Spectral Death

Known also as soul eaters, these are beings of negative energy that look like seething masses of blackness ringed by a dim, sickly black-green glow. Resting, one resembles a shapeless lump of shadow; moving, it rolls through the air like a menacing thundercloud.

Only spells and magical weapons harm a spectral death, and neither death magic nor energy drain affects it. Priests and paladins turn it as special undead, and it is vulnerable to abjure, dispel evil and protection from evil.

It strikes with two unseen claws, each dealing 1d10 points of damage, and every hit forces a save vs. death magic; failure costs 1 point of Wisdom. Anyone it kills through damage, or whose Wisdom hits zero, is gone for good: raise dead, reincarnation, resurrection and regeneration all fail. A wish can bring the victim back, but limited wish and alter reality cannot. If the creature dies or is driven off first, lost Wisdom returns at 1 point per day. A slain spectral death breaks into drifting vapor.

It always picks one target to kill. If summoned, its summoner names the victim; otherwise it singles out whoever looks least able to fight back, or someone who has already hurt it. Its flight and agility let it stay on that victim no matter how they try to flee, and if allies manage to block it, it lashes the weakest of them instead. Having no front, rear or sides, it cannot be flanked, and its claws reach in every direction. It can strike two foes at once but prefers to focus on one.

Spectral deaths come from the Quasielemental Plane of Vacuum, where they float invisibly and alone near the edge of the Negative Energy Plane, ignoring each other and everything else.

They occasionally reach the Prime by way of rifts torn open when powerful magic items fail or are destroyed, or by similar disasters, but evil priests summon them far more often. A chaotic or evil deity may send one in its place when a priest casts gate. Some sects may know summon spectral death, a variant of the 6th-level aerial servant spell in which the creature's sole task is to hunt down and kill a victim the caster names. That is risky: if it fails within the duration, one day per caster level, it goes berserk and hunts the summoner without rest. Against that caster its fury lets it fight with THAC0 1, as a 20 Hit Die monster, dealing 3d6 per hit, though each hit still drains just 1 Wisdom point.

While on the Prime they need neither food nor sleep. At home they seem to feed on energies along the border between Vacuum and the Negative Energy Plane, and they reproduce asexually by budding.