Achaierai

This bird-like beast is mostly head, lunging forward on four scaly legs. Wisps of noxious black vapor trail from its hooked beak.

Defense

Offense

Statistics

Ecology

Description

Black Cloud (Su) An achaierai can exhale a cloud of choking, toxic smoke three times per day. All creatures within 10 feet of the achaierai immediately take 2d6 points of damage as their flesh melts and rots away. The cloud erodes sanity as well as flesh, and anyone who takes damage from the black cloud must also make a DC 15 Fortitude save or become confused. Every round, the victim may attempt another DC 15 Fortitude save to recover from the confusion; otherwise it persists, lasting indefinitely until the condition is removed or the victim eventually makes her saving throw. The confusion element of a black cloud is a mind-affecting effect. The save DC is Constitution-based. This is a poison effect. Achaierais are immune to this ability.

An achaierai is a predator and scavenger of the lower planes that looks like a 15-foot-tall flightless bird, though its head and body are fused into one large unit, with four legs and atrophied wings. The thick, oily plumage covering its body all but conceals these tiny wings. An adult achaierai weighs roughly 750 pounds.

Though not devils themselves, achaierais live and hunt on the scorched and blasted plains of Hell, where they make excellent use of their long, stilt-like legs in running down any lost souls or lesser devils who stumble into their feeding grounds. Once it has closed with its target, an achaierai attacks with its two front legs, punching or slashing, as well as biting with its powerful beak. Far smarter than their animalistic form might suggest, achaierais prefer to hunt in shrieking packs and use their prey’s confusion and their own reach to their advantage, circling their quarry and darting in to attack as soon as the victim becomes distracted, then retreating again before the prey has a chance to retaliate. They have been known to wander through battlefields in the lower planes, picking over dying and regenerating creatures and souls, which has earned them the nickname “Hell’s vultures.” As achaierais are immune to the toxic clouds of others of their kind, they often work in conjunction to use these clouds to herd or scatter enemies, form long lines of black clouds to protect their retreat, or merely panic opponents in large melees. Achaierais are fond of disemboweling their targets and feasting on the hot entrails while their mortally wounded prey screams itself to death. Of course, as outsiders, achaierais have no need to eat, and their elaborate hunting routines are simply the bird-beasts’ sick form of entertainment.

Aeon Beyond passion, beyond mercy, beyond reason, the faceless caretakers of reality toil without end, silently struggling to preserve the tenuous balance upon which all existence depends. These voiceless forces are the aeons, inscrutable shapers and eliminators of the multiverse. They exist beyond the understanding of most mortals, endlessly striving toward goals unfathomable even to many of the planes’ eldest inhabitants. Aeons build order from the chaos of the Maelstrom, seed new life upon barren worlds, and halt the rampages of forces grown overbold. They rend nations to vapor, dismantle planets into cosmic dust, and pave the way for calamities. Their ways are at one moment beneficent and in the next utterly devastating, but always without ardor, compassion, or malice. Every aeon dispassionately but determinedly strives toward the same objective—an ever changing, amending, and readjusting pursuit of multiplanar equilibrium. United in this eternal and perhaps impossible pursuit, aeons embody the planes-spanning hand of a metaphorical omnipotent clockmaker, endlessly tuning and adjusting the myriad gears of reality in pursuit of ultimate perfection. The balance aeons seek in all things begins with themselves. Most aeons embody a powerful dichotomy sustained in equilibrium. From the potency of birth and death meeting in akhanas to the philosophies of fate and freedom embodied by theletos, the workings of existence take on form and will within their living manifestations. Even the lesser paracletus unite diverse elements of creation in their intricate orbits. Such stability reaches beyond the shapes of aeons to inspire and direct their minds, imbuing each with a singular purpose and area of control. Thus, each embodies the realm of reality it would seek to balance, attempting to enforce a harmony as perfect as that of its physical form upon all things. The forms of various types directly suggest their abilities and objectives, with pleroma aeons, for example, exhibiting the power to create or annihilate, and using such influence to alter that which has grown either too abundant or sterile.

While aeons are not malicious creatures, they care nothing for individual beings or the struggles and emotions central to most life. The ruin of an entire city or burning of a vast forest means equally little in their manipulation of symmetry. By the same right, creating new life or constructing defenses against impending calamities are equally characteristic acts. For aeons, only the final tally matters, and a land overpopulated by humanoids is just as much in need of culling as a land overrun by ravenous fungi. Just as a body’s natural defenses have neither mercy nor malice for invading parasites, aeons don’t muddy their objectives with emotion. Such impartiality extends to the interactions between aeons as well. Without culture, society, or even memory beyond the immediate needs of the multiverse, they build no relationships and, in general, have no personalities beyond an automaton-like directness. A vague caste system exists, with aeons that hold influence over greater multiversal principles acknowledged as superior by their lesser brethren. This caste system rarely translates to actual direction and obedience, though. Should the acts of a greater aeon jeopardize the works or even lives of a multitude of lesser aeons, the efforts of the more potent aeon proceed without hesitation. Only in matters of great existential concern do multiple aeons cooperate, directed into doing so by the united consciousness of their race and the multiverse itself, and even then rarely for long.

Many mistake aeons for friends or allies of nature and its creatures. While this might be true at times—and is definitely true if reality as a whole is considered a vast, united organism—aeons care no more for the trees of the forest than for the towers of civilization. For them, all life is life and all death is death, to be preserved or scoured regardless of its arbitrary shape.

In rare cases, aeons have been known to deviate from the whims of the multiverse. Such rogue aeons typically arise from interacting with other races excessively, living beyond their intended times, being exposed to unusual ideas, or being forced to perform acts they otherwise wouldn’t contemplate. These aeons typically take on extreme personalities, coming to favor one aspect of their being over the other—an akhana is just as likely to become an artist of life as a mass murderer. Normal aeons perceive their rogue brethren as high-priority disturbances in the balance of the multiverse and seek the destruction of such rarities with all haste.

Monad, the Condition of All All aeons are bound in a state they know as “the condition of all” or “monad,” a supreme oneness with all members of their race and the multiverse itself. Therefore, aeons exist as an extension of the multiverse; in a fashion similar to the way bones, muscle, and the various humors create a mortal, they exist as part of a greater being. When destroyed or upon accomplishing specific goals, their energies simply dissipate and become reabsorbed into the monad. They do not die, but are instead recycled. They have no discernible memories and seem to exist only in the present, arriving to repair balance. Relationships with non-aeons are generally nonexistent, and they feel no sense of affection, remorse, vengeance, or similar emotions. Aeons deal with each task as its own action, independent from all other tasks. Thus, an individual once at violent odds with an aeon may, upon their next encounter, have the aeon’s full and undaunted support. Aeon–Aeon, Akhana Aeon–Aeon, Akhana Aeon, Akhana Four gray arms project from a swirling mass resembling a giant eye, from which a tail-like appendage dangles.

Source: Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Bestiary 2