Bryrvath

Bryrvath

(Creature)

Type

Aberration

CR

15

Environment

Any (Aucturn)

Alignment

LG	NG	CG
LN	N	CN
LE	NE	CE

Source: Alien Archive, pg(s). 24

Bryrvaths are aberrations native to Aucturn that consume light and twist it into an impossible spectrum.

Appearance

A bryrvath is difficult to describe because of the way its body interacts with light and darkness, and different witnesses often provide conflicting accounts. These tales tell of a creature whose head is constantly shrouded and who possesses multiple limbs (no exact number is known), at least one of which ends in obsidian claws. A bryrvath appears to lack a skeleton, and when it moves, its body seems somehow out of joint with itself: its limbs may appear detached in one moment, and in the next, its torso may seem to split at an impossible angle. The average bryrvath is 6 feet tall when standing upright and weighs approximately 250 pounds.

A feeding bryrvath emanates a distorted aura of maddening impossible colours. According to many occult scholars, the visible bryrvath is only a fraction of its true self, it exists simultaneously in several other dimensions, and its impossible aura is but a glimpse of the bryrvath's other facets.

Ecology

Bryrvaths feed on any source of light that they can find, whether natural, artificial or magical, nourishing itself with the photons in its vicinity. It's unknown whether they do this out of hunger, or actually seek to snuff out light as a perverse pleasure.

In an illuminated area, a bryrvath can slash its claws through the air, rending the spectrum into tatters and producing a stationary anomaly of twisting and roiling, half-seen, non-Euclidean shapes. Some who see a bryrvath's display of impossible colours are plagued with nightmares until death, envisioning alien cities or planets baking beneath a sun that blazes with unearthly hues, and display a tendency towards colour-blindness. Bryrvaths prefer areas covered in darkness and rarely linger long in places exposed to natural light. Bryrvaths can also unleash a focused ray of light that burns like a laser rifle. Due to their unusual feeding needs, bryrvaths rarely require tools.

Society

Despite their intelligence, bryrvaths have no advanced society, though they sometimes congregate in small groups around a source of bright light.

An obscure field of study, called esoteric optics, originated from scholars who seek to fabricate the necessary detection equipment to discover a bryrvath's true nature, and blends optics with arcane rituals. Experts in this field risk their lives and their sanity studying bryrvaths, hoping to recreate their predilection for absorbing and ingesting light; their efforts created the aura goggles that can mitigate sight-based attacks. Esoteric optics is not well-known in the Pact Worlds system and sometimes appears in the news when a scientist splashes acid in his eyes, starts raving about 'the impending refraction' and gets declared mentally ill.