Mycelium Husk
A humanoid body — most often a monk or an adventurer — dead but walking, puppeted by the pale mycelium of the Gestalt. The husk wears its old clothes and old gear, and from a distance can pass for a person at rest. Up close, the mouth tends to hang open, the eye sockets are hollow with fine pale fibers feathering out around the orbits, and the skin has the wet, oil-slick sheen of something kept just below the surface of decay.
In motion the husks mirror each other — small tilts of the head, parallel swings of the arm, as if they share a single body of attention somewhere off-stage. The Gestalt watches through them. It will, given the chance, animate any cloth on the husk into a more useful form — a monk's rosary becomes an improvised set of reins; a sailor's belt becomes a sling — and is capable of riding any mount the body has access to. Husks do not flinch from wounds and do not stop when limbs are removed; the mycelium peels off the body when it falls and seeks a new host nearby.
Encountered:
- One monk-husk and one woman-husk in leather armor stood inside the iron door of the monastery's inner chamber, very close to the entrance. The party fought them in the library beyond.
- Ten to fifteen cocooned bodies — monks of the Order of the Long Death and pirates of an old Brakamite expedition — were preserved in the head of the Gestalt's biomass. None of them had walked yet.
Fire is uncomfortable to the mycelium and will keep it from advancing, but does not destroy the husk. Killing the body and killing the strain are different problems.