Mistwalker

Mistwalkers are ghoulish spirits of the Black Mist bound to the will of Yorick, the Shepherd of Souls, and marshaled into his spectral army on his quest to end the Ruination. When the Blessed Isles fell, the folk who had once called that place home were, across a thousand years under the shadow of the Mist, twisted into beasts. Most became wraiths and specters, contorted into hideous reflections of mortal weakness, and among them are the mistwalkers, each carrying a fragment of a lost soul. They appear as hunched, tired men and women with long dragging arms and slack mouths ringed with fangs. What sets Yorick's mistwalkers apart from the other shades of the Isles is obedience. Where free wraiths lunge at the living, his move in passive, silent purpose, heaving open the great doors of his monastery like dutiful footmen and clambering among rows of gravestones on some cryptic errand. He conjures and commands them with the waters of his holy vial. When Illaoi, Truth Bearer of the Buhru, came to the Shadow Isles seeking the Brethren of the Dusk, she found Yorick's monastery alive with the motion of mistwalkers, sweeping clean floors, carrying scraps of wood and rock, and digging graves. Yorick, robed like a priest but built like a boulder, with bluish bare skin and a shovel of dark, dirt-stained metal, called himself a caretaker. He told her the mistwalkers were not trapped: he searches the islands for the tormented dead, his own countrymen of the Blessed Isles, and shelters them while they build graves and find the peace that lets them move on. The Black Mist does not attack him, because the Maiden watches over him from the top of his tower. Illaoi found the sight of the dead kept in service unconscionable, yet that command is exactly what makes Yorick singular. A living man who has stood at his post since the Ruination began, he is one of the very few able to turn the creatures of the Mist against the Mist itself.