Ogramau's Candle (Patreon)

Wondrous item, very rare

This blood red candle is made from a sickly combination of necrotic organs, but smells like heady herbs while lit. After burning for 1 hour, the candle is destroyed. You can snuff it out early for use at a later time. Deduct the time it burned in increments of 1 minute from the candle's total burn time.

While lit, the candle sheds dim light in a 30-foot radius. Any undead that enters the candle's dim light for the first time on a turn or starts its turn there must make a DC 15 Constitution saving throw. On a failed save, the creature is turned for 1 minute or until it takes any damage. On a successful save, 1 minute is deducted from the candle's total burn time and the creature must immediately repeat the saving throw. If it succeeds for a second time in this way, it ignores the candle's effects until the start of its next turn. A creature that's turned ignores this property of the candle.

A turned creature must spend its turns trying to move as far away from the candle as it can, and it can’t willingly move to a space within the candle's dim light. It also can’t take reactions. For its action, it can use only the Dash action or try to escape from an effect that prevents it from moving. If there’s nowhere to move, the creature can use the Dodge action.

Alternatively, you can use an action to plant the candle on the skull or head of a corpse, allowing its wax to affix itself to the new base. While it's affixed to the head, you can speak the candle's command word to deduct 5 minutes from its total burn time to ask the corpse up to five questions, as described by the speak with dead spell.

You're an adept enough corpse-mage, I'll give you that. Your skill lets you control, in death, what you couldn't in life. Friends, allies, enemies: it doesn't matter when all that's left is skin and bone. You wield this talent as a form of vengeance, to that end, taking from those unable to defend themselves. Sad, truly. And boring.

From my earliest memories, I've wielded undeath in one form or another, as a tool as much a part of me as my own hands or feet. It was never to prove a point, or to defy the will of creation. My craft is practical and in service to the living: hardly extraordinary or unhallowed.

So how will your faithless creations stand against one who's truly mastered our craft? There is honor amongst the living, sure, but have you left your risen with a shred of it? Of their inherited dignity? I have, and for that I fear you not.