In the Mortal Realms, death is not an ending but a jurisdiction, and Nagash is its judge. The Nighthaunt are his verdicts given form: souls who offended the Great Necromancer (by worshipping rival gods, by cheating death, by sinning against the order of the grave), torn from whatever rest they had earned and remade as gheists of rag and cold light. For most of history they were a scattered terror, the haunting at the crossroads and the wail beyond the window. Then Nagash's great working convulsed Shyish, the necroquake rolled across every realm, and the processions poured out of the underworlds in numbers no living census could hold. The Soul Wars had begun, and the dead came to collect.
What makes the Nighthaunt uniquely dreadful is not their number but their design, for Nagash's justice is ironic and exact. The miser is lashed into the chains of his own strongboxes. The executioner who never looked at his victims is blindfolded and made to reap forever. The king who murdered for a crown is given a throne and denied the coronation. Memory is excised with a torturer's precision: each spirit forgets its name, its loves, the warmth of its former life, yet remembers just enough to know that something irreplaceable was taken. Hope is the first thing the process removes. Malice is the only thing it leaves whole.
The Nighthaunt make war as processions: funeral cortèges the size of armies, drifting beneath tattered banners to the toll of unseen bells. Against them the logic of battle collapses: they pass through walls and armour as though rampart and breastplate were rumours, their touch stops hearts with grave-chill, and the terror that precedes them defeats many defenders before a single blade falls. Knights of Shrouds command them, Guardians of Souls shepherd their essence back into battle, Spirit Torments drag them screaming back from banishment, and above them all reigns Lady Olynder, Mortarch of Grief, in whose veiled presence hope itself sickens and dies.
The final cruelty is the one the living rarely guess: the Nighthaunt envy their victims. The nearness of a living soul is to them both agony and hunger, a reminder of everything stolen, and the instant of a kill brings the only relief they are permitted: a heartbeat of quiet, gone as soon as it comes. Destruction offers no escape, for a banished gheist merely sinks back to Shyish to reform and resume its sentence. That is the message Nagash writes across the realms with his spectral legions: no debt is forgiven, no fugitive outruns the grave, and every soul that defies him will serve in the very army that comes for the rest.
Units
Black CoachBehemoth · War MachineA funerary engine of dark iron and grave-cold shadow drawn by spectral nightmares. Within its sealed casket sleeps something caught between states, and the Coach reaps souls to hasten its waking.
Bladegheist RevenantsElite · InfantrySpirits of those who died trapped and terrified: whirling forever in the panic of their final moments, they are the fastest and most frantic killers in the processions.
Chainrasp HordeBattleline · InfantryThe drowning tide of the processions: masses of manacled spirits, as petty and murderous in death as in life, that smother battlelines beneath sheer spectral weight.
Dreadscythe HarridansBattleline · InfantryShrieking spectres of murdered women whose maddening wails drive foes to panic as they scythe through the ranks.
Glaivewraith StalkersBattleline · InfantrySingle-minded spirits fixated on the hunt, advancing with lowered glaives at an inexorable, unnerving pace.
Grimghast ReapersBattleline · InfantryBlindfolded executioners of the processions, sweeping great scythes in perfect unison to the toll of a funerary bell. They never see who falls, and that is the sentence.
Guardian of SoulsHero · InfantryA necromantic spirit-herald bearing a nightmare lantern, whose cold light binds fleeing souls and drives the dead onward.
HexwraithsCavalry · Spectral CavalryDeath's outriders on skeletal, balefire-wreathed steeds: reaper-knights who ride through flesh, armour, and rampart alike to harvest the souls of any who think the grave can be outrun.
MourngulBehemoth · MonsterA gaunt and ravenous horror born of starvation and cannibal despair, feeding on the fear and flesh of the living.
Myrmourn BansheesOther · InfantryRavenous spirits that devour magic itself, swooping upon spells and enchanted blades to feast on the arcane energies within.
Spirit HostsSupport · Spectral SwarmChurning knots of the anonymous dead: dozens of souls fused into shrieking clouds that engulf the living in clutching hands and half-remembered grief.
Spirit TormentHero · InfantryA dread warden of captured souls, binding shattered spirits back into the fight with the chains and shackles it bears.
Characters
Awlrach the DrownerThe DrownerThe spectral ferryman who drags stolen souls across the underworlds' black rivers and hauls the Nighthaunt into battle in his wake.
Kurdoss ValentianThe Craven KingThe king who is never crowned: a throne-obsessed usurper cursed to wield all the power of royalty while his crown hovers forever an inch above his head.
Lady OlynderMortarch of GriefNagash's Mortarch of Grief and queen of the Nighthaunt processions: a sovereign whose sorrow is a weapon, and whose unveiled face is the last thing anyone sees.
Reikenor the GrimhailerThe GrimhailerNagash's spectral executioner of sorcerers: a wizard-king who spent his genius trying to outrun death, and now hunts everyone who makes the same attempt.
The Briar QueenThe Briar QueenA bound and furious banshee queen crowned in thorns, whose killing screams herald the wailing spirits of her cursed procession.
Subfactions
Reikenor's CondemnedThe personal procession of Reikenor the Grimhailer, sworn to hunt those who use magic to cheat the grave: the necromancer hoarding stolen years, the soul-trader, the king who buys forbidden time. The Condemned drag such offenders to the judgment they postponed, and many of its gheists were once exactly such people. That, of course, is the point.
The Emerald HostShyishan folklore tells of the emerald gheist: a green-lit spirit that appears at a highborn deathbed as a curse upon the whole bloodline. The Emerald Host is the folktale made true: a procession that manifests as an omen before the fall of great houses, then arrives in force to collect. Entire dynasties have beggared themselves on wards and blessings against it, and every one of them now marches in its ranks.
The Grieving LegionA funeral cortège that has never once reached the grave, the Grieving Legion drifts to war beneath rotted mourning banners in numbers beyond counting. Its spirits enfold the enemy the way family crowds a coffin, pressing close in a suffocating ring of sorrow. Those caught within discover that the Legion does not permit mourners to leave before the service is done.
The Scarlet DoomWhere other processions drift, the Scarlet Doom strikes: a shrieking spearhead of Bladegheist Revenants that hits a battleline like a scythe through standing wheat. Its name comes from what remains when the whirling blades move on. The spirits of this procession died panicked, violent deaths, and they are compelled to share that ending with everyone they find.
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