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Charg
The Typhon Wheel (planar sahkil tormentor [they/them] / NE) â€
Portfolio: Catastrophic decline, complacency, monsters
Realm: Ethereal / Xibalba / The Indifferent Gyre
Alignment: Neutral Evil
There are few sahkil more malicious than Charg, the Typhon Wheel. This sahkil is ‘blessed’ with the power to know about all future disasters in the mortal realm, and what do they do with this information? Nothing. The tormentor observes the inevitable catastrophe with satisfaction, for it is their belief that mortals are fated to destroy their own, and their nourishment is the fear that grips civilisations during calamities and societal collapse.
Charg appears as an enormous whirling cluster of skulls and viscera, of humanoids, of beasts and of monsters. This tormentor has an obsession with monsters, particularly the ones societies forget exist or assume to be fictitious—until it is too late. The complacency of mortals thrills Charg; but they can also help this along with their aura of forgetfulness. This causes leaders to err on the side of caution, soldiers to forget their orders, and allows societies to fool themselves that monsters they once feared are now extinct.
Charg embodies the slow and dreadful spiral of catastrophic decline which occurs to every civilisation in the end. Their pseudonym is inspired by the ancient myths of Typhon, the Father of Monsters whose war against the Greek Pantheon nearly unmade the cosmos. But where Typhon stormed Olympus in rage, Charg corrupts from beneath, urging mortals to relax their vigilance and celebrate the now, even while beasts gather outside the gates. The greater the hubris, the sweeter the fall. Charg cultivates civic laziness—guards abandoning their posts to seek entertainment or fulfil vices, city wards neglected and crime-riddled, corrupt high-ups who turn a blind eye to dangers—then waits for the inevitable consequences. For Charg, nothing is more satisfying than watching a state fall because of its own decadent incompetence.
This sahkil is no roaring warlord—it is the warning signs dismissed as superstition, the malicious laughter heard after a disaster. And when Charg rolls through the wreckage admiring its work, it becomes clear that decline and fall was always inevitable.
Charg’s realm in Xibalba is called the Indifferent Gyre, and it’s hardly anything to write home about. More a nebulous ether cyclone than a realm—and a lackadaisical one at that—the Gyre swirls slowly around the borders of Xibalba and throughout the Deep Ethereal, coiling around demiplanes the sahkil obsess over. Appearing as a curtain of thick mist, its main property seems to be to disorientate planewalkers and send them back the way they came. Whether the realm is hiding anything in its misty depths, that’s something graybeards have wondered for as long as they’ve known about the Gyre.
Edicts: Allow others to deal with their own mistakes, lead monsters to attack settlements, refrain from maintaining or fixing your possessions
Anathema: Kill a monster that isn’t a direct threat, meddle in situations that don’t directly affect you
Canonical Source: Book of the Damned [PF1e] p132; Divine Mysteries [PF2e] p229, 320-321.
Source: Jon Winter-Holt. Canonwatch: The Indifferent Gyre is homebrew, and I like to think of it as akin to the mists of Ravenloft, disorientating travellers, keeping them away from something or holding them back. Perhaps they are related, or even the same thing?