Ash Choir

Fire & Pain

“The city did not die all at once. First came the screaming. Then the heat. Then the terrible moment when every soul in the crowd realized the doors would never open again.”

— When the Lanterns Fell, Act III, Scene I

There are undead born from hatred. Others rise from curses, necromancy, vengeance, or unfinished purpose.
The Ash Choir is born from catastrophe.
It forms when enormous numbers of people die together in overwhelming terror during a magical disaster powerful enough to scar reality itself. Burning cities. Arcane reactor collapses. Failed rituals. Planar breaches. Divine punishment. The dead do not pass on cleanly. Fear, agony, confusion, and the instinctive desperation to survive fuse together into something singular and monstrous.
The result is not a collection of ghosts.
It is a mass casualty event that learned how to move.
An Ash Choir appears as a colossal drifting shape composed of fire, ash, smoke, and half formed human figures writhing endlessly within the blaze. Faces emerge briefly from the inferno before sinking back beneath the surface. Some scream. Some beg for help. Others simply stare with the numb horror of people still trapped in the final moments of their deaths.
Witnesses often report hearing thousands of overlapping voices at once. Pleading. Crying. Calling loved ones. Giving contradictory warnings. Screaming for doors that no longer exist.
The sound alone has driven experienced soldiers into panic.
Unlike many undead horrors, the Ash Choir is not truly malicious in a conscious sense. It does not stalk prey for pleasure or scheme with deliberate cruelty. Instead, it reenacts the emotional reality of the disaster that created it. It spreads panic because panic created it. It traps people because its victims were trapped. It warps escape routes because, in its final moments, escape became impossible.
To stand near one is to feel reality behaving incorrectly.
Hallways seem longer than they should be. Smoke moves against the wind. Exits appear farther away. Crowds become difficult to navigate even when no one is present. Survivors frequently describe the sensation that the environment itself is trying to recreate the catastrophe around them.
Scholars of necromancy debate whether the Ash Choir possesses true intelligence or merely collective instinct. The answer appears to be both.
The entity reacts tactically during conflict. It recognizes danger, isolates prey, and manipulates movement with frightening efficiency. Yet beneath these behaviors lies something more primal and terrible. Every action ultimately reflects the emotional memory of mass death. It does not simply kill its victims. It forces them into the same hopeless psychological state that birthed the Choir in the first place.
This is why encounters with an Ash Choir are so psychologically devastating.
A warrior facing a dragon fears destruction.
A warrior facing the Ash Choir fears becoming part of it.
Many cultures possess stories resembling the creature long before formal records identified it as a specific undead phenomenon. Entire villages vanished after following screaming voices through smoke filled streets that did not exist. Refugees spoke of burning crowds appearing in empty roads during heavy fog. Survivors of magical disasters reported seeing towering shapes within the flames before collapsing from shock or suffocation.
Modern arcane researchers eventually connected these accounts to a single horrifying conclusion.
Sometimes magical catastrophes leave behind emotional pressure too immense for death itself to contain.
The conditions required to create an Ash Choir are thankfully rare. Ordinary fires, wars, or massacres do not produce them. The deaths must occur alongside tremendous magical instability or reality damage. The catastrophe effectively imprints itself onto the souls of the dying population, welding thousands of final moments into one ongoing supernatural trauma.
Locations haunted by an Ash Choir become infamous quickly.
Flames behave strangely nearby. Animals refuse to approach. Survivors suffer recurring nightmares involving crowds, suffocation, and blocked exits. Buildings associated with the entity often remain abandoned for generations regardless of practical value. Even hardened scavengers and adventurers tend to avoid such places after dark.
The undead’s connection to its birthplace is especially troubling. Destroying an Ash Choir away from the site of its creation merely disperses it temporarily. Unless the underlying magical wound tied to the disaster is resolved, the entity eventually reforms where the tragedy occurred. Priests and occult scholars compare this behavior to a scar reopening repeatedly because the original infection was never removed.
Methods used to combat the creature reflect its unusual nature.
Silence magic weakens it significantly because the entity relies heavily on layered auditory terror and psychic overwhelm. Effects that calm emotions can suppress some of its more destructive manifestations, temporarily disrupting the emotional momentum holding the mass together. Radiant magic often destabilizes individual souls trapped within the entity, causing faces to separate briefly from the larger form before being reabsorbed into the inferno.
Unfortunately, this process can be even more horrifying to witness than the creature itself.
Some exorcists claim fragments of individual consciousness still survive within the Choir. They describe hearing coherent pleas hidden beneath the screaming during moments of magical disruption. Whether these are genuine trapped souls or merely emotional echoes remains unknown.
Most who investigate too closely do not remain emotionally stable afterward.
Veterans who have encountered an Ash Choir rarely describe the battle itself in detail. Instead, they remember sensations.
The heat.
The screaming.
The feeling that every exit in the world had suddenly become too far away.
And the unbearable realization that the creature did not hate them personally.
It simply remembered what happened.

“People think the screaming is anger at first. It isn’t. It’s panic. The thing is still trying to escape the fire.”

— Sister Angelica, survivor of the Red Basilica Collapse

Genetic Ancestor(s)

• Undead

Average Height

14 – 18 ft

Average Length

10 – 15 ft

Unknown Shores

Ash Choir CR: 16

Huge undead, chaotic neutral

Armor Class: 18

Hit Points: 262 (21d12 + 126) 21d12+126

Speed: 0 ft , fly: 50 ft , can hover

STR

22 +6

DEX

14 +2

CON

23 +6

INT

11 +0

WIS

18 +4

CHA

24 +7

Saving Throws: Con +11, Wis +9, Cha +12

Skills: Insight +9, Perception +9

Damage Resistances: acid, cold, lightning, thunder; bludgeoning, piercing, and slashing from nonmagical attacks

Damage Immunities: fire, necrotic, poison

Condition Immunities: charmed, exhaustion, frightened, paralyzed, petrified, poisoned

Senses: darkvision 120 ft., passive Perception 19

Languages: understands all languages it knew in life but speaks only through overlapping screams, whispers, and fragments of remembered speech

Challenge Rating: 16 ( 15,000 XP)

Proficiency Bonus: +5

Catastrophic Manifestation

The Ash Choir can move through creatures and objects as if they were difficult terrain. The Ash Choir can occupy another creature’s space and vice versa.
A creature takes 10 (3d6) fire damage if the Ash Choir ends its turn inside it.
Open flames within 60 feet of the Ash Choir distort unnaturally. Nonmagical flames extinguish or flare violently at the DM’s discretion.

Mass Death Haunting

The Ash Choir is composed of countless dead fused together through shared terror and agony.
The Ash Choir can’t be turned.
Whenever the Ash Choir takes radiant damage, one face within the mass briefly separates and screams. Until the end of the Ash Choir’s next turn, it has disadvantage on attack rolls.
If the Ash Choir is reduced to 0 hit points outside the location where it was created, it collapses into ash and smoke and reforms at its haunting site after 24 hours.
While within the area of a hallow spell, the Ash Choir can’t use Legendary Actions.

Smoke of Panic

A creature that starts its turn within 20 feet of the Ash Choir must succeed on a DC 20 Wisdom saving throw or become frightened until the start of its next turn.
A frightened creature affected by this trait perceives exits, doorways, and escape routes as farther away than they truly are.
While the Ash Choir is within the area of a silence spell, this trait doesn’t function.

Shared Death Memory

The first time on a turn a creature within 60 feet of the Ash Choir regains hit points, that creature must succeed on a DC 20 Wisdom saving throw or experience intrusive visions of the Choir’s final moments.
On a failed save, the creature can’t take reactions until the end of its next turn.

Actions

Multiattack

The Ash Choir makes two Grasping Flame attacks.

Grasping Flame

Melee Spell Attack: +12 to hit, reach 15 ft., one target.
Hit: 21 (4d6 + 7) fire damage plus 13 (3d8) psychic damage.
The target must succeed on a DC 20 Strength saving throw or be pulled up to 10 feet toward the Ash Choir as screaming faces emerge from the flames to drag it inward.

Choirfire Eruption (Recharge 5–6)

The Ash Choir explodes outward in a wave of screaming flame.
Each creature within 30 feet of the Ash Choir must make a DC 20 Dexterity saving throw, taking 45 (10d8) fire damage and 22 (5d8) psychic damage on a failed save, or half as much damage on a successful one.
A creature that fails the saving throw is also frightened until the end of its next turn.
The area remains filled with spectral smoke until the start of the Ash Choir’s next turn. The area is heavily obscured for creatures other than the Ash Choir.
While affected by a calm emotions spell, the Ash Choir can’t use this action.

Relive the Disaster (1/Day)

The Ash Choir forces nearby creatures to experience fragments of the catastrophe that created it.
Each creature of the Ash Choir’s choice within 60 feet of it must make a DC 20 Wisdom saving throw.
On a failed save, a creature is incapacitated until the start of its next turn as it relives burning corridors, crushing crowds, collapsing exits, suffocation, or other catastrophic final moments.
While incapacitated in this way, the creature perceives allies as panicked strangers and hears the screams of the dead surrounding it.
On a successful save, a creature takes 18 (4d8) psychic damage instead.

Legendary Actions

The Ash Choir can take 3 legendary actions, choosing from the options below. Only one legendary action option can be used at a time and only at the end of another creature’s turn. The Ash Choir regains spent legendary actions at the start of its turn.

Flicker Through Flame

The Ash Choir teleports up to 30 feet to an unoccupied space it can see that contains fire, smoke, or dim light.

Screaming Faces

One creature within 20 feet of the Ash Choir must succeed on a DC 20 Wisdom saving throw or have disadvantage on the next attack roll it makes before the end of its next turn.
The Ash Choir can’t use this legendary action while inside the area of a silence spell.

Collapse the Exit (Costs 2 Actions)

One doorway, corridor, window, or passage within 60 feet of the Ash Choir becomes warped by spectral flame until the end of the Ash Choir’s next turn.
That area becomes difficult terrain, and creatures moving through it take 10 (3d6) psychic damage.

A towering mass of living fire, ash and screaming faces drifts through the smoke like a burning funeral pyre given hateful intelligence, its shifting bodies clawing blindly through the flames as thousands of voices cry out in terror at once.