Zarqelith

The creature can take 3 legendary actions per round, choosing from the options below.

Centuries ago a wandering changeling known only in fragments as the Mask of Many sought permanence and power by bargaining with six banned elemental lords: Vyrath (Fire Sovereign of the Ash Spire), Hyelus (Gale-Voice of the High Tempest), Neralune (Tide-Matron of the Deep Brine), Korrg (Stone-Tyrant of the Rift Vault), Umbriel (Shadow-Patriarch of the Hollowed Shade), and Morveth (Necrospectre of the End-Well). Each pact demanded worshippers and rites on the Material Plane. Zarqelith answered with cunning: it founded cults that masqueraded as relief orders, guilds, and miracle-workers to gather converts and blood for ritual. Over decades these cults performed the rites that bound shards of the elemental lords into Zarqelith’s flesh. Scholars of the occult, like High Censor Thamrel of the Collegium Irid, argue that Zarqelith is neither wholly changeling nor wholly vessel: the elemental shards constantly whisper to one another and to their host, ensuring the Concordant's goals align with all six patrons just enough to avoid being torn apart. Known cult networks — the Brinefold Communion, the Ashward Conclave, the Stoneveil Cloister — now operate in port-cities and mountain-forges, and expeditions to purge them have found ruins where water scoured stone into grotesque sculptures and shadows swallowed entire regiments. Most who confront Zarqelith unprepared find themselves fighting not one foe but six overlapping catastrophes.

A tall, lithe humanoid whose baseline visage is pale and androgynous, Zarqelith’s body shows obvious grafts: veins of black glass run beneath skin, fissures leak ember-orange light, a braided plume of drifting vapor hangs off one shoulder like a living scarf, and the right forearm is capped in coarse basalt studded with mineral seams. One eye is a pupil of liquid ink that refracts starlight; the other glows like cooled magma. Where the changeling’s mouth moves to smile, a thin seam of shadow yawns. Along the spine small barnacle-like pustules weep a briny ooze; the hands shift subtly between clawed, webbed, and stony shapes. Its clothing is an eclectic collage: a priest's stole singed at the edges, a captain's sash threaded with salt, and rings of iron carved with runes of burial and storm. Scale: about human-sized, stands roughly as tall as a man in a doorway; elemental grafts make its silhouette asymmetrical and unnerving.