Heucuva

A heucuva looks like a normal man-sized skeleton draped in a robe reduced to tatters, but it is deadlier and harder to drive off than any common skeleton. It cannot speak, only moan and wail.

It rakes with one hand, its finger bones sharp enough to gouge wood. A victim who fails a save vs. poison catches a disease that saps a point of Constitution and a point of Strength each day; only cure disease stops the decline short of death and gives back what was drained. Heucuva are turned as wights, resist all mind-influencing spells and crumble to dust soon after destruction.

They hate priests. Once a priest casts a spell or tries to turn them, they focus on that priest and may ignore everyone except the priest and those protecting him. Three times a day a heucuva can polymorph itself into a harmless shape to approach a victim or avoid an unwanted fight while stalking chosen prey. It may copy someone met recently, perhaps an earlier victim or one of the adventurers it now faces; in the lair it may wear its living face, and groups abroad may pose as a pilgrim procession. The ruse fools only normal sight, since infravision shows a skeletal undead.

Heucuva haunt dark places underground and in temperate or tropical lands, but cold stifles them and they never appear in frigid regions or high, barren mountains. Legend says they are monastic priests who broke their vows, condemned to roam the dark as twisted parodies of their old selves. Their rags are what remains of monks' habits, their healing touch now spreads disease, their charity has become a lust to kill the living, and their former power over undead now helps them resist being turned.

Dim memories remain. Their lairs are hideous parodies of abbeys and temples, with victims' corpses arranged as a congregation, often still carrying belongings that make up much of the treasure, while other valuables are heaped around a false altar as offerings. Few good clerics can see such a place without longing to destroy it. Some heucuva wander forever on a pointless pilgrimage that leads nowhere, another empty mockery.

Malignant spirits bent on ending life, heucuva serve as a warning to priests who stray from devotion or use faith to hide wickedness. Powdered heucuva bone is used in magic items that corrupt living spirits or control undead.