Eblitis
The Speaker in the Void, the Lord of Genies, the False Father, the Spiteful Creator
Intermediate power and proto-demon lord of genies, deception, shapeshifting, despair and arcane magic [He/Him] / CE
Realm: Abyss / Layer 427—Nakdar Nakoul
“We saw then that the speaker upon the dais was not as we were. Rather, she was imbued with an energy that somehow made her seem more here, more real, more alive. Compared to that magnificence we were like hollow shells of people; just so many foolish monkeys with flapping tongues. I came to understand that this place was not ours and it never had been. To think we believed that such as they could have been made in ‘our’ image. I shook and wept at my own naiveté.”
Eblitis is a primal force embodying both nothingness and the multiplicity of form exemplified by Chaos itself. To speak his name is to invite the despair and futility of an individual soul afloat in the vastness of cosmological time and the inscrutable designs of Creation. Eblitis delights in humiliating and debasing the prideful and the presumptuous, for he knows that mankind has no more cosmic significance than pond scum—and must be made to feel the pointlessness and despair that this should entail. He delights in whispering secrets from the Great Canvas of Creation to the naïve, leading whole peoples to succumb to futility and terror at his awful revelations, abandon their gods and crumble back into fearful barbarity.
The legend Eblitis likes to spin is that he a being of chaos that arose from the first void around the still-forming Elemental Plane of Fire, who then settled into the Abyssal soup long before the obyriths had made their stain upon the planes. Other graybeards link him to Angra Mainyu, claiming that the Speaker in the Void is a daeva emanated from the secretive overpower at the same time as Ahriman, Asmodeus and the like. It’s likely we mere mortals will never know the dark of this, especially considering how secretive all of these powers are about their origins.
Whatever the truth is, Eblitis exists across multiple layers of space-time as a cloud of eyes and chanting voices that phase through the Abyss like fungal hyphae. An epic shape-shifter for whom magic is like air and water, chant goes Eblitis seems to have access to every arcane spell known. He’s a diffuse and myriad entity whose goals and dreams stretch across the furthest reaches of the Multiverse. The Speaker in the Void is nearly omniscient, though needs to coalesce himself into an avatar to use most of his powers. His broad outlook renders his designs in the Abyss much too abstract for him to be considered a very direct player there. His powers are more on a level with the gods than mere Abyssal Lords, and he generally concerns himself with loftier matters than Abyssal feuding. The younger Lords rightly fear him, for they’re wary of the unknown influences that such an ancient proto-demon might subtly exert throughout the Infinite Layers. Few of them are powerful enough to challenge something of his ilk directly, so the tanar’ri lords generally try and ignore him whenever it’s expedient to do so. Any powerful demon who directly involves themselves with the Genies though can expect to feel his wrath.
Pride goeth before destruction and a haughty spirit before a fall
Proverbs 16:18
Eblitis asserts that the Prime Material Plane is the rightful heritage of the genies alone. He considers himself the father and creator of the efreet, claiming to have shaped the first efreeti from the raw stuff of Fire in the Age Before Ages. Despite claiming himself to be the Chief of the Genies, his exact link to the other genie races is unclear—though he has definitely sired numerous bloodlines amongst the jann, khayal, marids and dao. His footholds amongst the djinn and the qorrash are decidedly weaker, due to those races’ respective proclivities towards goodness and law. As for the kizidhar and zuhra, they’ve not been back long enough for cutters to figure that out yet. Eblitis has no love for his charges, nor does he respect them on any individual level. He sees the genies as his trusted flocks of sheep and he despises the undeserved power and influence enjoyed by younger and weaker races in their absence.
Eblitis will not stand any other power currying genies’ worship, or attempting in any way to direct their collective destiny. His designs are probably the reason that genies have remained mostly aloof and distant from the affairs of mortals. Even the gods have generally made no inroads recruiting genie followers, though Eblitis has been much more lax enforcing this with the Primordial Powers of the Inner Planes, such as Kossuth. Despite this, he’s often come to strife with younger Archomental Lords, including Cryonax and Chan, if he has deemed them to have tampered too directly with the fates of his charges.
His disdain for the modern heritors of the Multiverse knows no bounds. The civilisations of the Prime are a slap in the face to one so ancient and prideful. To him, the new races are inferior copies of his genies; crudely shaped by amateurs from the Great Canvas’s leftover dust. Primes are misfits who have no place in the Grand Design and merely ape their greater forebears. Eblitis abhors clerical and shamanistic magic as the tools by which undeserving weaklings have cheated their way to power as the modern gods, allowing them to redirect the course of Creation according to their own childish whims. Divine magic is also what allowed humans and their allies to wrongfully wrest the Prime from the jann, forcing the superior beings into nomadic exile out in the shifting sands. The Black Scrolls of Ahm recount a legend of Eblitis once ruling an entire Prime world—before being banished back to the Abyss by a celestial host summoned by upstart human who’d just learned to use divine magic. But it’s the powers and their followers who are the ultimate insult to Eblitis, and he would dearly love to stamp out divine worship altogether. He particularly despises spirit shamans and witches for their ability to draw power from the superstitions of the godless and uneducated.
Eblitis urges the genies to war against and enslave mortals, and to retake their rightful place as masters of the Prime. Howeber, even the precious genies are scarcely more than chess pieces to Eblitis—mere pawns to be guided and ushered through the history of Creation as their Father sees fit. Subsequently, not even genies of such stature as the Malik-al-khayal or the Sultan of the Charcoal Palace are permitted to look directly upon his favoured Abyssal form. Even his greatest thralls and apostles must avert their gaze if they should attend him in his Abyssal realm. Regardless of the genie race he deals with, the aspect Eblitis manifests outside of the Abyss is always a large, powerful efreeti whose facial features shift from day to day. He cares nothing for petty feuding between the genie races and will not tolerate any of his charges who let such trifling concerns stand in the way of his grand designs. He can command any genie in the immediate presence of one his manifestations at will (as per the spell geas), and when he chooses to involve himself in their affairs directly, he orders and pushes the major movers and shakers at the highest levels of society. Accordingly he maintains direct ties with numerous evil genie nobles across the Inner Planes and beyond.
The Speaker in the Void permits no clerical worship in his name, but rewards his faithful with arcane secrets and truenames of great potency. Supremacy, he believes, is already his, by dint of the fundamental nature of his being, rather than something he need depend upon from the delusions of the weak. Genies that follow his dogma are taught to invade, subvert, colonise, capitalise, rule and conquer cities of the Prime, incrementally enslaving humans and their ilk wherever they can. They believe that the genie races are meant to rule the Prime through the jann; whose role is to act as arbiters and diplomats between the various genie empires. The faithful of Eblitis see the jann as the rightful heritors of the Prime, and cultists typically assist jann to retake their homelands from the imposters who have come to rule in their stead. Chant goes that some militant jann even walk freely around the cities of men, unseen in their earthly guises, working towards the ruin and downfall of mortal civilizations. Naturally this kind of dogma is considerably less popular amongst the shadowy khayal, who have always abhorred the jann. Many khayal honour Eblitis in spite of this though, seeing their own heritage as embodying the False Father’s fabled origins in the first void, and themselves as representatives of a far loftier ideal than the Prime.
Travellers to Nakdar Nakoul, the arid Abyssal layer Eblitis rules, claim that he manifests an avatar there permanently as the layer’s Lord—a huge stork-like bird with three human arms and three bird legs, wielding a scimitar that crackles with stunning enervation. Both serene and terrible, his eyes are like twin pits of the primal void—all-seeing, implacable and utterly pitiless. Chant goes that visitors, even genies, that come to Nakdar Nakoul must never face towards this avatar, and should abase themselves in the roasting sand whenever it speaks. The air itself roars and whispers in a vortex of darkness wherever this horror walks, and those barmies who claim to have been in its proximity say that its wreath of shadow watches them with a multitude of eyes and mock them with voices beyond mortal ken.[Though he predates the obyriths, being another order of being entirely, this effect works much like an obyrith’s form of madnessability. Eblitis is able to summon elementals of various kinds at will, and is typically attended by up to a dozen of them at any given time. His wizardly powers are godlike in scope, and he can prepare any wizard spell known and doubtless numerous others besides.]
Nakdar nakoul ezjaj ou ma youjaach
Forsaker vengeance oath
If he needs to entreat with a mortal in person, Eblitis usually appears as a large male human, or sometimes as a noble efreeti, though in either case his face never stays fixed for more than a few hours. Appearing as either corpulent or heavily muscled, he is outwardly jovial in demeanour but quick to enrage, and is highly prone to displays of violence. Typically he will answer a summons by an overly ambitious demonologist and use them to bring about their own city’s ruin. The ritual to summon an aspect of Eblitis is a coveted secret amongst wizards. Truenamers know of him too and hunger for snippets of his lore, especially the sect of the Bereft. Many seekers of forbidden lore die horribly in the process, simply through making some slight error in the summoning ritual. The False Father is a perfectionist and he tends to repay the slightest inattention to detail with agonising death.
Eblitis delights in letting slip Words of Creation Once Spoken in such interactions, as well as other snippets of forbidden epic magic or the locations of deadly eldritch artefacts from past eons. Fittingly, the demon is known by many different names across Prime civilizations, and one of his more famous appellations is Iblis the False Father. The legends told about him are countless, for he delights in conflating his own influence and history with Asmodeus, even brazenly asserting on certain Prime Worlds to have been the original source of evil itself. He has repeatedly meddled in the affairs of primitive societies, teaching them to use tools and simple arcane magic to suit his own broader purposes; laying the seeds of cargo cults for the genies, in order to hasten their return to power.
His mortal cult considers any attempt to depict his stork-demon form in art as the foulest sacrilege and hubris imaginable [editor’s note—oops!] They fervently believe that humanity’s true place is groveling in the darkness of ignorance and fear. To them, it is just and right that the light of the supreme is denied them, for they know themselves to be flawed and unworthy. Thus, any suggestion that the Father could even possess a mundane form conceivable to humanity is itself taboo—one met with unbridled wrath. Constructing an effigy or drawing a picture of Eblitis is grounds for the worst tortures that his cult can conceive of. Any mortal discovered binding a genie or possessing an item containing a bound genie will be fanatically opposed by Eblitis’s loyal servants, sometimes across multiple generations.
His Prime devotees include street preaching barmies and soothsayers who often choose to blind themselves or flay their mouths and gullets through ingesting shards of glass. These so-called Forsakers are men and women become rats, who loathe their own species and welcome their own worthy demise. Human Forsakers renounce their homes and possessions and go to live in cursed ruins. They are only permitted to eat cast-off leavings or that which they can steal, favoring befouled and rotten foodstuffs as befits their station. Even though he despises divine casters, rarely an exceptionally nihilistic and misanthropic mortal druid will succumb to this dogma too, and serve his decrees as a Walker in the Waste.
Ironically, Eblitis is himself the patron god of an enigmatic race of intelligent storks called the eblis, who fittingly, are too primitive to train as actual clerics. The eblis are seen by mortal folk as testimony to the ever-present gaze of the fiery dawn and symbols of the river delta on which men of the wastelands must beg to survive. They are harbingers of drought and reminders of the vast night in which men must blindly crawl. Eblitis never deigns to deal with his avian charges directly, delegating this duty to his half-fiend son Sut the Angel of Lies; whom he once sired with an eblis hen during a pique of depraved curiosity. As his proxy, Sut preaches hatred and xenophobia towards other Prime races and adoration of the Inner Planes and the basic elements.
Eblitis is attended by a motley host of demonic elementals, and evil genies of all kinds, as well as a select handful of strange and horrific entities which seem demonic, elemental or genie in form, yet are older and fouler still. His armies are small and select hosts, and never stoop to join the Blood War. Eblitis’s forces are occasionally deployed in the Inner Planes against the Archomental Lords. Some of his servants are smaller and weaker spirits from the first void, who have remained in loose service to the False Father since time immemorial.
Worse still are those rare enlightened members of his genie congregation who’ve tumbled to the true nature of their Lord and Father, and been irrevocably altered in mind and body in the process [gaining the pseudonatural template]. The best known of these are a fanatical order of khayal called the Muta-Araqil. They are acolytes of Eblitis, who have undertaken an unholy pilgrimage to a mystical Abyssal site called the Burning Tower, where they claim a deeper truth about the Speaker in the Void can be realised. Those who return seem somehow twisted outside of normal time and space; their now black-feathered bodies blurring and discorporating as they move, at times appearing as shifting conglomerations of staring eyes. Few assassins can hope to match the stealth of a Muta-Araqilim, and they are only ever deployed against Eblitis’s direst enemies.
Eblitis has little time for most of the high-ups of the Abyss. He retains a grudging respect for Dagon and the Great Mother, as fellow ancient beings steeped in the lost lore of the Age before Ages. Generally speaking, most tanar’ri lords are beneath his notice, save for those like Lolth who have ascended to become something greater. The Liber Maleficarum connects him with the obscure Nameless Ones said to slumber in the Abyssal depths.
He particularly despises Alzrius, the Zealot’s Fire and Lord of Infernal Light, who has benefited from forbidden divine worship from renegade efreet since the War of Law and Chaos. Eblitis will stop at nothing to stamp out cults to the Zealot’s Fire and seeks tirelessly to ensure that they gain no lasting foothold upon the Inner Planes. The Speaker in the Void maliciously smears Alzrius’s standing in the Abyss through whispered rumours that Alzrius has been corrupted by Baator. His Forsaken devotees are likewise charged with opposing Alzrius’s mortal demagogue followers if ever they arise within a Prime civilisation. Eblitis’s agents enact fearful omens and prophecies to stifle Alzrius’s revolutionary fire; seeking to dampen the powder keg before a spark can ignite it. For its part, the primal and fanatical Lord of Infernal Light is far too consumed with the Blood War to even notice such subtle opposition.
Eblitis’s own relationship with Baator remains shrouded in mystery, but certain apocryphal texts list an ancient race of she-devils called the peris as his greatest enemy of all. The Ex Infernus postulates that the peris were originally a legion of ancient Baatorians once tasked with ordering the Inner Planes during the Dawn War. A legend recounted in its crackling pages implies that the peris still exist, and maintain a network of Inner Planar wards that restrict his influences there to this day. Whatever the truth, Nakdar Nakoul is known to house a highly trained army led by Eblitis’s own son Dasim the Angel of Discord, which hunts tirelessly for an elusive foe whose nature no outsider has ever divined.
The Five Sons of Eblitis
Eblitis has five sons who act as his proxies, generals and agents. Each one is a half-fiend begotten long ago with mortals in couplings foul and blasphemous. Eblitis’ penchant for depravity and lust is another instance of his need to dominate and control the fates of mortals. His sons are much more direct players in the Abyss than he and, largely out of fear of him, they work to sow meaningless conflicts between other powerful beings of evil in honour of their father’s infinite superiority.
Sut
The Lord of Lies. CE eblis tiefling [he/him]
Sut is Eblitis’ most powerful vassal. His son is half-eblis and appears as a demonic stork. In addition to acting as Eblitis’ herald before the eblis, he’s occasionally dispatched as an envoy to the courts of powers across the Lower and Inner Planes. His bluffs are nearly impossible to discern, due to his knowledge of the word of lies, which is apparently from the Language Primeval. Sut is well-versed in truename magics, which he uses to further bolster his prowess as a diplomat and manipulator.
Dasim
The Angel of Discord. CE bar-lgura-blooded tiefling [he/him]
Dasim is a large ugly baboon-like half-fiend of uncertain maternity. He employs truenames and words of power, but unlike his elder half-brother, he’s also a mighty combatant who prefers to lead his father’s armies in battle. His favoured shock troops are Abyssal eviscerators. Dasim’s most potent ability is his dreaded word of discord, which can shatter the resolve of even the best trained armies and erode the firmament of creation itself. Dasim is primarily tasked with hunting down and exterminating the peris. Within the Abyss he is currently honing his tactical abilities by orchestrating a conflict between the tanar’ri fire lords Marduk and Flauros. He is revered by the Doomguard and the Undone, who admire his mastery in the arts of unmaking creation.
Awar
Lord of Lubricity. CE vrock-blooded tiefling [he/him]
Sometimes a softer and more subtle touch is needed in order to break the foundations of a mortal empire. Awar specialises in seducing and sullying the pure, eroding faith and weakening convictions. Awar uses acts of sexual depravity to break the spirits of his foes, forcing them to embrace their basest and most animal natures, before leaving them to wallow in shame and despair. This fiend of corruption appears as a huge peacock with winged arms ending in featherlike fingers, but he’s a potent shapeshifter and more likely encountered as the object of his victim’s desire. His maternal bloodline is unknown.
Zalambar
The Lying Merchant. CE couatl-blooded tiefling [he/him]
A bizarre beast sired upon with defiled and broken couatl, Zalambar is a mighty flying feather serpent with seven heads and even more wings. Eblitis’ influence amongst the djinn is comparatively weak, for they despise his favoured efreet children and are repelled by his corruption. Zalambar is his father’s predominant agent upon the Elemental Plane of Air, where he works alongside a corrupting auran spirit called Valefor the Duke of Thieves. Zalambar seeks to subvert and garnish minor djinn nobles on his father’s behalf, fomenting black market capitalism and secret trade links with the City of Brass. He works directly against the designs of Chan, seeking to weaken her influence amongst the djinn.
Tir
The Lord of Misfortune. CE merrow tiefling [he/him]
Tir appears as a boar-headed fish monster with humanoid arms; one white and one black. He wears a tarnished brass crown, and chant goes his mother was a particularly unpleasant merrow. Tir is commonly engaged upon the Elemental Plane of Water, where he seeks to draw marids into his father’s wicked plots. The staging ground for this corruption is a pointless war Eblitis has engineered in the Murky Depths between Blidoolpoolp and a powerful Abyssal entity known as Mot. Tir occasionally converses with Dagon upon the Shadowsea, with whom his father is on good terms. On the Prime, Tir wreaks havoc upon coastal settlements with typhoons, tsunamis and shipwrecks. The Lord of Misfortune seeks to quash the hubris of mortals who try to master the oceans. Beneath the waves he seeks to turn marids towards cruelty, genies whom his father seeks to make overlords of the aquatic races. On Oerth, Tir is associated with the star of Mercury, and is believed to be strongest upon the 13th day of each month.
Sources: Dalmosh (article rescued from defunct Planewalker.com archive); edited by Jon Winter-Holt. Mythologywatch: Eblitis and his sons are drawn from real world religion. See also Green Ronin’s Iblis the Duke of Pride, in Legions of Hell, which is another take on this character focussing on different aspects of the myth. Eblitis is often considered an aspect of Shaitan in real world faiths. Rip van Wormer first named and numbered his Abyssal layer Nakdar Nakoul. The eblis are an AD&D 2e monster that worship a being called Eblitis.