#daemonslayers

I like it when crappy sketches turn into something more exciting although it did eat my entire Saturday.  I suspect part of me was procrastinating because I have other things I want/need to work on but went down the rabbithole with this instead.   Still, here’s some worldbuilding :-)

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The dead do not always rest easy on Tymaera. Magic permeates the land, in some places perhaps a little too much and here energies may focus and coalesce, drawn to vessels that once held the most precious energy of all; life. Enough may gather to reignite the spark of being and cause a corpse to reanimate, or to perhaps call back an echo of the departed in incorporeal form, even easier if the spirit had unfinished business and fought against passage to the afterlife. This new existence is no blessing and these lesser dead (the Greater Dead are something worse) roam mindlessly and know only a hatred and envy of the vitality of the living that drives them to kill and consume in the hope of taking that for themselves. A futile and destructive want. They may display some shreds of memories of their former lives but this only makes their suffering worse.

That said, the undead don't have a monopoly when it comes to skeletal beings.  Dark spirits and daemons, embodiments of death and corruption, abound.

So amidst these fine lines and grey areas, how do you know what you're looking at? (We'll put aside for a moment the fact it's mostly academic as its victim will end up dead whatever the unnatural being that's doing the killing). The balefire - the glowing essence all creatures with magic in their veins exhibits in some shape or form (in the eyes, aura, inner glow, etc) - is a good indicator.  For the undead it is often pale, ghostly white, very sometimes light blueish, blood red for vampires or most often sickly greens. Lesser undead are much less 'glowy' than Greater. Daemons mostly exhibit good old fashioned hellfire reds and physically they tend to look like, well, daemons.