HopFish and Knotsman

HopFish (Crawling Piranha)

Well, these guys are pretty simple. Piranha are already terrifying. Some cave fish have already learnt how to climb up rocks. Piranha like to jump occasionally. What could make more sense than a Piranha species in dangerous circumstances evolving stiffened fins and hopping out of the river after their prey?

Albino of course. Maddened by blood. Strange little “click click click” as the first few leave the water. Then you turn and shine your lantern at the ground and see it covered with these white, twitching, hopping fish. Tapping forward awkwardly on their fintips. Their jaws churning.

  

They wouldn't be able to stop prey running, or follow them for very long. So they would probably attack where movement is constricted. A series of slight, low islands in a river. Or leaping out of a waterfall as you cross it. Climbing down after you as you attempt an emergency rappel.

They are a pretty low level threat if you think about it, but everything else I've done is terrifying so why not?

Knotsmen (Gordionites)

Some called them Debtsmen, but this name has been forgotten now.

Agonised puritan secret-thieves. Slave-hunters. Desperate fighting philosopher-cowards. The ultimate Sophists, a life built on lies and hidden knives.

They guard the Hive of Glass and the legendary Alepholith* at its centre. They sometimes shepherd the Stormsheep. They map and re-map the Underdark. Searching.

The skin of a Knotsman has bumps. Throbbing nodules of mixed up red and blue. Sticking up through the skin, almost breaching the pale flesh. Its their blood.

Think of two hose-pipes braided together in irregular lumps like the cables behind a cabinet. Then imagine them filling up with water, turgidly locking into place as the stuff flows through. These are the veins and arteries of the Knotsmen. They are mixed up and tangled in the flesh. The pressure forces lumps of body-tubing up under the skin where it ticks with the pulse like a forehead-vein. Every Gordionites tongue has a golf-ball sized lump in its centre where the veins mash. If they were to accidentally bite down on this, they would bleed out in minutes.

The Knotsmen are in incredible discomfort. It hurts to do anything. They will deny this. They are not in pain. You can see in many, broken pins sticking from the veinal twists. This is where some have desperately and dangerously tried to unknot their own flesh. The pins break and cannot be removed. They will deny this. Press again and they attack. Suicidal rage before the truth.

Knotsmen want armour but it makes them very uncomfortable. They fight so very very carefully. 

 

Knotsmen sold their children and themselves. A single tribe, driven from the surface long ago. Lost in the darkness and the cold. Penned in by waking nightmares. They sought a way to survive. They made a terrible deal. They sold the souls of people yet-to-be. Who to is not known. But results speak for themselves. Knotsmen are lucky. Fiendishly freakishly mad with odd results. The scum succeed and live on every time. As hard to kill for good as funny-book villains. Something awful outside time is watching them and waiting to collect.

The Knotsmen sold their children’s souls before their birth. They live in debt. The debt can be redeemed by surrendering another soul that's not been made. They hope. So every one that lives goes on, knowing they must feed fate their children to escape.

They will not admit this is true. They will not accept this is wrong. They will hold fanatically to the death-deal they have made and, every time each one denies the truth, another knot forms within them. There is a strange power in this.

Old Knotsmen are rabid, twitchy and pustulent with distended knot-flesh. Their leaders and priests have curling back-turned bones and are not seen.

The Knotsmen often run. Young and sometimes old. Often with their children. They try to escape. But this is the Underdark and there is nowhere to escape to.

They obsess over maps. They are seeking their escaped children. Hunting them to ensure their own survival. Not just the parents but the whole culture. Any breaking of the bond of soul-debt is seen as the most terrible threat to all. An obscene and unforgivable crime. Evil and inexplicable. The map-need helps them find their hidden kids. It is a dual-edged blade. Knotsmen know the Underdark better than anyone. Their escapees are well informed.

Knotsmen hoard and trade map-knowledge and will hunt the slaves of other cultures for fun and profit.

*The Alepholith is the Aleph of darkness and silence. A simple point in space from which every hidden part of the underground world can be seen. Every cave, fissure, passage, every hidden ocean and the blind tumbling currents within. Every hidden path, every city lost to gravity and time, every alter to forgotten faiths. If you place your head in the right place and turn just so, you can see it all as one. The hidden Aleph, the secret Aleph.

It lies in the centre of a labyrinth of volcanic glass. Anyone entering can see every single thing inside. The glass cradles light like cathedrals carry sound. Distorted fun-house views of lighted rooms are glowing in the quartzy walls, accessible to all. Nothing is what it seems. Few have survived. Many have tried. The Alepholith is within and anyone who seeks a secret thing can discover it there.

Meanderthals

Ultimately, what survives of us is love. And super-genius psychopaths locked forever in negative space.

Our Neanderthal cousins had a quixotic unmeasurable intelligence. The fine division of nature into tools, words, cleanly cut ideas and clear mosaics of cause and effect had no interest for them.

If you actually showed them a mosaic they would wonder why you ignored the rock-grain and the weight. Like someone gluing lego together. If you showed them a windmill they'd wonder why you were fucking with the currents. Show them a seed drill and they'd probably try to club you to death before it spread.

Neanderthals had no word for 'criminal'. These are the criminals they didn't have. Rare, but horribly dangerous and impossible to kill. The Science/Religion caste were practised super-shaman. High-level theoretical astral ramblers sang to the stars and the spaces between material things. They kept converse with the afterlife. The world of the dead was as far from them as America in the age of sail. When one turned bad, even if killed, they were coming back.

And when they turned bad they turned very very bad. Fascist/Animist soul-deep apocalyptics. Without political aims to fracture and encode the moral rot they went all the way wrong like man never has.

An answer was sought. The solution was harsh. Containment. The entire Neanderthal race combined to make themselves gradually extinct. The racial death-moan was encoded with harmonic traps. It held the souls and minds of it's bright-eyed shame. It holds them now.

But there was one hidden flaw. Accident or scheme no-one knows, but gene-key fragments dodged the trap before it closed. Careful, or accidental, interbreeding with a rising sub-species left rags of dissolute code dancing in alien flesh. If you have any of this code inside you, then you are a gate* and you can be used.

They are waiting now, hidden deep deep away from the sun. Ghosting and wandering like memories of abuse. A shameful unbidden thought locked within the earth. Fire-gold eyes like Saxon torcs, and rust-red mammoth coloured hair. Processing endlessly in the permanent night beneath your feet, fleeing the attention of the rock before it remembers what they are, and recalls the wrong they did to it. They are looking for you.

Meanderthals can whistle your soul out of your animal heart and eat it like meat while you watch. They do not, and never will, understand words. Mathematics can banish them in shivering fear. Any mathematics. Music is theirs, and movement, and dreams, religion and anything that transcends. They fear machines.

(Not truly fear. It's baffled rage-filled screaming incomprehension. It bothers them like surrealist art troubles a feverish child, but much much more.)

Meanderthals are vague spirits to most other races. They are a human problem and can touch us through the weave in our flesh. They want our help, or submission to get back and will offer and threaten what they can understand to do.

Meanderthals will assault you and cut out your soul with flint-knapped blades. (damage to WIS not HP) They will sing your spirit animal up out of your mouth, capture it and torture in in front of you. Their touch can make your organs revolt against each other like angry snakes in a bag. A single whistle can make oxygen revolt in self-contempt, forget it's bonds and incandesce the air in your lungs. They can bite through your skin and into the hopes you never speak, pulling them out in gobbets of your flesh. This is only the half-perceived relic of their powers.

If they capture you they may hang you from your heels, bleed you, and distil the blood with strange herbs. Gather round the bowl above the fire and inhale the pale red fumes, tasting out the sacred fragments. If you have a high WIS they may try to breed with you to produce viable young. Though such children have no more than an average chance of turning out 'evil'.

*Everyone who is not of direct African descent (probably, according to the internet) has some Neanderthal DNA. How far you want to go with this depends if it makes sense in your game and how you feel about the creepy/weird sub-scientific racial theorising. Technically, as written, pure Africans should be immune to Meanderthal influence.

Egg Dead (and Sonic Pigs!)

Egg Dead (PseudoOolites)

Zombie dragon foetus, hiding in their eggs, faking as cave pearls.

When a pregnant dragon dies, the young starve in their eggs. Very very occasionally something awful seeks the corpse. It wants a necrotic death-toy and, finding one, cranks up the wasted flesh with bleak automatic fires.

The eggs, lying moon-white in the corpse-fat earth, are forgotten. But, the foetal wyrmlings curling in their necrotic yolk, stir and start to live again.

The last thing they recall is starving to death inside their mothers womb. A Dragon, even pre-birth, has the intelligence of a man. These un-dead ever-starving children, genetically prepped for Raptorous majesty, are unshaped by any material experience. They are hungry, cannot eat, and cannot die. Eventually they break the egg, wandering in birth-flocks, looking for something they cannot find and do not understand. Then they return to the egg. They do not understand the world. The egg is all they know. Their bodies are unripe. They crawl inside and carefully re-build the shell. This takes time to learn, but they have time, infinite time. They wait inside. Sleepless and tense.

Something disturbs them. They emerge. Afterwards, maybe, they move the eggs. Climb within and rebuild.

Perhaps the endless shiftings of the river-pools remind them of their mothers heart. They don't feel cold. The thoughtless bubbling flow that gently and ceaselessly rocks them in the infinite night may fake a mothers touch. Lulling them to the edge of unachievable sleep. Perhaps underground nothing will bother or disturb them. Perhaps the cold, smooth Oolites in the cave-wells remind them of a nest they've never seen. But perhaps, it is just possible, that something places them there, a half-deliberate trap or lure, of what purpose no-one knows.

They crawl into the pools in river-caves where Oolites form. Scatter amongst them in re-assembled eggs, and wait.

Until you disturb them.

A swarm of necrotic ice-cold dragonlings, desperate for a parent and a meal. You will play one of these roles. They will instantly imprint on what they see, like Geese. They will follow you in the darkness, climb upon you rubbing their cold rank scales against you, seeking a warmth they can never feel. They will watch you with keen bright intelligence, learning and forgetting as their foetal rotting minds decay. They are looking for a signal they cannot understand, a behaviour they cannot adopt.

The Egg Dead will track you like a parent, until you act like prey.

Sonic Pigs!

This albino pig makes you shit yourself and weep.

All those predators have to eat something after all. The Sonic Pig resembles the terrestrial version. It's white, and long instead of fat. The legs somewhat extended, it climbs like a goat and can swim. It eats anything that can't fight back.

A Sonic Pig senses its way with a mad pink frilled out nose. It's face turns back on itself into a wet red starburst fleshflower as wide as the animal itself.

like this but... a pig

It's defence is an ultra-low frequency organic boombox. The pig-throat swells out like a toads. The flesh awash with interference patterns and held breath. The alarm noise it makes sounds like a drum and base rave burning down. A heard of pigs in retreat is deafening and can be felt for miles around. It's often mistaken for distant geological action.

and also like this but again, a pig

The pig herds know specific sounds to drive off threats. The long-wave vibrations are designed to wobble your organs and make your bones hum like a washing line in wind. They don't do much damage, but, one of the noises produced is the semi-mythical 'brown note'. A cave pig makes you poop yourself. The physiological effects also mimic a concussion, producing dizziness, disorientation and despair. (Minuses to DEX, Save Vs Breath, and WIS after being caught in an danger-crump.)

Sub-terrestrial hell-states use slaves to farm the sonic pigs. It makes no difference the them if the oppressed are shit-stained, deafened and mentally upset. In fact its pretty handy in controlling the population. A swift shift on the pig ranch quickly numbs the freedom-lust.

Lamenters

Man-big birds with sanity-baffling screams, full of useful muck.

 

The Lamenter, or Oilbird is Trogloxene. It nests and raises young in caves but usually hunts outside. They access through volcano cracks and dried-out lava tubes. They are usually no more than twenty minutes, (by wing) from the surface. Locals have named them Lamenters as they think the souls of the dead take residence in the caves and that the birds are singing to them. They are and they do. These are no good dead.

The guano piles have Smaug-like depth and richness. If dragons cared about agriculture they would all be occupied. Soil-fixed nitrogen is a as rare underground as everything else. Hip-high forests of pale pigmentless plants die even as they grow in the rich but sunless soil. A big Lamanter nest hangs above a dangerous oasis of organic life. Throngs of insects, big and small, and all the things that feed on them. Kept safe from organised intelligence by the Lamenters terrible cry. And the dead.

There are deep dwelling albino Oilbirds, these are thinner,more ragged, and often blind. They are descended from captured young, raised by underground civilisations in attempts to farm the useful oils they hold.

Every so often a city dwelling race gets the idea of farming Lamanters. The chicks are so full of oil, you can kill one, squeeze it out, and use the unrefined bloody mess to fuel a lamp for days. Light is a fine currency for some.

This never works. Factors preventing the useful farming of Lamenter's are:-

1 They can fly and will leave.

2 They are man-sized and will peck your face off.

3 They will defend their young with their life.

4 They can navigate underground when they want to, using a stream of extremely high pitched tongue clicks five octaves above middle-C.

5 The cacophonous screaming of Oilbirds en-mass will drive any intelligent being insane.

6 They are surrounded by the invisible souls of the dead at all times.

(Drow agricultural rumours* tell of Aboleth treaty’s and farms of mad, skinless men covered with peck-marks, tending baffled white birds in dark Cyclopean dovecotes. The resulting clamour keeps sane things away from the area, which can be handy for those on whom sanity has no hold. Deafened pack-apes toil in epic oil-caravans to the sighted realms)

Insanity is their chief defence. A flock of howling Oilbirds weave a nexus of high-frequency ultrasound that deafens, frightens, invades the mind and ultimately drives you mad.

But this is not its purpose. No sage has ever known knows what the birds sing to the dead. But I will tell you now. It is a love song. They are crying to their lost children and lost loves. And they are heard

When you die in the presence of Lamenters the hideous music shifts. Its shaped like that to echo in the baffles outside life. When you cross over, from the other side, it is beautiful. Like dawn-song held in autumn air. You will probably want to stay there too, if you have no-where else to go.

Survivors of the Oil-Birds Song often become silent fungal shaman.

Characters who go to Zero HP while under the Lamenters song and then survive, no-longer suffer insanity as a result, and feel a little bit better about life in general. Not everything is awful all the time.

*Drow farming rumours are some of the darkest rumours you can get anywhere. Like a pro-slavery version of Roots directed by David Lynch.

TitanSkull Hermit Crab

“O wherefore sleepest thou?

For Heaven is parted from thee, and the Earth

knows thee not”

This car-sized crab is noted for the strength and strangeness of its shell and the length and patience of its courtship.

As everyone knows the Titans, primordial beings of wild potency, ruled the earth in its chaotic age. They birthed gods, man-shaped Homo Divinus, stellar beings absorbed with human wants. These apparently inferior things outwitted and killed their mums and dads. And that's why the universe looks like us, governed by principals an ape can understand. Anthropic-Facism. Don't like the rules? Kill the boss, eat his bits, and remake things so you know what they are.

The bodies and blood of the titans went into making the sea, sky, earth and stars. The skulls were lost. Life hates a vacuum. A big crab lives there now.

The TitanSkull Hermit Crab is in the last and latest stage of it's development. It has moved through tiny ant skulls, rat skulls, monkey heads, babyskulls, man skulls, ogre skulls and giant skulls. This has taken a couple of millennia. It grows slowly and a good skull is hard to find. Now it is nearly ready to mate. This age of the world has reached it's end, in a couple of hundred thousand years mankind will have bollocked up reality so much the whole thing will decay back into primordial chaos. At this point the TitanSkull Crabs will begin the sex-lurch. This will be incredibly loud, the Titan Skulls that form their home will bang like solemn bongos rebounding through space and time. There will be little there to hear them, except for the neo-natal titans accreting in the chaos-flow.

If any Titans left a tale of the thumping beat that first a-waked them in the cosmic womb, none now live to tell of it.

By the time new titans have been born to rule all things the baby crabs are hunting out their first decapitated ants. Over the uncounted millennia of the Titans reign they slowly slowly grow, moving from skull to skull, waiting for the gods to be born.

Then things begin to happen very quickly. The gods rebel. The Titans die. The phenomological world is born from their flesh. The ascent of man begins. As the Titan Skulls sink uncorrupted in the ooze, the adolescent GiantSkull crabs gather and fight. The epic underground brawl leaves one crab for each available skull. And there they wait. Attending the decay of mankind, preparing for the apocalypse to mate again.

TitanSkull crabs have a bower-bird style mating ritual. The male creates a remarkable ossuary encrusted with notable skulls, polished with care and woven in beautiful strands. After the end of time, he dances like an old locomotive, this ushers the female towards his skull-mosaic cave. The tessellated head-bones may impress. If so, he has his wicked way with her in the night.

Because of this, one of the few things that can disturb the deep waiting of the TitanSkull crab is the presence of unusual skulls. High-Status hero skulls are good. Unusual head-shapes or bone-types are favoured for decapitation, polishing, and careful presentation.

The crabs are careful, fussy, slow and almost impossible to damage. They live inside the skull of something that fights gods. They are wise and experienced and will wait for a good brainbox to arrive. Animal but intelligent, they can trade, but the only thing they want, or have, is skulls in infinite varieties.

Each TitanSkull has slightly different properties. Though what powers they may hold, few can tell.

Whose skull is this crab inside?

1. Crounus – Time, The Leader, ate his kids.
2. Thea – The Mother of Mothers
3. Hyperion – Sun-High One
4. Coeus – The North, wisdom and farsight
5. Gyges – Endlessness, Rivers, Containing things.
6. Briareus – Vigour!
7. Typhon – The Father of All Monsters
8. Dolor – Spirit of Pain and Anguish
9. Porphyrion – King Of The Giants
10. Phoebe – Radient, Bright and Prophetic
11. Creus – Generally stayed at the back, didn't do much, a hanger-on.
12. Iapetus – The Piercer, Titan of Mortal Life, father of Prometheus
13. Cottus – The Striker, the Furious.
14. Caf
15. Enceladus – Trumpeter to arms with the scales of the dragon for feet.
16. Atlas – Endurance, punishment.
17. Phorcus – Hidden dangers of the deep.
18. Oceanus – The Sea
19. Tethys – All Rivers.
20. Themis – Good council and divine order.

Stormsheep and Mantis Shrimp

Stormsheep (Fulgeroids)

Imagine the tangle of glass left in sand when lightning strikes.

Now imagine it moving, squirming and birthing itself out of the granular quartz. Stretching like a deer foal and picking its way on spindly tubular limbs. Migrating somewhere under the earth.

Now imagine walking through an underground nightmare for a month then hearing, up ahead, the sound of a party in a wine bar. The plinking and tumbling of glass. Mutterings. A kind of vague ultra-high-pitch whine like a mosquito in a jam jar. You turn a corner, look down, and there they are. Spindles and bulbs of rippling processioning beaker-ware. Glass-marked in primary for the taint in sand that made their flesh.

The Stormsheep are blobs and twists of living glass with startling synthetic-bright shades within. They flock in fractal patterns, migrating carefully, touching the wall.

Miners hunt them for the ore-scent pulling them to metal as it winds its veins beneath the earth. They gather in herds around the slight twists of silver and iron that root down from the mountaintop. And, sometimes, around thick and silicised waters. They are waiting for a storm to summon lightning from below.

Lightning strikes up, not down. Watch it in slow motion and you'll see. Zeus was a target. This planet is a battery. The storm makes negative one sky-bound pole and electrons¹ rampage in a flicker up out of the iron heart of the earth. On its passage it collects spiritual, magical and physical impressions and leaves these written in the glass of the Stormsheep before the air absorbs its pure distilled remains.

They are a kind of detrius, but do not know this. Each one has a sort of memory map inside, made of the lightnings path as it burrowed up out of the slow epochal magma storms, seeking the sky above. A genetic vertical geography encoded in an instant. It may be this recall that makes them seek out the deeps.

They follow lines of electric conduction, when the strike occurs above they taste it with their glassy limbs. It fills them with electricity and geospiritual calm, this makes them less dangerous.

If you find the Stormsheep hungry, they will sense the electricity and memories inside your head and, in famine-struck madness, attempt to feed. The use of metal weapons is not advised. Metal armour will reverse or invert your AC. Don't get wet. The glass limbs need not touch you, they can summon forth the electrical impulse within you from a foot away. The corpuscles in your arterial blood spin madly on their axis. Each one becomes a tiny generator. Veinous blood is safe, the iron is dull in its cells.

Stormsheep summon electricity from your flesh. (When they attack, you roll to hit, use your CON modifier, add their HD bonus. If you hit, electricity leaps from your flesh, connecting with its outstretched limb. It burns you and sends you into stroke-spasms.)

If they get close enough to touch they will try to eat the electrical memories in your brain and spine. This will kill, or mind-blank you. It poisons them. Stormsheep that eat human thoughts stagger, crazed and maddened like cows with CJD. So by defending yourself you are also protecting them. There is no way to explain this to them.

If you meet sated Fulgeroids, happy and fat, things will be different. They will gather in weird neuronal constellations in the dark. Exchanging silica dreams with thick blue twig-shaped sparks. The blue electrical charges sputtering amidst them hum and pulse in cryptic configurations. Sages read the crackling magnoglyphs to discover secrets. The conditions are dangerous and uncertain. Sages often need protection, from the Sheep, and from whatever else wants those secrets kept.

Each Fulgeroid carries inside it, coloured by metallic taints, a map of the path the lightning took that made it. This 3D tangle of shades shows unknown route not trod by man. If you can work out where it fits in the endless warrens of night. This makes Stormsheep bodies quite potentially valuable. They are difficult to retrieve whole, as the creatures splinter on all but a critical killing blow, but the corpses have been known to show the way to secret treasures and hidden lands.

For this reason they are sometimes guarded by hidden Knotsmen.

1- Whatever the fuck they are, I've never seen a clear explanation.

Mantis Shrimp

This predatory amphibious leopard-sized shrimp usually draws no benefit from it's invisible flesh. That's why it hunts the sighted.

The shrimp descends from tiny translucent ancestors that lost their pigment in the dark. Not just the skin, but the flesh inside went blank. Holding in your hands a bowl, full of water, with the shrimp inside, you shine a light. All you see is the misty shadow of the beast on the bowl bottom, the creature itself is nearly invisible.

i will cut your penis off...

It's larger cousin uses the same transparent flesh to gain a brutal advantage against light-bearing prey. It can't be seen. Only the shadow on the cave wall, like the shadow of glass on a dining table. (Triangulate your lanterns.)

Sighted prey is rare underground, but there are just enough functioning eyeballs down here for the shrimp to carve out a small evolutionary niche as an ambush predator.

It tracks the party underwater, following the glimmers of their lights caught in the surface flow. Waits, observes, then pounces on the weakest, dragging its catch into the black.

The Mantis Shrimp likes killing. This isn't just about food. It's the only shrimp anywhere near the top of a food chain and it kills for fun and pleasure when it can. Bodies have been found in parts, with extremities removed and scattered, or piled in delicate heaps as territory marks. A pile of wet fingers or nibbled ears on a prominent rock can mark its hunting ground.

AntiPhoenix

Buddha was wrong. The Hindus are wrong. History does repeat itself. But then it stops. It's all going to come to an end one day. The stars will burn out. Time will stop. And god won't slurp it all back up and vomit it out again in a different pattern. That's it.

There is one AntiPhoenix and only one. It's written on this page there is no other. It came alive when you read these words. You can use this Black Phoenix in your game. It's the only one you'll ever get. When it dies, if it dies, tear out the page. Its printed with a perforated side. Take it outside. Burn it. There can never be another AntiPhoenix in your game, or any of your games, ever again.

Things find their meaning in their end. For a thing to live it has to die. For a thing to exist there has to be not-exist. No end, no meaning. The AntiPhoenix is the end. Final and irrevocable. When it dies even the terms used to describe it will fall like old leaves.

A Rainbow of darkness. In normal glows the AntiPhoenix burns, a Hiroshima-storm of A-Bomb-ravenwings. The negative-image pinwheel, a whirling, dancing archive of every imagined colour of black. An oil slick, vast and far a you can see, that holds the light from one bright star in the empty carbonised sky. This is the lesser image if the AntiPhoenix, douse the light and its true form begins to reveal itself.

As total darkness falls upon the eye, the rods revolt and cones rise up. They crackle slightly in the black, reluctant in sleep. Like dreaming dogs they twitch. The random flickering signals make the back-ground-grey, the hunting place of the Eigengrau. Absolute blackness can't be seen by us, except in contrast with light.

Unless the AntiPhoenix is there. Its absence rides the blackness, infiltrates the eye, and inverts the signals in your optic nerve. The back-ground-grey recedes. A deeper darkness seems to grow. A shadow in a shadow, a storm cloud in an eclipsed sky with slowly growing shape and form. The light sensing cells in your eye spasm and freak, instead of sending signals to the brain they start demanding energy to live. The brain responds and amps up your eye-nerves with sustaining volts. The eye stops receiving energy, and starts to gently glow¹. Your pupils lume.

Simply looking at the creature in darkness is slowly draining your mind and life and soul out through your eyes. It's nothing personal, this is just the effect the AntiPhoeinix has. It's not trying to kill you, though it fully accepts you death is inevitable and absolute, like all death. (Lose 1hp per round while looking at the AntiPhoenix in darkness.)

No-one who dies at the claw of the AntiPhoenix or around the AntiPhoenix or even thinking deeply about the AntiPhoenix will ever come back, by any method, fictional, meta-fictional², or divine. Ever.

The AntiPhoenix is a master of words and generally sad. It only speaks and cannot be reached by any other form of communication. An expert in poetic forms, it knows all forgotten tongues and none that live³. To talk to it, you must learn a language, ruined and extinct, only then will it allow you the slightest attention.

It knows everything that has passed (most things) all that will die (most of the rest) and a bit about immortals (doesn't like them, fakers.) It ends things, sometimes things like lives and hopes and loves but also sometimes curses, tyrants and pain.

It sometimes wants things, old poetry is a favourite, lost things, memories, highly secret and deeply lost artefacts, powerless but significant. Decoding it's instructions is the hardest thing about working for it.

Every single part of its body is extremely valuable and extremely dangerous. The kind of people who would want these parts are all uniformly terrified of going anywhere near it.

1- It's quite pretty actually, although only the AntiPhoenix will ever actually see this.

2- You can try and bring them back in another game, but you will know in your heart that this is a lie, just a copy of the character you knew.

3- It probably knows these too but refuses to use them.