Book of the Dead
Scribed within this thick tome are an unintelligible jumble of faded arcane glyphs across its hundreds of pages, all bound in dry and decaying bleached-white leather that leaves an ashy residue that is hard to remove from the fingers of whoever handles the book. However, the power of this book is not in its reading, but in being buried with a corpse not dead for more than a year.
If both corpse and book are left undisturbed in the grave, the power of the book slowly restores the corpse to life, finally reviving and energising the being to be able to dig their way to the surface of their grave at midnight on the anniversary of their burial. Should the grave be disturbed within that time, on that anniversary, the book will instead bring to life a Night Stalker1 to hunt relentlessly whomsoever dared disturb the grave.
Once spent, the book crumbles to ash and, whilst the being restored to life will otherwise feel and act as normal, except for perhaps some confused recurring nightmares, they must pay the price for their resurrection — upon each anniversary of their revivification, they will become possessed by the demonic spirit that wrought the hellish sorceries to bring the book into being and take the life of an innocent as payment for their continued life, with no memory of having done so the following day.
1 An undead creature from Mortal Combat. Until migrated to Dragon Warriors, substitute a Cadaver (Bestiary, p.76). ⇑
This article first appeared in Casket of Fays Issue 2.
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