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Trigger warning — this fiend description contains themes of blackmail and guilty secrets, so if you have concerns about content like that, I suggest you give this creature a miss
Ijhyeojin Sahkil
The Empty Mirror (CR 14); athazagoraphobia — fear of being forgotten
Home Planes: Ethereal / Xibalba; Nether
Alignment: Neutral Evil
Have you ever walked purposefully into a room, only to realise you’ve suddenly forgotten what you went there for? Perhaps you’re just getting old and absent-minded. In fact, you’d better hope that’s all it is berk, because the bad news is that you might be being stalked by an ijhyeojin [EE-jyuh-jeen]—a sahkil that sucks away all sense of the familiar. These fiends appear as warped echoes of their previous lives as psychopomps, their forms gaunt and pallid, their bodies too thin and their limbs too long. They are typically clad in phantasmal tatters with their faces wiped smooth, looking like skulls covered by stretched, featureless skin. Peer too long at one and you’d swear their flesh is twisting and warping, as if somehow it’s becoming both more and less real at the same time.
An ijhyeojin manifests with a sharp chill and the dry, musty scent of crypt dust disturbed, accompanied by a silence so deep it swallows every footfall and whisper. Only when they choose to act does the air then become thick with a suffocating pressure—their “voice,” if you can call it that, is a deathly hush, less words and more an absence that feels like static behind your eyes.
Driven by a loathing for the hope that pesky mortals cling to in the face of oblivion, the ijhyeojin specialise in dissolving all sense of personal identity and meaning. The dreaded gaze of an ijhyeojin can convince a berk that their life is utterly meaningless. But their method of sowing terror is even more insidious: rather than lashing out or making threats, they unravel their victim’s sense of self by causing their memories to slide away and emotions become numbed, to cloud their minds with blank confusion and existential dread. Sods caught in the web of an ijhyeojin might start by innocently forgetting the names of acquaintances, but this then progresses to their friends and loved ones, and then even their own names. Eventually the poor sods become mere shadows, desperate to reclaim what they can’t even remember losing.
The fear these sahkil foster isn’t just of death, but the annihilation of self—the existential dread of being forgotten by the multiverse. The ijhyeojin reckon that fear’s truest form is not of pain, but of oblivion, and they feed upon the sense of resignation and futility that this creates in their victims. Only when that last flicker of hope dies, does the ijhyeojin leave, satisfied that its work is done.
Source and Stats: Tian Xia World Guide [PF2e] p297
Other Sources: Jon Winter-Holt. Canonwatch: These 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.