Dread Knights

Dread Knights were a type of high-level undead found only within the Church of Fear. It was said that after the God of Fear inherited a fragment of the power of the God of the Dead—the Bone King Komir—he created these exclusive undead warriors.

Before becoming Dread Knights, all of them had been knights above level 15 and devout followers of the God of Fear. After these believers died and their souls returned to the divine kingdom, the God of Fear, adhering to the principle of maximizing resource utilization, put their corpses to use.

Before being turned into undead, these corpses underwent thirty-two alchemical reinforcement processes to preserve their strength. The Church of Fear then sealed them inside specially made stone sarcophagi and continuously nurtured them with negative energy. Every year, grand sacrificial ceremonies were held for these sarcophagi, with each one receiving the blood sacrifice of three to five professionals.

These sacrifices continued for a long time—generally, at least a hundred years. During those hundred years, fear priests continually cast "Animate Dead" on the corpses to preserve their viability as undead.

After a hundred years, the followers of Fear would conduct a highly unusual ritual. Drawing on the God of Fear's power, they stole evil, blank souls from the Styx and placed them into the prepared bodies. (There was another theory: the God of Fear had made a deal with fiends beside the Styx, who supplied him with batches of blank souls every hundred years. Those living by the mountains ate from the mountains, and those living by the water ate from the water; the lower planes were no exception. Many fiends engaged in stealing souls from the Styx, with Styx Memory Thieves and Yugoloths being the most famous. Of course, the soul-stealer organizations in the Nine Hells did