[ Sahkil ] [ Impostors | Lurkers | Stalkers | Tormentors ]
[ Ananshea | Chamiaholom | Charg | Dachzerul | Eil | Hataam | Iggeret | Kakasbal | Kasadeya | Nameless | Ozranvial | Shawnari | Velgaas | Vermillion Mother | Xiquiripat | Zipacna ]
Chamiaholom
Trigger warning — this sahkil involves the themes of near-death situations, cremation, and flaying. If you or your table has concerns about content like that, I suggest you give this fiend a miss.
The Skull Staff, the Lord of Last Breaths (planar sahkil tormentor [he/him] / NE) â€
Portfolio: Domination, hopelessness, mortality
Realm: Ethereal / Xibalba / The Pyre Inevitable
Alignment: Neutral Evil
When mortals whisper of death walking abroad, they speak unknowingly of Chamiaholom [sha-MEER-hull-um], the Skull Staff—a sahkil tormentor who manifests as a cadaverous funeral pyre. Towering over fourteen feet tall, Chamiaholom is a skeleton wreathed in flickering crimson flame, each bone blackened with soot yet somehow impervious to the fire. In his hands he wields a long staff crafted from the skulls of berks who dared try and cheat death, each of them still conscious and croaking in perpetual pain. Wherever Chamiaholom manifests the smoke of funeral herbs fills the air, shadows deepen, and natural flames gutter, their warmth dying in acknowledgment of his authority.
This tormentor’s true art lies in cultivating the exquisite dread of anticipated death. Chamiaholom appears to mortals in their final moments—not to hasten their end, but to savour the terror that blooms in the berks when their hope finally dies. Chamiaholom is also the reaper of second chances, obsessively stalking cutters who’ve glimpsed the other side and then returned to tell the tale. He appears at the bedsides of survivors of near-death situations—perhaps rescued from drowning, cut down from the executioner’s gibbet, or magically healed from mortal wounds—and his message is always the same: Your reprieve is temporary. Every breath borrowed is a debt that will be be collected in the future. With a wave of his skull staff, Chamiaholom floods their minds with visions of their true death. Not the gentle fading they just experienced, but the raw terror of their real future final moments. Cutters who survive his visitation are forever changed, haunted by knowing that their death is not distant, but close and hand, and impatiently waiting.
His hatred for the undead burns even hotter—liches, vampires, and all who mock death’s finality are torn apart by the tormentor and his skeletal minions. To Chamiaholom, as indeed to the psychopomps, every undead creature is an obscenity, a blasphemous denial of the one truth that governs all existence: Death Comes to All in the End.
Chamiaholom’s realm in Xibalba is the Pyre Inevitable, and is the sixth and final house of the Lords of Fear. Also called the ‘Hot House’, it’s a place where the bodies of petitioners who fail the trials of Xibalba are ultimately taken and imprisoned. Inside the hellish, smoke-infested house there are row upon row of perpetual funeral pyres. The struggling petitioners are bound with thorny vines and thrown into flame pits where their flesh burns away completely, leaving only skeletal remains, charred, yet somehow still ‘alive’. And that’s how these humiliated unfortunates are cursed to spend their rest of their afterlives.
Edicts: Accept the futility of life, destroy sentient undead, punish those who somehow avoid death
Anathema: Comfort the dying, seek immortality or unnatural longevity
Canonical Sources: Book of the Damned [PF1e] p132; Divine Mysteries [PF2e] p228, 320-321.
Source:Â Jon Winter-Holt. Mythwatch: Chamiaholom is one of the Lords of Fear, the gods of the Underworld of the Maya religion.