Burst-Dead

Overview

Corpse Burst detonates a dead body into shrapnel, pestilential fluid, and remnant shock, and a delayed grave-sigil lets the necromancer arm a corpse and leave it. The Burst-Dead are such corpses, set as traps. They do not walk. They wait.

Appearance

A Burst-Dead is a corpse, and looks like one: a fallen soldier on a road, a body on a crypt shelf, a beggar dead in a doorway. The signs are small. The body is swollen tighter than its days dead would make it, the skin drum-taut and faintly shiny. Somewhere on it, usually on the breastbone, the palm, or the sole of a foot, is a grave-sigil cut or burned into the skin, often hidden under cloth. It may twitch. The smell is worse than ordinary decay, sharp and sweetish, and flies avoid it.

Habitat and Range

They are found where necromancers hide or flee: across the threshold of a hidden workroom, in the crypt where raised corpses are kept, on the road behind a pursued caster, and on battlefields where a necromancer fought. They are rare, and each one is someone's deliberate work.

Behaviour and Temperament

They have no behaviour. The sigil holds them armed until its trigger is met: a touch, a step across them, a light brought near, a name spoken. Then they burst at once.

Abilities

The burst throws splintered bone like shot, sprays rot that festers in every wound, and looses a shock of remnant force that stuns the living and wakes agitated remnants around it. In a close room it kills; in the open it maims. Once burst, the corpse is spent.

Uses and Dangers

To the necromancer they are a weapon and a last defence. To everyone else they are a horror, and much of the reason Corpse Burst is infamous: lords and villages that look away from other necromancy burn whoever sets Burst-Dead, when they can catch them. Those who must clear a necromancer's hold go in with long poles and burn every body before they touch it. Burial parties after a battle where a necromancer fought do the same.

Lore and Belief

Soldiers believe a Burst-Dead can be told by the flies, and that is often true. Others say a corpse turned face-down cannot burst, which is false. Sanctified clergy treat the bodies as twice wronged, and say the rites over the remains when they have been burned, for the burst itself is said to leave the dead restless.

Bounty-takers who hunt necromancers say the trail behind a fleeing one is sown with them, and that the first corpse on the road is always the one to burn from a distance; their warning-tale is of a hunter's band that did not, and the lone survivor who brought the necromancer in anyway.

Where It Appears

• Overview: The Risen Dead