell-bent on bringing their worst fears to life. On the battlefield they hunt down those who lose their nerve and run.

Shadowhounds are huge, black, two-headed dogs with snapping jaws and fur matted with foul ectoplasm. They hunt in packs. Those lucky enough to get away can still hear the howling in their heads long after they wake. Those who weren't fast enough are devoured, and their screaming skulls leer forever from the hounds' hides.

Butchers are killers without finesse and without mercy. Many see them as a horrific cross between an ogre, a golem and a squid, with huge cleavers in their many hands, dripping with gore. Shadowhulks are titans of the ether – once giant cyclopes, or perhaps several of them fused into one. Little is left of their mortal bodies: they're covered in weeping sores, extra mouths and spines, and their hands have fused into fleshless lumps of bone. Now they're filled with the hunger of the void.

The smallest gap is an invitation to the Needle-fangs. They pour through keyholes and under doors as they flow towards their food – a black tide of crawling, shapeless things and spiteful, ever-hungry warp pixies. Soulflayers are death incarnate: they ride ghastly mounts whose six demonic hooves burn with cold blue fire. Invisible streams of evil, leaking in from another plane, carry them along, and they can summon icy winds that freeze a body but keep the mind alive and fresh – for later.

Even the creatures of the sea weren't spared Oskan's deceit. The ocean depths and trenches were no refuge from the catastrophe. Terrors are the sorry remains of such beings: grotesque masses of blubber and slime with random bits of the kraken they might once have been.

Things from the void

And from the void come the envoys of the ancient star-gods. If they were ever mortal, it must have been some bizarre form of life that no longer exists in Pannithor. Unspeakable, indescribable things, they have lived in the dimensions between worlds for an eternity. Perhaps the Celestians knew them, back when they travelled the stars themselves.

Some have a kind of intelligence. Void Lurkers understand enough to sense the rents in the fabric of the universe and to find them. They latch onto the Nightstalkers as they stream into reality, and here they set into mismatched, terrifying shapes – whatever best suits their insatiable appetite. Behind them come the Planar Apparitions, which can't hold their place in any plane of reality for long. They flicker in and out of existence, which makes them hard to see and harder to destroy, and all the while they channel the fitful dark energy of the shadow worlds beyond the Abyss.

Fiends feed on hatred and jealousy. They're drawn to those who plot revenge and spin webs of lies. The most cunning and unscrupulous politicians, the most powerful crime lords, anyone who weaves deceit and distrust – to the strongest Fiends they shine like beacons. They're terrifying, spider-like monsters with venomous fangs and chitinous armour that reflects no light. They wait in the shadows, watching and learning their prey's weaknesses, slowly poisoning its thoughts and feeding on its fear of failure. And when the time is right, they slip through the smallest crack in the skin of the universe. The schemer simply vanishes. No one ever sees them again.

Part four: no leaders

Malevolent minds

Nightstalkers don't have leaders in any sense a mortal could grasp. Some souls are more intact, or simply more malevolent, than others, and lead their kin to the slaughter. But loyalty and leadership are utterly alien ideas to these beings. Most just copy whatever the others are doing, like a herd of animals.

Horrors

Not everyone swallowed by the Conclave's catastrophe was an elf. The twisted, misshapen Horrors were once a delegation of dwarf Stone Priests, visiting the elven schools of magic on a diplomatic and scholarly exchange. Right at the moment the Mirror broke.

Of those respected, learned sorcerers only a vague caricature remains. The bitter winds of the shadow worlds blow through their broken, warped bodies. Sometimes several Horrors are drawn to one another, and then they howl their foul incantations in unison, pulling more and more of the shadow realm into the mortal world.

The Banshee

A Banshee is a hideous ghost glittering with hoarfrost – the shattered remains of the spirit and mind of an elven Mage-Queen. Its furious, bitter wail rings out across the battlefield, and its force drives enemies back almost like a physical blow.

No armour helps

Armour is little use against the probing attacks of a Mind-screech, which worm their way into the head. Its victims fall to the ground, screaming without a sound, hands pressed to bleeding ears. Their comrades can do nothing to help. And then they feel it inside their own heads too…

Butcher Fleshrippers are slaughter made flesh. They attack anything they can find, ripping their victims to bloody ribbons in an orgy of violence. Somehow that carnage feeds the rage of the other Butchers nearby, until they're whipped into a frenzy no one can escape. Reaper Souldrinkers are the cruellest of their kind. Their hunger for pain and fear is so all-consuming that they devour their victims' souls entirely – and the unimaginable terror and torment of that moment only sharpens their dreadful appetite.

The Dream Hunter

The Dream Hunter tears dreams and souls out of the people of Pannithor to feed itself and the Nightstalkers around it. It has long been a bedtime story used to frighten small children in every culture, and it goes by many names. And it is those who feared it most as children, and never stopped fearing it as adults, who open its way into the world. Fairy tales are a key to the mind.

A visit from the Dream Hunter is a dream of paralysis and helplessness, in which the dreamer's very essence is drawn out through the pores of their defenceless body. The unlucky ones who survive wake up mute, empty of feeling, dead to the world – and end up as outcasts.

Part five: winter at Tarisios

The best picture of a Nightstalker incursion is what happened at Tarisios in Basilea – a kingdom of men ruled by the Hegemon, who is both king and high priest. For the Basileans it's a story about the faith and courage of High Paladin Ecquitar. But it can also be told from the side of the shadows.

Tarisios is the trading heart of Nova Ardovakio, one of the Hegemony's most remote provinces and a gateway to the Young Kingdoms, the Successor Kingdoms and the feudal lands of old Primovantor – once the greatest of all human realms. The Hegemony guards the city well. Against mortal enemies.

It began in a particularly hard winter, when snow had cut off many of the surrounding villages. Old tales – of shades haunting the nearby burial grounds, of creatures from the woods that steal children away at night – suddenly rang truer than ever. Peasants in villages miles apart began having the same nightmares: beasts made of shadow, slavering ghost-hounds and, worst of all, many-eyed, tentacled things hovering silently in the dark. Soon the townsfolk had the same dreams, until cries in the night could be heard all around the city.

The paladins first suspected Abyssal magic. Meanwhile villages, farmsteads and watchtowers went dark one after another, like candles being snuffed out. Riders came back talking of walls of unnatural, inky fog. If they came back at all. Cut off from the world, the citizens huddled behind the walls, and the fear hung so thick in the air you could almost touch it. To beings that feed on fear, it must have smelled like a feast.

Then one night the shadow came from every side. It seeped up from the ground, rolled down from the Copper Hills and crept out from among the trees of the forest of Galahir – blacker than the darkness around it. Hideous shapes squirmed, scuttled and jerked inside it, and thousands of shining eyes fixed the city with a cold, inhuman stare. Anyone who looked at them recognised the monsters they'd feared since childhood. And with every sob of fear, the shadow-army grew larger, stronger and closer.

When the garrison commander, Ecquitar, led the city guard out through the gates, the shadows parted. Black shapes scuttled across the ground. Slack-jawed killers lurched into view, vanished, and reappeared right in the middle of the Basilean ranks. Pale figures, beautiful at first, lured soldiers out of line before turning into skull-faced monsters whose screams seared men's minds. Behind them lurked huge shadow-beasts, chitinous and terrible, their countless eyes full of alien intelligence. The defenders fell until only the paladins and the sisters were left – a circle of light in an endless dark.

But Ecquitar noticed what mattered most: creatures that feed on fear grow weak in the face of courage. With every step he took forward the shadows lost strength. With every prayer one of them flickered as if about to go out. On his orders the sisters, shielded by a ring of paladins, stopped fighting and began to sing the praises of the angels – and showed no fear even when the jaws of the spectral hounds and the scythes of the phantoms reached them. Their song called down an angelic host, bright as dawn. In its light people found their courage again, and weapons that had passed through the shadows harmlessly began to wound.

At the very heart of the horde waited the thing from the void. It whispered Ecquitar's deepest fears into his mind, turned into things he wished he'd never seen, and at last struck him with talons of pure darkness. The paladin struck back anyway. The creature screamed so loudly that the other shadows began to break apart, and every Basilean dropped to the ground clutching their head. When they came to, nothing was left – only shadows sliding at the edge of sight. In the east, the sun was rising.

The Nightstalkers were gone. But they had left something behind. Ecquitar felt a darkness inside him, a seed of evil and fear gnawing at his faith. And out of shame, he told no one.

Part six: the shadow that waits

After an incursion like that, it's hard for mortals to grasp what actually happened. Sudden violence, ruin – and then the power of the Abyss wanes and everything melts away like shadows at sunrise. All at once the spectral enemy seems no more dangerous than a bad dream or a story for children.

That's an illusion. With every incursion, more Nightstalkers dig themselves into the minds of unwitting hosts and gain a firmer foothold in the real world. And the gaps are multiplying. The Shadow Paths – routes by which the woodland elves of the Sylvan Kin and the Fey of the Twilight Glades can reach any place in the world – have rippled and torn since the Abyss last expanded, briefly opening doorways onto the void and planes of madness. Travellers there have to be very careful these days. Far to the south, beyond the Cracked Lands, the Southern Rift is widening – a chasm that, if no one stops it, will become a void to rival the Abyss. The crones of the Twilight Kin, the dark-hearted elves, summon Nightstalkers deliberately. And then there's plain fear, which lives in every mortal mind.

Inch by inch, soul by soul, the Nightstalkers are gaining ground. Because once enough of them are anchored in the world of the living, they won't need to wait on the whims of the Abyss to come in force.

And when that day comes, all of Pannithor will drown in screaming shadow.

Until then they'll wait where they always have. At the edge of sight. In bedtime stories. In the dark under the bed that grown-ups tell children is empty.