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Trigger warning — this fiend description contains themes of blood-drinking and drowning, so if you have concerns about content like that, I suggest you give this creature a miss
Borda Sahkil
Mire Harpy; Mosquito Leech (CR 9); thalassophobia — fear of drowning; limnophobia — fear of lakes and marshes
The borda embodies the primal fear of drowning, especially in still waters, quicksand and marshes. They feast upon the fear felt by cutters who lose themselves in treacherous boglands, and shudder with glee when a berk finally goes under.
From a distance, a borda looks like a wise old crone, and a berk who’s got themselves lost might breathe a sign of relief that they’re about to be rescued. But the borda takes this form merely to make the disappointment all the worse, for it is really a twisted parody of the wise crone. Raising herself up from a hunched-over stature to her full height of eight feet, the borda glides over the brackish water and mud with unnatural grace on her leathery wings, barely touching the surface. She can also dive underneath and swim when required.
Her most horrifying feature up close is her grotesque, bulbous head that has a dozen eyes. These eyes never blink in unison and look in all directions at once, which means the borda is impossible to surprise in her home territory, since she can also see though fog, rain, and even muddy water. The creature’s belly distends obscenely, visibly swollen with the blood of her victims. While she does not need to eat, a borda will obsess over sanguinous fluids, fighting to the death once she tastes blood with her predatory, leech-like tongue that can extend a terrifying fifteen feet from her mouth.
Bordas relish their victims’ fear of drowning—one of the most common fears in mortals. But more than that, they savour their victims fear of becoming hopelessly lost in the confusing environments of shifting waterways, thick fog banks and unmemorable landmarks. Bordas possess an aura which confuses the direction sense of mortals, which gives victims a helping nudge on the way to becoming lost. They use their eyes to create dancing lights that appear to travellers as lanterns or campfires in the distance, and mimic the calls of humanoids in distress to lead victims deeper into more treacherous terrain. Bordas are also able to create fog banks, vomit up swarms of biting mosquitos, and infect a berk with sleeping sickness by their bite. Even though marshlands are sparsely populated, when a borda can find a victim, they are in for a rich feast indeed.
Bordas are often found in planar swamps like Semuanya’s Bog, and they have been known to form part of a coven with hags. More mysteriously, bordas they have also been encountered in Belierin of Elysium. They’re run out of the plane whenever the guardinal scouts encounter them, but there’s something there in the marshes that’s either attracting them back…or letting them in.
Source and Stats: The Creature Codex [PF1e] here
Other Sources: Jon Winter-Holt. Canonwatch: The sahkil are a fabulously horrid type of fiend from Pathfinder lore, who make a great addition to the Ethereal Plane and Planescape lore generally. The Creature Codex has done an awesome job of expanding the number of sahkil massively too, and I’ve included all their creations here. Organising the sahkil into three sub-types based on their hunting style was my idea, because the list was unwieldy and their names are (deliberately) hard to remember, and this splits them up into bite-sized chunks.