Puppet Dead

They staggered towards us, as if something pulled at their limbs and forced them forward. Vacant faces, unwilling and stiff limbs

The Puppet Dead are corpses reanimated by the Hungry Dark to serve as shock-troops and weapons, able to go into the light by hiding within rotting flesh. The corpses have no will or even animation of their own, but are moved by the sentient, physical dark that fills them. Although each puppet dead is a clumsy, uncoordinated thing, they are dangerous when gathered into a horde, guided by the single intellect of the Hungry Dark.

Darkness clings to the puppet dead like thick slime or smoke, reinforcing them from without when they are outside the reach of light. In it, the dark retreats into the husk of the corpse, sometimes to the point of swelling. As the body rots, tendrils of shadow leak out of the husk, until it can no longer beheld apart. When sufficiently damaged, the puppet dead will sometimes burst apart in a cascade of oozing darkness. With their armor of flesh removed, the darkness within is as vulnerable to light or sunshard weapon once again.

Although the dark can do nothing to arrest the decay of their dead shells, its corrupting presence sometimes... Change the body it inhabits. Cancerous scabs often cover the puppet dead, or spires of coalesed, calcified darkness jut out from the flesh. Fungi, one of the few things tolerated within the dark-dominated lands, infest most puppet deads until they are barely recognized as what they once were. In the first age of Darkness, when the fresh dead outnumbered the living, the Puppet Dead were at the vanguard of mankind's extinction. Today, the undead hosts have long since rotted away and only menace societies again during times of great strife and devastating battles. Recent reports suggest greater changes wrought on the corpses of the Puppet Dead by the Hungry dark. Whatever experiments the alien mind of the Hungry Dark is doing on the Puppet Dead, it heralds nothing good for mankind.

by Midjourney by Q

Worse still, there are signs that the Darkness is taking people alive, now. To be lost in the Hungry Dark has always meant death, and this troubling development has lead some to believe that it is learning how to puppeteer the living as it does the dead.