Liesel Varnhold [Spectre]

Liesel Varnhold looks like a living woman, except that light passes clean through her like a projected image. She is small, a little over five feet tall, and strikingly beautiful, with silvery hair, pale skin and icy blue eyes like frozen ponds. Her fine clothes mark her as the child of wealthy nobles.

She speaks as she did in life, in a sweet, musical voice that still carries command. She knows only her homeland's tongue; the neighboring lands arose after her death. She loves to sing, and her songs carry the anguish of undeath so vividly that some listeners reportedly died of despair.

Her chilling touch draws on both the negative plane and the manner of her death, and deals 2-16 (2d8) damage, double a normal spectre's. She does not drain levels. Instead she pulls the warmth out of a body: anyone she damages must save vs. death or freeze solid on the spot, becoming something like a flawless ice statue.

Only a wish or limited wish can revive a frozen victim, lesser magic generally fails, and oddly a simulacrum spell also works. Those she kills do not become spectres. They simply stay dead, and she cannot create undead.

Charm, hold, sleep and other life-affecting spells fail against her, as do, poison, toxins, disease and paralysis. Lacking a body, she ignores spells like web. Cold and ice attacks do nothing to her. Holy water deals 2-8 (2d4) damage, a raise dead spell forces her to save vs. spell or be destroyed instantly, and clerics and paladins of high enough level can turn her.

Daylight does not hurt her, but in its rays she cannot attack or defend herself, so she stays hidden by day and hunts only after sunset.

Liesel was the daughter of rich landowners whose remote mountain estate in the misty dread realm sat on a silver vein. Everyone loved her kindness, and she adored the wilds in every season, winter most of all. Winter is what killed her, at age 27, about 75 years after her homeland was drawn into the mists.

Near the solstice she and several friends tried to climb the peak. An avalanche swept the others to their deaths; Liesel heard it first and wedged herself into a crack that proved to be a small cave, but snow sealed her in. As her candles, food and air ran out, a ghostly vision of her long-lost brother Matthias appeared and, when she begged for rescue, replied only 'I cannot.' Dying, she swore to do anything to escape such an end. A coiling darkness with two red eyes seeped from the mountain into her body, and she went still.

She woke aching with cold and walked through the ice, unaware she was dead. Near home she embraced a furrier and felt brief relief as he crystallized in her arms. Finding her parents just as they learned of her death, she fled before their warmth could overwhelm her, and by dawn a dozen people lay frozen. More than three centuries on, she still roams the mountain, convinced she suffers some strange curse. Each victim she freezes quiets her pain for as many minutes as that victim had levels.

Liesel is an unnatural blight who spreads only death and misery. The wandering fortune-tellers sing a ballad, The Ice Queen, that recounts her fate almost exactly, though most people dismiss it as legend. A famous vampire hunter who met her claimed she could be destroyed by finding her frozen body and burning it on a funeral pyre, but he failed at the task and reluctantly abandoned it.

Her unlife follows the seasons. When the snows end and spring warms the ground, she must return to the cave, re-enter her corpse and sleep until the last autumn leaf has fallen, so the living world she loved is forever denied her.