Self-Raised
Most remnants can only chill a room or wake twitching in the dead they cling to. A few grow strong enough to do more, and get up. The Self-Raised are corpses walked by their own remnant, with no necromancer and no command: the dead moved by the feeling they died with. Every people that buries its dead knows them, and most of its funeral customs are meant to prevent them.
Appearance
A Self-Raised is the dead person as they lie: in a shroud or grave clothes, or in whatever they fell in, at whatever stage of decay. It moves badly, in jerks and lurches, since nothing but feeling drives it, and it often keeps the posture of its death, a hand at a wound, a head bowed. Its face is slack except for one fixed expression, rage or grief or fear. It makes a dry, wordless sound, sometimes one word over and over. It smells of the grave, and the air around it is cold.
Habitat and Range
They rise wherever death was left unfinished: hasty battlefield burials, the graves of the unclaimed, mortuaries where a body waits too long, a household where no one grieved, and graveyards near careless necromancy, since agitated remnants are among its known costs. They are found among all peoples, rarely in any one place.
Behaviour and Temperament
A Self-Raised does what its feeling drives it to. One that died in rage attacks the living; one that died in grief walks home and sits by its old hearth; one that died in fear flees and hides. It does not think, and it cannot be ordered, bargained with, or reasoned with. It stays near where it rose.
Abilities
It is as strong as the dead body allows and does not feel pain or wounds; it stops when the body is broken past moving, or when the remnant is quieted. Its touch carries the remnant’s cold and can cling to the living. Rites and magic end it: Grave Quiet, Trace Magic, or Sanctified Magic driving the restless back, and then burning or a proper burial.
Uses and Dangers
They are a danger to graveyards, sickrooms, and the households of the dead. Mortuary staff use Trace Magic to tell which body may harden overnight and isolate it; watchers sit with the dead; and where rites cannot be had, people burn their dead rather than risk them. Unlike raised corpses, a Self-Raised cannot be turned to work.
Lore and Belief
Every people believes the risen dead are souls refused their rest, and that is near enough to true: a Self-Raised is what an unfinished death becomes when it is strong. Many pray to Ennor the Grave-Watcher, under their own names for him, to guide the dead past the threshold before they can rise. Some blame every Self-Raised on a necromancer, and hunt one down when there is none.
After a great battle the dead that were left unburied rise first, and the songs of the old wars remember the field where the fallen of both sides rose together and marched on the town that had refused them burial.