Ardat
The Unavowed. CE demon lord of harpies, secret or failing marriages (she/her)
Locations: Abyss / Grand Abyss; the Plains of Gallenshu; shores of the Scalding Sea; Torremor [wandering]
Listen well, cutter, and I’ll give you the chant on Ardat that I picked up on my latest descent through the Grand Abyss. It ain’t the sort of knowledge any sane blood would need, mind you, but the multiverse has its own ideas about who needs to know what, don’t it?
Ardat is a being that embodies the kind paradox that the Abyss loves to birth. She’s twelve feet of treacherous feathers, with wings that could shadow a balor. But it’s her heads, cutter—oh, the heads are where the real dark lies. Three of them, each with its own tale: one a young beauty, another twisted with age and malice, and the third of them the savage visage of a harpy queen, all beak, fangs and fury.
I crossed paths with her court during what the locals call the Season of Screaming Winds (though in the Grand Abyss, when aren’t the winds screaming, eh?). Her Soul Sirens were performing a “recruitment ceremony”—though any berk with half a brain could see it was really just elaborate torture with a thin philosophical veneer. They had this poor sod lashed to a thorny tree, and were singing to him about the beauty of surrender while his skin peeled away in the wind.
See, that’s the gist of Ardat’s philosophy, as near as I can puzzle it: She believes beauty and horror are just different verses of the same song. Pain and pleasure, youth and age, loyalty and betrayal—all just notes in the great chorus of life.
But here’s the real dark: Ardat’s got a special hatred for those who break faith. Ironic, given she’s a demon queen, but there it is. When Baphomet did the dirty on her and her Soul Sirens in Vorganund, something fundamental shifted in her. Now she’s not just another power-hungry demon lord—she’s become obsessed with the idea of justified vengeance, turning betrayal back on itself.
Ardat has a particular resonance with marriages destroyed by betrayal, like a connoisseur savouring a fine vintage. Her Soul Sirens often seek out those who’ve suffered or perpetrated marital betrayals, seeing these broken bonds as especially potent forms of treachery. That harpy-head of hers seems to take particular delight in collecting wedding rings from failed marriages, which her cultists string together into wind chimes that sing discordant notes in the abyssal winds. The really dark part is how she sometimes appears as a radiant bride with her beautiful face forward during wedding ceremonies that she knows are doomed to end in betrayal. She’s been known to secretly bless such unions, not to protect them, but to make the inevitable betrayal even more poignant and powerful. Some berks who claim to know the dark of it say she was once a mortal who suffered such a devastating marital betrayal that it catalysed her transformation into a demon lord, but in the Abyss, every being’s origin story has a dozen different versions, and the true chant is hard to come by.
These days Ardat’s been spotted flitting between the Plains of Gallenshu and Torremor, playing a dangerous game of political intrigue with Pazuzu. Word is she’s building an army, but not through force—instead through song, seduction, and slow corruption. Her Soul Sirens seek out those with grievances, those who’ve been betrayed, and offer them a chance to join their Grand Cacophony.
Pike it if you see her, cutter. Those three faces might each tell you a different story, but they all end the same way—with you either enslaved or dead. And if you hear singing in the Grand Abyss? Well, best plug your ears and thank whatever powers you hold dear that you got the dark of it from me first.
Canonical Sources:
Dragon Magazine #341 p24 (relationship with Baphomet); #359 (Ardat’s appearance, Soul Sirens); Fiendish Codex 1 [3e] p155 (brief mention of title and portfolio)
Source: Jon Winter-Holt