Hellcrown

The life of a Hellknight is bloody, brutal, and often short. Many who perish in service to a Hellknight order are glad to rest after having served their masters so faithfully, but others seek to continue their work even in death. When a Hellknight is decapitated, the ghostly undead known as a hellcrown is an occasional result. Consumed by the desire to bring about order by inflicting cruelty, hellcrowns haunt battlefields and abandoned castles, slaying all they encounter. A strange fusion of spirit and steel, a hellcrown has no corporeal form by itself, but instead inhabits the helmet it so proudly wore in life. Dangling from the helmet like a shroud is a shadow of the former Hellknight's spine, adding to the creature's terrifyingly gruesome appearance. Hellknights regard hellcrowns with a mixture of disgust and respect, considering the individuals who transform into these floating undead to have been resolute in purpose but weak in body.

A hellcrown usually manifests hours or longer after its body's death, and only when its body is unattended; this might even take days if the Hellknight perished in a major battle. Typically, no recognizable fragment of the Hellknight's former personality survives the grisly transformation into a hellcrown, but in rare and particularly tragic cases a hellcrown might remember its life and hold grudges against those it views as the cause of its death. Regardless of whether they retain memories of their lives or have lost all former sense of self, hellcrowns linger around the site of their death, reminding all they encounter of the merciless principles of their order.