Nyarlathotep

Nyarlathotep - known also as the Thousand Tongued Prophet, the Malicious One and the Defiler of Truth - was one of the twelve Dark Lords that governed the multiverse before Mankind, and a source of all eldritch-themed magic. Only a scant few things are known about him - while the most talkative of the Dark Lords, to listen to a single word of his was to invite madness to the great house of Mankind.
There are inscriptions left in various abandoned citadels in the second layer of Abyss, but watching them is rarely safe for your mind, and even aberrants tend to deface them when they move in.

Physical Description

Body Features

Nyarlathotep was an extremely accomplished shapeshifter, to the point where his actual look remains unknown - many suspect that simply due to the fact that whoever saw him in that state promptly lose his mind, perpetuating the mystery. If the 'Thousand Tongued Prophet' moniker that his servitors used to refer to him is literal, he had exactly one thousand faces to choose from. If this was a metaphore, we're back to square one.

Special abilities

Nyarlatothep's power lied in his infectious madness. To hear his voice was to be driven insane - and while Mankind did find a way of fixing that, it still required purge of a lot of memories and sizeable alteration of what's left (and that's if you managed to disarm and incarcerate whoever was driven insane without killing him). What's worse, on a shorter distance he simply didn't need to speak, for his mere presence did the job.
His another specialty was the worrying degree of his understanding of humans. Instead of sending millions of cannonfodder against human armies, his armies were much more subtle. They actually used tactics, made attempts on deception, understand the importance of supply routes, and employed numerous forms of psychological warfare. It allowed them to keep humans occupied for a long time, despite their relatively inferior numbers.
On two separate occasions Nyarlatothep somehow infiltrated human armies, replaced some top officers, and then spoke to his soldiers - instantly driving entire divisions into a homicidal insanity.

Mental characteristics

Personal history

Nobody knows whom the Nyarlatothep was before he became a Dark Lord. Some of the less cognitohazardous inscriptions scattered throughout the Abyss saw some indiscript entity acting like a representative (or a priest) to some unspeakable, formless things - so perhaps he was some sort of a mad prophet or a religious person otherwise? Whatever it was, he ended up lording over Abyss for eternity, before the Great Multiversal War started.
He has managed to delay human advance for several years, holding ground for the longest time among all the Dark Lords. Finally, however, he was cornered and slain, although nobody knows how exactly. At least one apocryphal record suggests that it wasn't done by Mankind, and instead he was 'devoured' by something that emerged from the mythical third layer of Abyss, when he was forced to retreat to a fortress built around a chasm leading downward.

Age

Timeless