End Men

End men appear as humans but about 10ft tall, with long, boney limbs and neon purple eyes. They wear no clothes, and their skin is completely black, like looking at a void. When they are cut, they bleed a glowing purple sludge. If killed, they dissolve into it.

Mysterious motivations. End men wander aimlessly until they come across metal, which they collect and steal no matter how useless. Despite the tools they take, they never use any, and so fixed metal they may ignore or become furious over obtaining. They avoid fire, light, and places with lots of activity, so they rarely enter towns except for quiet villages at night.

End men that have had an item they wanted taken from them will hunt it. They magically have vague knowledge of its location, and the longer they are near it the more specific their knowledge is.

The metal that they obtain is taken through their portals and never returns. Sometimes it is used to build strange structures that form stable portals to their world.

A dead world. The end men's home dimension is a cold, desolate wasteland of smooth white rock islands floating in a void. Towers of jumbled metal are fused together by perfectors. The perfectors know little about the place or the end men, as they have been brought there themselves. Some perfectors think it paradise, everything in its proper place. Others think it maddening for the lack of challenge. Regardless, they are instructed by the end men to build the towers, with no other communication whatsoever. It's possible to follow an end man through its portal to their dimension, and hopefully back home.

The End of all things. Dwarves have the most encounters with end men due to low light and abundant metals in their environment. Many dwarves claim the end men have a strange resemblance to humans, or that end men seem to never steal from humans. Some dwarf sages theorize that the end men are what humans will become in some terrible future, a future which they work to bring closer. Whether this spawns from genuine philosophy or mistrust of humans is uncertain.