Dread

A dread is a single skeletal arm, animated and able to fly, that rakes with sharpened finger bones or grips a weapon. Wizards and priests make them as guards. The animating magic includes a set of instructions, much like the triggers of a magic mouth, that fix where the dread will act and when it will or will not attack. The same spells let the bones mend themselves and resist the effects of age.

Dread fly through the dark wielding weapons, often scimitars or hand axes, though they can handle anything up to 50 pounds and 10 feet long. Many old dread still carry the magical swords they were given. Creators like to tuck them into niches too small for a person, partway down shafts or above trapdoors, so that intruders cannot escape the opening strike. Some are placed to keep pelting climbers in a shaft with dropped or hurled rocks.

Others lie motionless among bones, in a coffin or in a heap of their victims' remains, until intruders come within 10 feet. They can swing bones as clubs for 1d4+1 or throw skulls and bones for 1d4. Roll a die with each blow: on any odd result the bone shatters and is useless. The dread themselves are enchanted against such breakage.

Common orders are to attack anyone who lacks a certain password or badge, or to kill every living thing that enters a particular spot, such as a dead-end corridor built purely as a killing ground.

Dread are turned as shadows, though in some especially important guard posts enchantments ensure that most of them cannot be turned or even dispelled. Charm, hold and sleep spells do not affect them, and cold deals them no damage. Holy water deals 2d4 per vial, or 1d4 from a splash, and edged or piercing weapons do only half damage. Their animating magic also makes them immune to shatter, disintegrate, polymorph and related spells. Damaged dread regenerate 2 hit points per day.

Dread serve almost exclusively as guardians, and only very rarely as sparring partners for weapon practice or as assistants in a wizard's casting chamber. In days past, families who could not pay for better protection, or would not trust hired swords, had dread made to watch over their vaults.

Dread have no life functions and neither eat nor need anything. Ground into powder, their bones serve in certain preserving magics and in spells of flight, telekinesis and levitation.

These rare dread must kill a living creature at least once a year to sustain their unlife. Whenever one damages a living being barehanded, not with a weapon, it gains half the hit points the victim lost (rounded down). The extra hit points fade slowly, 1 point per ride (10 days). Because the stones anchoring their boundary enchantments have crumbled, many roam and hunt at will. Cautionary tales and paintings often show them flying along with blood dripping from their fingers.