[ Outsiders > Fiends > Orphans ]
Karina
Plague birds (CR 5 karina; CR 11 grave karina)
Home Plane: Gray Waste / Any Layer
Alignment: Neutral Evil
Themes: Cannibalistic graverobbers
A word to the wise, planewalker: If the night falls silent and then your hear your own name drift back to you in the voice of a loved one, do not answer! Turn away and bar the path, for a karina is hunting. These creatures are huge, owl‑bodied fiends with dark red plumage, eyes cold as moonlight, and wings that hide grasping talons fit for cruel tools and crueller tricks. What do they hunt? Fresh corpses, cutter—karina are on the lookout for the lame and the sick, poised ready for the moment they enter the dead-book. But they are not interested in fresh carrion like a vulture, oh no. For reasons even graybeards don’t understand, the karina wait until after their prey has been buried before they swoop in the dead of night. Using their vile talons, they unearth these fresh corpses just as they start to decay, digging them up and stealing them away like avian bodysnatchers. What they do next is dark, but the corpses are never seen again. Some say they eat the dead. Others reckon they’re reanimated as zombies or used in dark magics. But why they wait for burial first? Nobody knows.
As cannibals of corpses, you might not be surprised to hear the karina are also plague-bearers, carrying a noxious disease called grave blight. While the fiends seem immune to disease themselves, they gleefully spread it to mortals, like twisted farmers sowing crops for the future. The more death, the more food for them, after all.
Do not mistake the karina for prophets or priests; their philosophy is that of a hunter sharpened into malice—they seek to unmake courage, divide the herd, cull the weak, and feast on the spoils. They gorge as scavengers and predators both, lingering where villages burn and religious rites falter, and they take a perverse delight in panic. A karina will gleefully set a village alight, then misdirected rescuers by mimicking distressed villagers, imitate a warning bell tolling, stoking up panic until the villagers flee into the night forest. This makes them easy to pick off in the darkness, for karina have the vision of hunting owls as well as the visage. But they don’t want to make things too easy—these fiends will toy with their food before silently striking, luring them with mocking voices mimicked perfectly.
Every so often a karina consumes the corpse of a high-up or of a particularly powerful creature, and is transformed into something even more dangerous. The so-called grave karina are even more savage and hate-filled than their raptor brethren. Wreathed in smoke and stinking like funeral pyres, they hunt mortals and corpses too—but their favourite prey is other karina, who they consume in vicious rituals. These awful creatures can breathe flaming ashes and are said to have weird powers over shadows.
Canonical Source: The Mwangi Expanse [PF2e] p301; Pathfinder Adventure Path #172 [PF2e] p31
Source: Jon Winter-Holt
