Tyrant

While the Seekers are vigilant in their patrols of the Black Forests borders, it is inevitable that people sometimes slip in. Whether it is curiosity or wanderlust, people want to enter the cursed woods and many are unfortunate enough to run into a Tyrant.

Physique and abilities

Like a tumor growing from the dead ground, the Tyrant is a large fleshy mass of what researchers have concluded to be a type of brain matter. It is immobile and benign in its physical capabilities. However, a Tyrant will, using a method not understood by the scientific and magical community, mesmerize the individual and enslave their mind. Once it has done this, the individual will stand by its new masters side, find it food (offering up their own flesh if nothing else is available) and even defend it with his or her life.

The longer the individual spends under the Tyrant's yoke, the more physical corruption sets in. Limbs split into new configurations, fingers stretch into abominable claws and the entire head might even be cocooned in the same kind of fleshy mass as the Tyrant itself is.

Enthrallment

Curiously, the Tyrant does not seem to rob its victims of all reason, as those enthralled by one have been witnessed to plead for the life of their Hateling master, that the Seekers putting the beast down are making a grave mistake. Seekers have even stumbled onto entire cults worshiping their Tyrant master in makeshift chapels they have constructed from the rotting wood of the forest, members of which can be found in the city-states, too.

One such cult, the so-called Congregation of Witnesses, surfaces again and again despite the repeated deaths of its master, which would indicate that perhaps each Tyrant is not an individual creature but a growth that is part of a larger organism that has spread throughout the forest like a cancer, and all those that are enslaved by one are actually worshiping the same being. Such a notion is disturbing to say the least.

Nearing it, it feels like something is trying to talk to me. Not with words or even thoughts, it's just a... connection trying to form.

I have chosen not to let it.

-Seeker Bronsmith

by AI-generated

_{A Tyrant with its thrall. Note the drastic physical changes brought about by extended servitude to the creature.}