The Undead: the dead who would not rest

The Undead were beings who had died and been returned to motion by curse, magic, or the power of the gods, or who lingered on past death with their higher minds stripped away. They troubled both eras of recorded history: in Greece they rose as soulless corpses bound to Hades and the Underworld, marching in the armies of Ares and standing guard over the domains of death, while in the Nine Realms the Draugr and the Hel-Walkers of Helheim spilled into the lands of the living in ever greater numbers as Ragnarok approached. Kratos fought them across both worlds, from the streets of Athens to the frozen wilds of Midgard.

The soulless dead of Greece#

The undead of Greece were almost always tied to the Underworld and its ruler Hades, the God of the Dead. They lacked souls entirely. What walked was the corpse alone, reanimated and rotten, so toxic to the touch that their decaying flesh could dull swords and burn the opponents who struck them. By the power of the gods, these dead rose to serve their masters without rest, whether within the armies of Ares, the Underworld, and Olympus, or as guardians of the Island of Creation and the Domain of Death in the service of Thanatos, the primordial god of death.

They did not speak and showed no great intelligence, yet the art of combat ran deep in them. They stood in formation, fought as a unit, and wielded their weapons with skill, whether from their past lives as soldiers and warriors or from the very power, or curse, that had raised them. Nor were all of them human in origin. Undead beasts marched in the armies of the Underworld as well, among them the Erebus Minotaurs and the Satyrs of Hades.

The armies of Ares#

Kratos recalled that in his younger days there had not been nearly so many undead in Greece, which suggests that their overwhelming presence in his later years was a new condition rather than an ancient one. One likely cause was Ares himself. Sometime after Kratos forswore his servitude to the God of War, Ares took command of the legions of the Underworld, where before he had commanded mortal armies such as the Spartans of Sparta. His undead hosts could pour onto a battlefield through red mystic portals in overwhelming numbers, opening behind enemy lines to wreak havoc in the rear of any force that opposed them.

Those armies fell hardest upon Athens, which Ares' undead and monstrous hordes ravaged with a speed and thoroughness that shocked even Olympus. The citizen soldiers of the city could barely stand against them, and the gods themselves recoiled from the nature of the horde, armies that destroyed and killed neither to survive nor to worship.

Hades commanded the dead by other means as well. With the Claws of Hades, the Lord of the Underworld could summon legions of the undead and a wide array of undead beasts, a power he had turned against the Titans in the Titanomachy. When Kratos later tore those chains from Hades, he too gained the power to call the souls of the undead to fight at his side.

The many shapes of the Greek undead#

The undead of Greece took many forms. The most common were the Undead Legionnaires and their kin, the Legionnaire Captains, Undead Archers, Cursed Legionnaires, and Magic Legionnaires, alongside the risen Hoplites, the Wraiths, the Shades, the sentries of Olympus, and the skeletal Cursed Remains. Singular beings numbered among them as well: Charon, the ferryman of the dead; Pandora's Guardian; the Body Burner who tended the pyres outside Pandora's Temple; and Alrik, the Barbarian King, who returned from death itself to hunt Kratos.

The overflowing dead of the Nine Realms#

In the Norse lands, the most common undead were the Draugr, joined in growing numbers by the Hel-Walkers after the Great Desolation, for Helheim itself had grown full and began returning its denizens to the realms of the living, chiefly Midgard, the domain of mortals. The cause reached back to Odin, King of Asgard, whose disruption of the work of the Valkyries left the domain of the dishonourable dead to overflow. The result was an ever increasing tide of Draugr and Hel-Walkers across the realms, with Midgard left next to defenseless and overrun.

Not all the risen dead of the North were mindless. The Old Magic mastered by the Vanir goddess Freya, known in her exile as the Witch of the Woods, was used to animate the decapitated head of Mimir, the God of Knowledge and Odin's former advisor, who kept his wit and his memories intact. During the battle between Kratos and Baldur, Freya turned that same magic to a far greater corpse, animating the long dead Frost Giant Thamur, who was finally brought down by Jormungandr, the World Serpent.

Fimbulwinter and the unkillable armies#

All of this was merely the precursor to Fimbulwinter, the great winter that followed Baldur's death. The hardship and destruction it brought came with an even greater presence of the undead, as the armies of Hel made ready for Ragnarok. Among the undead of the Nine Realms in these years were the Hateful, the Revenants, the risen champions known as Berserkers, the traitor Fiske, Gullveig, and the Raven Keeper.

The nature of the armies of Hel and Valhalla made them impossible to wipe out by force of arms. Every undead warrior slain on the battlefield simply reformed in his own afterlife, ready to rejoin the fighting among the living. The Einherjar, the honored dead of Odin's hall, defended Asgard in exactly this fashion during the final battle of Ragnarok, until Freya and her Shield Maidens closed the connection between Valhalla and Asgard, cutting off the reinforcements that had made the defenders endless.

The nature of the undead#

The undead were extremely difficult to kill because they stood in limbo between the world of the living and the world of the dead. Certain among them kept the memories of their previous lives after death, and others wielded magic in battle. Yet the dead of the two worlds were not alike. The Einherjar and the Hel-Walkers appeared to retain their souls, fighting, dying, and returning without end, while their Greek counterparts were soulless corpses animated only by the power of the gods.

One known exception stood outside that rule. The Body Burner of Pandora's Temple was unique among the undead of Greece, for he kept both his soul and his sentience. That gift was also his sentence, denying him any afterlife and binding him, in flesh and spirit alike, to the pyres he tended, while those he burned passed on to the Lord of the Underworld and found the release he could not.

For all their differences, the dead served the same purpose in both worlds. Asgard and Olympus alike, and Hades and the Jotnar through their rulership of Helheim, took the dead mortals under their influence and authority and forged them into armies.