December 18- Dullahan

Dullahan

Of all the undead in the world, none is so feared. Mothers of all races tell their children to behave lest a dullahan drag them away. Their fearsome reputation is not surprising. They truly are intimidating creatures, naked and snow pale and, worst of all, dragging their enormous head beside themselves. Only in the dead of night do they appear, and for reasons macabre. They never speak, simply riding through a town until they find their designated target and drag them away, taking seemingly no harm from mortal weapons.

This does not seem to be the case for everybody, however. I have interviewed tribes of goblins who apparently follow a dullahan at night, and they report that at worst, they are tolerated, and rarely, they are encouraged. A dullahan may hand out trinkets to its followers, although these usually consist of oddly-shaped bones, organs, or bits of metal. I was only able to wrangle one of these bones away for study, and it only ended up raising more questions. It was a dragon vertebrae, and dragons don’t even live in the arctic. They are also not prone to giving up their vertebrae.

I trailed one of these goblin-adopted dullahan one night. It appeared from nowhere at sundown, riding into view when nobody was looking. It waited patiently for the goblins to gather their things and go, then took off into the night. The goblins had no trouble following, but I found its predilection for climbing sheer hills wiggling through impossibly narrow tunnels quite aggravating. It led us through a crowd of zombies, cutting down any that came close enough to even attempt attacking, and eventually to the hut of a man I can only assume was a lone necromancer. It grabbed him by the neck and rode off faster than I could keep up, vanishing into the night with him.

We did not see the dullahan or the necromancer again, but a week later, the chief of the goblin tribe had a shiny new human skull. I do not wish to meet a dullahan again.