Xrafstar

[ Outsiders > Fiends > Orphan > Xrafstar ]
[ Karamank | Marzanbor | Panjeghorb ]

Xrafstar

The xrafstars [KHRAF-stars] are among the most terrible of Ahriman’s creations. They are gargantuan vermin that prowl the lower reaches of any plane he touches, particularly the lightless tunnels beneath the Chinvat Bridge and the desolate slopes of Gehenna. While they are fiends, they are not demons in the conventional sense. Xrafstars are more ancient than that concept, far older than courts and hierarchies and the squabbles of fiends over petitioner-stock. They are scattered, misshapen, and deformed manifestations of nihilism—stagnant intelligences that stopped evolving, and instead became something profoundly dangerous. Where a tanar’ri desires to corrupt a soul, and a yugoloth yearns to sell it, a xrafstar simply wants to consume it utterly, without remainder.

Each xrafstar is a grotesque chimera of pestilential vermin: the coiling mass of a great serpent; the venomous tail of a scorpion the size of a war galley; the clicking mandibles of ants; the drone of a wasp that has no right being so large; the slimy body of a frog bloated to terrible proportions. Chant goes that no two xrafstars are identical—Ahriman did not design them so much as despair them into existence, and despair is not precise. What they share is their scale, as even the smallest of the xrafstars would dwarf the largest creature most cutters have even seen.

They haunt the lower planes as expression of pure negation—this philosophy is embodied in their writhing, chitinous flesh—simply put, petitioners should not exist. The cycle of souls is an affront to them, and that the only correct outcome for any consciousness after death is its absolute destruction. They were not summoned to Gehenna, they belong there, in the way that rot belongs to dead wood.

You think the scorpion that took your brother in the desert was cruel? That was a mercy, cutter. A kindness of the gods. But what hunts the tunnels beneath the Chinvat Bridge has never known mercy. It was born from the idea that mercy should not exist.

— Fereshteh Khatun-al-Jann, planar merchant and survivor, to a follower of Ashman

Combat

A xrafstar does not want to eat its kill, so much as it wants erasure. This distinction matters in a fight, because it means that a xrafstar will pursue a petitioner—or indeed any creature unlucky enough to have a soul—past the point of any rational tactical calculus. Fiends that have made the mistake of standing between a xrafstar and its quarry have found this out to their detriment. Xrafstars do not negotiate, take prisoners, or accept garnishes, because thet has no capacity for wanting anything that isn’t absolute destruction.

In open ground, a xrafstar relies on its sheer mass, be it a charge that shakes the slopes of Gehenna, the sweep of a scorpion-tail the length of a longship, or an open maw the size of a cavern entrance. Some of them are venomous, with poisons derived from the combined toxins of every noxious creature Ahriman ever breathed into being. Petitioners are especially vulnerable; their already-thin sense of self can be dissolved entirely within minutes of exposure.

In the confined tunnels of Druj-Demana, xrafstars fight very differently. Here, the terrain is their ally. The tunnels were not built for mortal movement; the vertical tunnel slows climbers and renders them vulnerable, and the xrafstars know the contours the way a wolf knows its den. They use their segmented, verminous bodies to scuttle through places that seem too narrow for their mass, emerging suddenly from walls, floor, or ceiling. They coordinate through subsonic vibrations—a sinister thrum that’s felt in the soul.

Habitat and Society

Fortunately, xrafstars are rare, and most are concentrated in two locations: the long, vertiginous tunnel that plunges beneath the Chinvat Bridge into the dark abyss below—a region planewalkers call the Passage of Lies—and the slopes and void of Gehenna, particularly the cold rifts of Mungoth and Krangath where light barely penetrates and even yugoloth patrols are infrequent.

The Chinvat Bridge itself is the crossing-point between mortal life and the afterlife, and its nature shifts depending on the moral weight of the soul attempting to traverse it. For wicked souls, the bridge narrows to a razor’s edge, and it is from beneath this edge that the xrafstars emerge, drawn upward by the smell of a petitioner in freefall—a soul tumbling toward the House of Lies rather than the House of Song. These are the most vulnerable petitioners imaginable, and the xrafstars compete savagely among themselves for them.

If ‘society’ is even the right word for what xrafstars form, it is one of pure competition and consumption. They have no heirarchies or lords, not even the daeva themselves. This is a source of tension with the other powers of Ahriman’s court, many of whom regard petitioner-souls as resources to be used—fuel for corruption, raw material for new fiends, or simple tribute. A xrafstar recognises no such economy. When a soul falls to the House of Lies destined for the hands of some daeva, an xrafstar that intercepts it will consume it. The daevas hate this. They can and do attack xrafstars—but only before the creature has secured its prey. Once a xrafstar has a petitioner within its gullet, even the daevas back away. It is, as one yugoloth intermediary once put it with characteristic bluntness, “not worth the trouble.”

Ecology

Xrafstars do not eat in any ordinary biological sense, they just exist to unmake. When a petitioner is consumed by a xrafstar, it does not pass into the plane as raw belief-matter, and nor does the soul recycle toward reincarnation, or suffer any further torment in the House of Lies. It simply ceases to be. It seems the xrafstars extract nothing nutritional from the action, and grow no larger.

There are persistent rumours among planewalkers of a still-deeper location: a xrafstar nesting-cluster somewhere in the absolute nadir of Gehenna where the creatures gather together, a mass of overlapping carapaces and venom-sacs in a state of near-catatonic nihilistic satisfaction, having unmade so many petitioners that they have temporarily ceased hunting. None of these rumours include a witness who returned, mind.

The planes themselves react to concentrations of xrafstars with metaphysical unease. Regions where many petitioners have been unmade over long periods develop what Bleaker philosophers call ‘null-spots‘—areas where the ambient energies of the plane is thin. In these planes, spells that interact with the spirit or soul function poorly, divinations become vague, and resurrection magic becomes exponentially harder to effect. The longer xrafstars inhabit a location, the less that location is spiritually real. Graybeards reckon that this may be the real purpose of the xrafstars.

Killing a xrafstar returns nothing to the cosmic economy. Their bodies do not dissolve into belief-matter, seed new petitioners, or even spawn fiends. They simply rot, contaminating whatever ground they soak into.

Three xrafstars are described here, although many more undoubtedly exist:

• Karamank
  • A spider-worm which can shoot webs and cause earthquakes
• Marzanbor
  • A snake-wasp with a venom that disintegrates its targets
• Panjeghorb
  • A frog-scorpion that can enrage and confuse its victims before swallowing them whole

Stats: Homebrew [ PF2e ]

Sources: Jon Winter-Holt. The xrafstar is a creature of Persian mythology, and are described as a kind on enormous vermin the size of mountains. I’ve reinterpreted this as mixing and matching various kinds of vermin into horrible monstrosities. Their names are portmanteaus of Persian words for the creatures.