Temporal Stalker

A temporal stalker looks like the demiplane's mist-smoke compressed into an almost solid body. Silver light pulses inside it, and two red glows stand in for eyes. When it moves, a hint of a physical body sometimes shows through the haze, though that may only be illusion.

Stalkers usually hunt alone, grouping only for large parties or exceptionally strong targets. They follow a single victim for months, waiting for a chance at surprise, and if travelers are in a small group, they wait for one to wander off. A stalker's touch deals only light damage but drains one level and everything that comes with it. Alternatively, the same touch can inflict paradox, tampering with the victim's past; a favorite trick swaps a wizard's memorized spell for one that is useless in the moment.

A victim whose levels fall below 0 rises as a new stalker. Mist-smoke gathers around the body, and over several days it hides most of the corpse. Friends can halt the change by returning the corpse to reality before it awakens.

These undead exist only through temporal forces, so leaving the Demiplane of Time for any other plane destroys them instantly. Many were once chronomancers. They have no lairs and no desire for wealth, only a deep hatred for linear beings and a wish to destroy them. They are intelligent and know a great deal about the demiplane, which only feeds their anger, since they can never leave to use that knowledge on reality.

They hate most the time wardens, the chronomancers with the greatest effect on reality, and sometimes plan small ambushes when they think they can catch one off guard. That rarely works, because the wardens know the danger well. The wardens, aware of the hatred, mostly leave stalkers alone: since stalkers cannot enter reality, they pose no threat to the timeline, and they weed out careless chronomancers before those fools grow powerful enough to cause real damage. Survivors of a stalker attack, meanwhile, learn more about the risks of time travel than any lecture could teach.

The best way to deal with stalkers is to exploit their burning desire to destroy a time warden. More than one clever chronomancer has survived by promising to lure wardens, the more the better, into a stalker trap. Some of those bargains collapsed when the victim simply warned the wardens, so stalkers are now wary of such deals and hard to persuade.

Temporal stalkers cannot exist outside the Demiplane of Time. They neither hunt nor are hunted by other temporal creatures. They wander its timestreams looking for one thing, linear intruders, and once a stalker finds a traveler's mist trail, it follows until it catches him or he leaves. They move as fast as most chronomancers and never sleep, so outrunning one is rare.