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Trigger warning — this fiend description contains stomach-bursting body horror and eating disorders, so if you have concerns about content like that, I suggest you give this creature a miss
Jichjik Sahkil
The Hunger Worm (CR 2); emetophobia — fear of vomiting; cibophobia — fear of food
Home Planes: Ethereal / Xibalba; Nether
Alignment: Neutral Evil
The jichjik [JISH-jik] is a slick, pallid green maggot the length of a halfling’s forearm. Its flesh glistens with fetid mucus and its breath bears the stench of rotting carrion. Its diminutive, vermiform body ends in a mouth of needle-hook mandibles capable of savage bites. This sahkil moves with an obscene purpose—seeking warm mouths, soft throats, or anywhere it can burrow and disappear into living meat. Once inside a host, the fiendish parasite writhes beneath the skin, pressing bulges along the oesophagus and guts as if kneading dough. Its presence curdles the appetite into a gnawing nausea that never abates. These vile creatures feed from the fear and distress they cause to their victims as they are rendered unable to eat, and as the host weakens, the jichjik grows fat. After a few days, when the sahkil is sated and the victim has given in to despair, the fiend departs in an eruption of wriggling grubs: sometimes bursting through a natural orifice to spare the host for later torments, other times detonating through the skin in a grotesque cascade that risks killing the host.
The Fear It Feeds
Like other sahkil, the jichjik slips from the Ethereal’s nightmare city of Xibalba into the planes of mortals. It prefers to lurk in pantries, markets, kitchens, and banqueting halls, especially hunting proud and discerning cutters who worship flavour, like Sensates. Jichjik love to use their powers to make food touched by their host become contaminated with maggots and rot. But their presence also renders their host too nauseous to eat—attempting to consume any food of or drink results in immediate agonising retching. The jichjik feeds from the dread of its host of being unable to eat, of the distress from their choking and gagging, and from their slow starvation amid abundance. They particularly enjoy the effect of turning the palate of a gourmand to ash, making a chef retch at the mere thought of food, and ruining a business by poisoning its patrons.
Jichjiks believe that the dread of going hungry is the most fundamental terror of mortals—a primal fear that strips away pretence, piety, and pride down to a simple yearning for meat. They delight in targeting those whose identity is defined by their sense of taste: cooks, critics, vintners, and devotees of the table, because the keener the palate, the sharper the despair when flavour is spoiled by filth. These sahkils work to instill an atmosphere of dread long before they first strike: creating a lingering reek in the larder, a single worm among perfect grapes, nightmares of a feast turned to crawling larvae—like all sahkils, jichjiks are masters of heightening fear and manipulating emotions.
Their preferred hunting style is served over three courses:
- The Souring: First, the subtle exposure to its stench and an infestation of vermin to instill disgust, anticipatory nausea, and ramp up the fear. The jichjik is looking for victims who are particularly sensitive to scent and upset by their actions.
- The Fasting: Once the jichjik has selected a victim, it infiltrates their body and overwhelms their appetite so the victim cannot keep down even water, which causes nausea, weakness and creates delicious panic.
- The Final Course: When its satisfaction has peaked, the jichjik decants itself in a spray of maggots, either sparing the victim to let their fear ferment further or rupturing them to serve a fine vintage of horror for witnesses.
Exploitable Weaknesses
Perhaps it’s a throwback to their psychopomp origin, but jichjik are repelled by many kinds of funerary foods: pan de muerto (bread of the dead), pinda (rice balls with ghee and sesame seeds)), soul cakes, or lady fingers. Especially effective is the so-called Dumb Supper ritual of the Celts, where families set the table for themselves and their ancestors, and eat a meal in complete silence. The windows and doors are left open so the dead can come and go as they please. Jichjik are repulsed by thus ritual and will usually make a hasty (if messy) retreat if the ritual is conducted successfully.
Source and Stats: Ruins of the Radiant Siege [PF2] p60. This was a text-only description of this particular sahkil, I have expanded it here and the stats are my homebrew.
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. 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. Dumb (or Silent) Supper is a real world ritual typically performed at Samhain.