Echo

When an elf is cut down young, centuries of life are lost, and sometimes the spirit lingers to claim those stolen years. An echo resembles a banshee: a translucent spirit glowing with blue-white light, keeping the form, grace and youthful beauty it had in life, its fine features marked by bottomless sorrow. It floats a few inches above the ground around the place it died, chanting the story of its short life and every future it was denied.

Echoes cling to the innocence of youth and almost never strike first. The danger is their dirge, which sounds faint and far away, like the echo of an old song. Anyone within 90 feet who hears it must save vs. spell or be overcome by inexplicable grief, suffering the combined, stacked effects of slow and ray of enfeeblement. A victim who has not escaped within five rounds falls into a coma and will not wake until 24 hours after being carried out of earshot; one left lying in the song's range for long simply wastes away from exposure and starvation.

Attacked, an echo first tries to flee, but it can never go more than 150 yards from where it died. Pursued to that limit, it strikes with ghostly fists that deal no damage themselves, though the grave-chill in its essence inflicts 1d6 on anyone it touches. It is harmed only by magical weapons, is immune to sleep, charm and hold spells and to cold and electrical magic, and is turned as a wraith. It keeps singing no matter what is done to it until destroyed.

An echo senses anyone entering its haunt and is drawn to them by a need to be heard, following any sentient creature and singing of its lost life whether or not the listener is conscious. Even those who flee are not safe, since the song carries well past the echo's boundary.

Echoes are pure victims, their whole identities forced on them by the deaths that stole their lives. Bound within 150 yards of the death site, often near their own rotting remains, they spend their time drifting along the edge of their domain, refining their mournful songs and brooding on how they died. They are solitary, ignore other undead and even other echoes, and only form groups if one tragedy created several in one place.

They care nothing for coins, but each keeps a small trove of things that mattered in life, depending on its age: toys or keepsakes of lost parents for a child, combs and trinkets for a girl, weapons or instruments for a youth. Whatever its worth, an echo blocks the path to this hoard and will attack anyone who takes from it.

Animals will not enter an echo's domain and stay nervous within a quarter mile of it, so the area is eerily free of tracks, droppings and birdsong. Instead it is strewn with the unburied dead who could not escape the song. One lost traveler often costs an entire rescue party their lives as they try to retrieve their companion.