Eyeless Ones

Depiction of an Eyeless One^[1]

Help a blind old baba, dearie, there’s a good lad. Here, let me take your hand… ~ typical whisper of an Eyeless One.[1]

The Eyeless Ones are a kind of Undead found from the north of Kislev.^[1]

Overview

Bitterly-cold conditions have made the ground of Kislev’s northern Oblast far too hard to be broken by hand tools for something as trivial as a grave, and wood is scarce enough to similarly rule out funeral pyres. When one dies on the steppes, then, the tradition of the old ways is for the dead to be taken away into distant snows and left there. Tradition also teaches that the dead thus left sometimes rise again, seeking out the warmth and life of the stanitsa. To prevent this from happening, the eyes are removed from bodies buried in this way, so that should they become Undead they won’t find their way back.^[1]

This is not always successful, as some particularly restless or hungry spirits care not whether the eyes are intact or the skin is bleached white, so desperate are they for warmth. Once revived they are known as an Eyeless One. Signs of their disfigurement, like their empty eye sockets, pale skin, and fingers elongated into horrifying claws, are hidden from sight under hoods and robes and whatever other clothing they can find, and suitably disguised as a lost Human they desperately set about luring travellers close enough to harvest. Merely being touched by such a creature can suck the warmth from a body - shortly followed by eyes and even the very soul. This process is not necessarily fatal, at least immediately, and stories abound of foolish travellers stumbling in to a stanitsa with empty, bleeding eye sockets.^[1]

Related Pages

• Mourngul - similarly a product of the chill and craves warmth, but made Undead through a very different process

Sources

• 1: Realm of the Ice Queen, Appendix: Beasts of the Oblast, pg. 135