AntiPhoenix

Actions

Talons: +12 to hit, 5 ft. 2d8 piercing damage. Target must succeed a DC 18 Strength check or be grappled.
Bite: +12 to hit, 5ft. 1d10 piercing damage. Instant hit against grappled targets.
Flystrike: +16 to hit, 120ft. 6d6 slashing damage as the AntiPhoenix flies through the target, cutting them with its wing feathers as it passes.
Leap: Leaps up to 45ft., and attacks with talons. If the target is grappled, the AntiPhoenix immediately bites them.

BUDDHA WAS WRONG. THE HINDUS ARE WRONG.
History does repeat itself. But then it stops. It’s all going to come to an end one day. The stars will burn out. Time will stop. And god won’t slurp it all back up and vomit it out again in a different pattern. That’s it. There is one AntiPhoenix and only one. Things find their meaning in their end. For a thing to live it has to die. For a thing to exist it has to not-exist. No end; no meaning. The AntiPhoenix is the end. Final and irrevocable. When it dies even the terms used to describe it will fall like old leaves. A rainbow of darkness. In normal glows the AntiPhoenix burns, a Hiroshima-storm of Atom-Bomb-ravenwings. The negative image pinwheel, a whirling, dancing archive of every imagined colour of black. An oil slick, vast and far as you can see, that holds the light from one bright star in the empty carbonised sky. This is the lesser image of the AntiPhoenix; douse the light and its true form begins to reveal itself.

As total darkness falls upon the eye, the rods revolt and cones rise up. They crackle slightly in the black, reluctant in sleep. Like dreaming dogs they twitch. Absolute blackness can’t be seen by us, except in contrast with light. Unless the AntiPhoenix is there. Its absence rides the blackness, infiltrates the eye, and inverts the signals in your optic nerve. The background-grey recedes. A deeper darkness seems to grow. A shadow in a shadow, a storm cloud in an eclipsed sky with slowly growing shape and form. The light-sensing cells in your eye spasm and freak; instead of sending signals to the brain they start demanding energy to live. The brain responds and amps up your eye-nerves with sustaining volts. The eye stops receiving energy, and starts to gently glow*. Your pupils luminate. Simply looking at the creature in darkness is slowly draining your mind and life and soul out through your eyes.
It’s nothing personal, this is just the effect the AntiPhoenix has. It’s not trying to kill you, though it fully accepts your death is inevitable and absolute, like all death. No-one who dies at the claw of the AntiPhoenix or around the AntiPhoenix or even thinking deeply about the AntiPhoenix will ever come back, by any method, fictional, meta-fictional, or divine. Ever. The AntiPhoenix is a master of words and generally sad. It only speaks and cannot be reached by any other form of communication. An expert in poetic forms, it knows all forgotten tongues and none that live**. To talk to it, you must learn a language, ruined and extinct; only then will it allow you the slightest attention. It knows everything that has passed (most things), all that will die (most of the rest), and a bit about immortals (doesn’t like them, fakers). It ends things, sometimes things like lives and hopes and loves but also sometimes curses, tyrants and pain. It sometimes wants things – old poetry is a favorite; lost things; memories; highly secret and deeply lost artifacts, powerless but significant. Decoding its instructions is the hardest thing about working for it. Every single part of its body is extremely valuable and extremely dangerous. The kind of people who would want these parts are all uniformly terrified of going anywhere near it. No ghosts nearby. Ever. Too scared. ^{*It's quite pretty actually, although only the AntiPhoenix will ever actually see this. **It probably knows these too but refuses to use them.} The AntiPhoenix nest smells like the memory of ash in an old, cold hearth, and like myrrh.