Ghoul

The Ghoul, the Hunger That Remembers

"What is left of the dead once everything has been torn away, except the hunger."People take it for a scavenger, and it is one. But the ghoul is not an empty corpse that is raised and led: it keeps shreds of what it once was. Most often almost nothing, a reflex, a tic, and it lets itself be led. Some deaths, though, leave a trace too heavy to shed, a rage, a grief, a last thought still burning. That one obeys no one. A skilled necromancer does not command it, he turns it toward what it hates: it makes no guard, but a war troop, the only one among the dead that tries to survive the battle. With a ghoul, the danger is not in the teeth. It is in what it remember.

AppearanceYou spot it. The smell hits you before anything else, the smell of death, heavy, clinging to the back of your throat. Near the body you came to find, something is feeding in the dark, unhurried. Then it stops. A sharp sniff snaps through the silence, then another, turned toward you, as if it were tasting the air. It raises its head. Skin stretched over bone, mouth still full, and in its eyes, nothing. Then a glimmer stirs, searching, as if it were trying to recall what you are. Pray it remembers nothing.The ambush. You approach the body. Around you, quick, light footsteps, to the right, then to the left, then to the right again. They draw closer. A jaw snaps, hard, and the echo throws it back from everywhere at once: you no longer know where to look, and yet you feel the danger closing in. Suddenly, a presence at your back. You turn. Nothing. And it is from where you were looking a moment ago that the weight strikes you.

Combat

How it fights. It follows the smell of death, and yours as soon as you bleed, slow and tireless as long as the trail runs long. But a few steps from its prey, it changes: it circles, quick and light, snapping its jaw so the echo misleads you about where it will come from. A ghoul that has kept almost nothing, you push aside. One that remembers is not hunting prey, it is chasing a grief, and those never let go.

How to fight it. When the jaw snaps, don't look for the sound: the smell doesn't bounce off the walls. One that has kept almost nothing is only a shell; scatter it, burn what remains, and it will not rise again. One that remembers cannot be commanded or reasoned with; the only answer it gets is fire. But you can guess where it is going, for it always returns to what it lost. And cut the trail: cross water, mask the smell of blood. What no longer smells of death no longer exists for it.