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Trigger warning — this fiend description contains themes of slavery and kidnapping, so if you have concerns about content like that, I suggest you give this creature a miss
Nakorik Sahkil
The Binding Tyrant (CR 8); carcerophobia — fear of imprisonment, slavery
Nakorik embody the darkest fears of mortals about subjugation and imprisonment. They feed on the fear that prisoners and slaves have of their captors; both the terror of being caught in the first place, but also the anxious fear of losing control of one’s life to a parasitic monster.
While the nakorik is definitely a sahkil, it appears more like a construct than a living thing. Standing ten feet tall and weighing 800 pounds, while it looks like a skeleton, it is crafted entirely from black iron. Its skull head is really a hollow helmet, for only flames can be seen flickering inside the featureless rictus mask. Nakorik can speak however, with nerve-shredding voices that sound like rusted iron nails scraping on a corrugated sheet. Their huge gauntleted hands grip thick, barbed chains which they can use as weapons or to bind berks whom they capture, with hooks and spikes designed to make escape especially painful. They wear heavy iron hobnail boots, of which they seem inordinately proud.
These sahkil feed on the fearful misery which they cause by the gradual psychological destruction of their abductees. These creatures understand that true enslavement does not just mean physical restraint, but more importantly the breaking of will and spirit. This is a process that they have perfected, to transform free-willed beings into compliant tools of labour. The nakorik view freedom as the greatest delusion of mortals, since they are already enslaved—to their desires, their fears, and their mortality. Nakorik are masters at cultivating conditions that make resistance seem impossible, and they particularly savour the moment when a victim finally realises the inevitability of their captivity, transforming from rebellious prisoner into a subjugated thrall. When victims will perform menial, pointless tasks without question, this indicates the nakorik’s psychological conditioning has taken hold.
Nakorik prefer to dwell in places that evoke feelings of confinement and helplessness—abandoned prisons, ruined slave markets, mining tunnels, or fortress dungeons. In combat, nakoriks employ their ability to telepathically force opponents to attack their own allies, horror of being trapped within one’s own treacherous body. Planewalkers should keep an eye out for omens that indicate the presence of nakorik, such as broken shackles and manacles, the sound of rattling chains and heavy iron boots echoing without apparent source, and most ominously, the gradual onset of chronophobia or “prison neurosis” among party members. This is characterised by obsessive time-counting and claustrophobic episodes. The only positive thing to say about these fiends is that they are less murderous than most sahkil—but that is only so they can abduct their victims to serve in nakorik slave farms in Xibalba.
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.