Medusa

Medusa are Thaia-thaan'ag cult leaders whose bodies are hosts to a nest of symbiotic amphisbaena. Their neck, shoulders, back, and head are grotesquely swollen and writhe continuously beneath the skin. At the base of the skull a spray of snaking bodies break through - this eruption weeps a viscous pus the flailing heads not chained with others of their ilk constantly lick away.

The narcotic venom sluicing through their bodies imbues medusas with visions of nascent godhood and a remarkable resistance to injury or persuasion. Linked to their slaves along serpentine coils they pursue the contradictory goals of increasing their own glory and the destruction of all life surrounding them. If threats or promises prove insufficient to deter a threat, a medusa is willing to tear into its own undulating flesh, producing fistfuls of angry, toxic amphisbaena.

Villagers tell tales of the mother and master of medusas, Aiatar. Her entire corpulence boils and heaves with toxic life, wears a cape woven of her own slithering young, and eats up little children. Of course these tales are most popular with the concerned parents in the darkly wooded and dismal-hilled borderlands past the southern border of the Lands, so who is to lend them credence?