Rotting vestments hang across the withered flesh of this walking corpse, and its mouth hangs open in a silent scream.
Huecuvas are the risen corpses of heretical clerics who blasphemed and renounced their deities before meeting death. In unlife, they hate and seek to destroy those pious souls who keep their vows. Although easily mistaken for zombies or even skeletons, huecuvas have a spark of intelligence that makes them cunning and deceptive foes. During daylight hours, a huecuva becomes shrouded in an illusion that causes it to appear as it did in life-at these times, a huecuva might seek to infiltrate society to dwell among those it hates. When night falls, it emerges to seek out its prey. Fortunately for the living, the typical huecuva has only fragments of intellect remaining, so it is usually not long before the undead creature makes an error of judgment or simply reveals itself for the monster it is. Most huecuvas remember little of their former lives except for the blasphemies that led them to their cursed fates. They often find themselves drawn to the ruins of old temples, where they rage against or seek hopeless absolution from the deities who so aff licted them. Huecuvas sometimes work in concert with other undead creatures that share the same area. While most huecuvas arise when a god rejects a heretic priest's soul, forcing the slain to rise as horrible undead, a huecuva can also be created with create undead. The caster must be at least 11th level, and the body to be transformed must have been an evil cleric in life. The spell can be used to create a huecuva using the body of a nonevil cleric, but doing so requires a DC 20 caster level check.
Huecuva are the undead spirits of good clerics who were unfaithful to their god and turned to the path of evil before death. As punishment for their transgression, their god condemned them to roam the earth as the one creature all good-aligned clerics despise - undead. Huecuva resemble robed skeletons and are often mistaken for such creatures. A huecuva attacks with its claws, raking and slashing at its opponents. It attacks relentlessly until either it or its opponent is dead. During combat, if a good-aligned cleric attempts to turn a huecuva and fails, the huecuva concentrates all attacks on that cleric, ignoring all other opponents until the cleric or the huecuva is dead. A huecuva's natural weapons are treated as magic weapons for the purpose of overcoming damage reduction.