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Wraith Engine

The Wraith Engine is a terrible machine guided by a malignant intelligence that draws power from refined necrotite and from the pure energy of the Void to distort the very fabric of the physical world. An imposing testament to the raw power and perverse brilliance of Cryx, it lurches across the battlefield with the terrifying clamor of grinding steel and the incessant wailing of the discarnate dead caged within its frame.

History

The Wraith Engine’s present form draws on knowledge gleaned from centuries of necromantic research and refinement; Cryxian scholars have extensively studied the nature of the Void and the dread underpinnings of occult power. Lich Lord Tenebrous has stood at the forefront of these efforts, never hesitating to coerce the most brilliant and depraved minds of the Scharde Islands to labour on his private projects.[1]

Properties

Hundreds of living victims are sacrificed in the creation of the Wraith Engine, with an exacting process that bind the spirits within the machine’s numerous receptive components. These mechanisms are etched with blasphemous, binding runes, amalgamating the spirits into a collective machine intelligence loyal only to its masters. Its animating souls forsaken by the gods and suffering unimaginable torment, the construct seeks only to murder the living and glut itself on their souls.[1]

The Wraith Engine cuts down the living like wheat before the scythe, their souls reaped to feed its hideous engines. Each part of the machine is inhabited by tortured, fragmented souls trapped for eternity within its confines. It is suffused with the power of the grave; an echo of the Void manifests in its presence and strengthens the dead that walk in its shadow. Its malignance saps the vitality of the physical world, rotting iron and spoiling flesh that ventures too closely. Untethered to a fixed, cohesive form, the Wraith Engine slips between spectral and corporeal states, sometimes seeming to vanish entirely only to reappear elsewhere, all the while sowing death and despair.[1]

As this hideous apparatus powers up, it begins to oscillate between the physical world and the nightmare of the Void. Tendrils of shadow manifest around it, feasting upon light itself. The mere presence of the Wraith Engine wounds the mortal world. The raw energies of the Void in the air around the monster cloud its victims’ eyes and weaken their resilience. Knowing the Wraith Engine’s mindless thirst for death will never be slaked, it is kept chained until it can feast unhindered on the battlefield.[1]

References