Ghost Collector Miniature - Late Night Miniatures

For countless centuries the mages of the realm treated the souls of the dead as an endless resource. Soul-fire burned brighter and longer than anything elemental, so great academies rose on it, their glowing towers fuelled by the dissolved remnants of human lives. To them it was simply progress.

What they failed to understand is that the dead had always belonged somewhere. Beyond reality lay the ethereal realm, an ancient metaphysical ocean that sustained the balance between life and existence. As the harvest escalated from hundreds to tens of thousands, the realm began to starve. Shadows moved incorrectly. Ghosts lingered too long. Children near the academies spoke in unfamiliar voices.

During a winter solstice ritual the oldest academy attempted to unmake ten thousand souls at once, and the veil tore. What came through wore the shape of a man but was not one: a corrective force, patient and inevitable as gravity, created to answer a debt grown across centuries. He hunts the mages first. He does not annihilate them. He feeds their souls back into the starving realm they helped cripple.