Daemon, Astradaemon

Ecology Expanded

Diving out of the silver haze, this translucent, faintly phosphorescent humanoid appears to be some fusion of a gaunt, eyeless giant, eel, and a monstrous jellyfish. With exaggeratedly long limbs and nearly a dozen ghostly tentacles that extend from its back, shoulders, and upper arms, the creature grasps about at everything near it, tentacles twitching like the sensory organs of a deep-sea predator.

Astradaemons appear as ghostly, faintly phosphorescent, rail-thin humanoids with exaggeratedly long limbs. The fiends also have a seemingly random number of translucent tentacles trailing from their backs, shoulders, and upper arms, which wave and weave through the air.

Their bizarre forms possess heads that are skeletal, elongated, and vaguely piscine, reptilian, or canine, always bearing hungry rictus grins. Wicked, curved claws sprout from their hands and feet, and their tails move in rhythm with their tentacles, typically hanging toward the ground and almost doubling their length.

As the perpetually ravenous servitors of Abaddon’s archdaemons, the astradaemons’ touch is corruptive and damaging to the spiritual material of souls. Their touch and especially their bite can cause horrific damage, akin to that of a wraith, to anything they attack. Most feared, however, is their ability to utterly consume the souls of those killed in their proximity, feeding off of their essence or dragging it back to their fiendish overlords

Appearing blind at first glance, astradaemons have no visible eyes—what might have once been eye sockets are covered over by translucent hide. However, while any other creature might be considered crippled by such a deficiency, Abaddon’s soul-harvesters are unhampered by their condition. The fiends more than make up for lack of sight, sensing their environment through the constant movement of their tentacles—like the “vision” of many creatures who live in pitch darkness—and a supernatural awareness of souls.

Perhaps most disturbing, astradaemons exist in a uniquely translucent, semi-incorporeal state. This property also allows them to somehow transition between planes with ease, and they often use the ability to flee pursuit, especially after glutting themselves on stolen souls.

Astradaemons never speak and rarely use their telepathy to communicate with anything other than daemons.

Astradaemons are the artificial creations of more powerful daemons—the archdaemons, their greatest servitors, and a select number of non-aligned daemonic nobles. Though the gruesome and blasphemous details are restricted to the most powerful daemons, the process by which astradaemons form begins with the forced amalgamation and rendering down of dozens of mortal souls into a screaming, conscious slurry of quivering soul-stuff. Over days and weeks, the soul-mass experiences unimaginable tortures, until at the apex of its maddening experience its masters fuse it with the spirit of another daemon (always a sacrifice rather than a willing act, usually as a punishment). Once combined with this daemonic essence, ritual magic and their creators’ raw force of will then transmute the damned into their final twisted and blindly obedient form.

Just who first created the astradaemons is a mystery. Though the secret has since spread beyond the archdaemons, none of them claim the act as their own, leading some to attribute the act to one of their longsince deposed and now nameless predecessors, or even the mythical Oinodaemon.