Wraith-shadows of Wraithblade Keep

Everyone the Wraithblade Khopesh has killed is still at Wraithblade Keep. They come out of the walls and up through the floors, pale and translucent and roughly the shape of a man, and they cross a room fast and fly. They cannot find a person they cannot see: without a line of sight to him they do not know he is in the room at all.

A shade in its dark state is the dangerous one. Its touch pulls the strength out of a living body, and one of them took enough off Koa at a single pass that he could not afterward work the winch on the portcullis. Once it has fed it turns pale, settles for good, and is never a danger again; a pale one passes through a man without his feeling anything.

Consecrated ground rebukes them. The keep’s church, a later Peren shrine raised over a Mól anvil with electrum woven through the room, keeps them out entirely, and nobody shut in there could explain why. The Elder held them off at thirty feet while badly weakened, at a cost that climbed steeply the longer he kept it up.

Whoever holds the sword commands them. Oshuun Karral, the hobgoblin who carried the Khopesh out of this keep to Beltran, was killed by it and is one of them now, and Koa knew his face. With the blade in its lead-lined box and nobody wielding it, it went on filling its ranks and had no hold over any of them.

They are not the wraith affliction the blade spreads through the living, which is a contagion and travels with the sword. These are the accumulated dead, and they stay where the sword was kept.