Legion of Night

No army in the Mortal Realms is more thoroughly a lie than the Legion of Night, and none has a more honest master, for Mannfred von Carstein has never pretended to be anything but a schemer. His legion fights as he thinks: the visible battle is a distraction, and the decisive blow arrives from behind at the moment it is least survivable. Feigned routs draw pursuers onto buried reserves; allied banners turn out to belong to no ally at all; ground that seemed abandoned proves to have been the trap's floor.

Such war demands patience, and undeath supplies it in abundance. The Legion will lie dormant beneath a battlefield for a season, seed a fortress with sleeper-dead years before it is besieged, and spend whole campaigns setting a snare that closes in an afternoon. Mannfred hoards his strength like a miser, spends it like an assassin, and reserves a portion of every plan for the contingency he trusts most: his own escape.

That final reservation is the Legion's open secret. Among the Soulblight Gravelords it is understood that his schemes profit Mannfred first and any cause a distant second, and that the surest way to survive his betrayal is never to have relied on him at all.