Most processions of the dead advance like a slow tide; the Scarlet Doom arrives like a thrown blade. It is a spearhead of Bladegheist Revenants (spirits who died thrashing in the grip of violent, panicked ends) flung at the enemy line in a single shrieking rush that folds it like a scythe through standing wheat. The name is not poetry. It describes, plainly, what is left on the ground once the whirling has moved on.
Every gheist replays the manner of its death without pause: the sealed and burning tower, the flooding hold, the collapsing shaft. Trapped forever in that final frenzy, they are compelled to inflict it, to make the living share the terror they cannot escape, and so the Doom strikes with the speed of the drowning and the strength of the desperate. In the instant after each kill every spirit falls still, granted a heartbeat of the rest it died reaching for; then the spinning resumes.
Commanders fear the Scarlet Doom above the drifting hosts of the Nighthaunt precisely because it does not wait. There is no dread lull, no gathering sorrow: only a scarlet blur across the field, and a battle-line that was whole a moment ago and is ruin the next.
Order of battle
The The Scarlet Doom field the units of the Nighthaunt, a detachment from the roster:
Other Nighthaunt formations
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.
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