Snagged from the Vault: The Great Beyond

Friday, March 13, 2009

After yesterday's fateful misadventure, we have decided against heavily drinking Qadiran firewine before plumbing the depths of the Vault in the future. Today, dear readers, we promise to fetch only the finest art from the Golem's boundless treasury. Presented here are the axiomites and astradaemons from Pathfinder Chronicles: The Great Beyond, illustrated by Sarah Stone. Our deepest apologies for the errors of our last theft.

Vadid and Nahk
Preview Purloiners

The lords, caretakers, and architects of the eternal city of Axis, the axiomites possess a wide variety of outward forms, oddly unlike the uniformity displayed by their fellow natives, the hive-dwelling formians. A random cross-section of axiomite society contains those who resemble flawless, perfect humanoids of all descriptions—typically humans, elves, tieflings, dwarves, halflings, giants, and even gnomes—but these outward shapes belie their true forms, which can be seen briefly whenever the axiomites move or perform any complex actions. During such moments, their bodies partly dissolve into glowing clouds of golden, crystalline dust. The clouds move and contort on their own accord, temporarily congealing into twisting lines of mathematic symbols and complex tangles of equations. Each axiomite is actually an immortal construct of living, intelligent mathematics approximating a humanoid shape.

Astradaemons appear as ghostly, faintly phosphorescent, rail-thin humanoids with exaggeratedly long limbs. The fiends also have a seemingly random number of translucent tentacles trailing from their backs, shoulders, and upper arms, which wave and weave through the air. Their bizarre forms possess heads that are skeletal, elongated, and vaguely piscine, reptilian, or canine, always bearing hungry rictus grins. Wicked, curved claws sprout from their hands and feet, and each creature’s tail moves in rhythm with its tentacles, typically hanging toward the ground and almost doubling its length. As the perpetually ravenous servitors of Abbadon’s archdaemons, the astradaemons’ touch is corruptive and damaging to the spiritual material of souls. Their touch and especially their bite can cause horrific damage, akin to that of a wraith, to anything they attack. Most feared, however, is their ability to utterly consume the souls of those killed in their proximity, feeding off of their essence or dragging it back to their fiendish overlords.