For death shall always haunt those who sow hatred and despair.— Idiom brought from the ghempo religion of southwest Karda
Often dangerously confused for simple walking corpses, a
revenant is a much stronger form of undead which, though still inhabiting a fully deceased vessel, retains the essence which once inhabited it during life.
Revenants are formed when a kith or otherwise sapient being experiences a complete and overwhelming sense of anger and hatred - usually that borne from feelings of wishing to seek retribution over some form of unjust treatment - towards a single person or group at the very moment of their death. On rare occasions, these emotions may become so overwhelming that they inhabit a certain spiritual power and will bind the essence of that being to their mortal form. The mind, now driven by the single purpose of hunting down the individual(s) which it believed to have wronged it in life, will thereafter remain entrapped within its deceased body until its goal is accomplished and its emotions put at ease.
The body of a revenant is pushed into motion via the same forces that would move the body of any other reanimated corpse, and it will thus continue to decay with exposure to the elements. One which has been hunting its quarry for long periods of time is a grizzly sight indeed, bloating and stinking of rotted flesh and pus, infested with flies and maggots as its shambling husk will continue to trudge onwards through the otherworldly force empowering it.
As with most essence-bound undead, a revenant's mind will slowly begin to deteriorate over the course of its journey alongside its mind. Whereas soon after the moment of its creation a revenant may behave mostly as it did in life, it will eventually and inevitably turn into a creature of pure violence and hate, slaughtering any who attempt to stand in the way of its duty. Nearer to its formation, however, some revenants may possess both a relatively sound if duty-bound mind alongside functional vocal chords, leading to the incredibly rare cases where one such creature may find its solace by bringing its mark to justice in more benign manners including the single attestation of a revenant in rural
Doldecht who in 1173 successfully had her murderer brought to justice by leading the local guardsmen to her husband's corpse. Such instances are the exception rather than the rule, however, and the vast majority of these already rare-seen undead come in the form of half-rotted bodies clinging to sword and spear with stiff hands, butchering all those in its path until its eternal quarry meets the same fate.
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