The Grey Man

A silent, grey-skinned figure who haunts the cliffside camp above New Halfwood — full plate, one side of his face burned almost clean off, an amateur-shaven head with three-to-five ring hoops up the ear, and orange-red eyes that catch firelight like flame. He never speaks and never sleeps: he sits staring into the campfire by night and rides out by day to slay the undead, drawing a conjured ethereal flame-blade to atomise them and crossing open water as if it were solid ground. Lethal to approach — get within ~10 ft and you become one of the things he kills. He predates the undead blight by ~150 years, and the party believes he is a made thing, set to a handful of instructions.

(Called "Grey Man," "Greyman," "Greyskin," and "Grey Skin" across the scene; spelling/identity open.)

Session 46

• Introduced by Golgain. The veterans tolerate his presence on the cliffside camp; he killed Timothy ("ended up in 3 bits") and Gorblan when they got too close, and the recruits' old "Bloody Mary" dare was to go look at him. One lad, fed up of hazing, simply moved in to camp with him and found it "kind of fine" — so the less-squeamish vets now camp up there too.
• Older than the blight. He has wandered the woods since before Golgain's grandmother (who owned a painting of him) — ~150 years, four generations — and so cannot be its cause. Laewendas's army periodically puts a bounty on his head; the hunters "don't end well."
• Reads as no known type. Thalia's Primeval Awareness flags him not as a normal man but as a creature-type not in any guidebook — "a blob of a colour you've never seen." A Nature/Arcana check floats golem / construct; he is explicitly not celestial, fiend, fey, plant, giant, or insect.
• Trailed by night. Fenric and Thalia secretly follow him: he detours around a trapper camp, drops a charging zombie with the flame-sword, and rides across a pond past the boatswain's cottage. To Fenric's insight he carries himself like the reassembled tea-party woman from the crypt near Gravis's country — a creature set to a few standing instructions ("camp here, ride out, do this"). Theory: the woman was a proof-of-concept, the Grey Man a functional prototype. The party resolves that a third such creature means walk away.