Verrilax

Verrilax are fey oddities found near moonlit marshes, ruined bathing grottos, and places where the border between the living world and the dreaming is thinnest. Folktales from marsh villages tell of a 'white-mouth that births the dusk' — Verrilax are often blamed for strange, sudden illnesses in livestock and for children waking from sleep with tiny bite marks. Scholars debate whether Verrilax are aberrant spawn of bog spirits or deliberate creations of a long-dead marsh witch named Surna Vel. The witch is said to have bound pieces of dreamstuff into the mouths of common frogs to craft living guardians and brood-carriers; Verrilax are thought by some to be the surviving, wayward results of those experiments. Naturalists note that Verrilax hunt opportunistically: it eats insects, small fish, and carrion, but uses its spectral tadpoles as both projectile and distraction to catch larger prey. The tiny spectral frogs it can cause to bloom are ephemeral — they harry and bite for a minute before dispersing into cold mist. A group of swamp rangers known as the Glasfen Ward has catalogued Verrilax behavior: the Ward avoids Verrilax during the waning gibbous moon, when the toads are most likely to spawn broods. The taciturn scholar Ilenn of Brenmar wrote a short treatise, 'Of Brood and Borrowed Breath,' warning that Verrilax may be drawn to pockets of lingering grief or unquiet graves, places where the dreaming clings to waking flesh.

Verrilax is roughly the size of a common toad (about 6–8 inches long, weight comparable to a small rabbit). Its skin is pearl-white, slightly translucent at the belly, with a slick, waxy sheen and small, wartlike nodules along the back that glimmer faintly when moonlight strikes them. The eyes are unnaturally large, lidless, and a deep blood-red with tiny vertical slits; they have a wet, glassy surface. The mouth is wide and slightly upturned, permanently parted to reveal dozens of tiny, pale tadpoles coiled within — each tadpole appears as a faint outline, semi-transparent with a soft inner glow and tiny black flecks where eyes would be. When the toad spits or opens wide, those tadpoles uncoil and slide out as half-solid, half-smoke forms. Limbs are stubby but sinewy, tipped with sticky, webbed toes. Scale reference: stands about knee-high on a halfling and reaches roughly mid-calf on a human; often pictured sitting on a wet stone or the root of a bog oak with a ring of damp reeds around it.