Kothogaz

Unyielding Kothogaz, the Dance of Disharmony

From the fragmentary Ezida Scrolls, unearthed along the southern coast of the Castrovin Sea in what was once the kingdom of Ninshabur, comes the most complete description of Kothogaz to ever make its way to the Inner Sea region. While most of the document appears to have been dissolved in some sort of acid, what is left reads:
...[the] abomination wears the shell of a horned beetle, having insectile wings made of veins and shattered glass. Yet beneath the massive spiked shell onto its back, the creature’s body is horrifyingly all too humanoid. It is slug-like, though long, insectile legs jutting from its torso pull it forward. It has four arms, two ending in huge pincers... The thing’s head is little more than a bump upon its shoulders, with an elongated, elaborate mouth stretching from the top of its head to... dozens of gleaming eyes running parallel to that awful chasm on either side. Its body is covered in wet, chitinous armor; always, it is dripping a rain of drool and worse corruption from its leaking body.

Lore

The totality of Vudra’s might stood arrayed against the blighted Kothogaz as he lurched across Casmaron—and from their eventual, anguished conquest over his blasphemous power sprang the bloodline of Khiben-Sald, the one true Maharaja of the Impossible Kingdoms. Within two centuries of the beast’s fall, the hundred semi-independent kingdoms of that fabled land were ruled by a single raja, who brought tales of victory with him to the courts of Nex and used that power and influence to establish a hold upon the Isle of Jalmeray that persists to this day.
It is said that the blasphemy that is Kothogaz angered and mutilated the very soil beneath it as it came, generating polyp-covered horrors from the slick earth over which it passed, and spraying forth the reanimated, spittle-coated corpses of devoured dead from wounds in its belly. A single bite from the Dance of Disharmony is said to have poisoned and tarnished the great gold-scaled dragon Trilochan, which now makes a ravaged and forsaken home for itself in the wastes of the Narhari desert, screeching and breathing futile flames at visions it perceives through its ulcerous third eye. In all, the Vudrani hero-priests of that age spent more than a million lives to bring the beast down, pushing it into the sea and then boiling the very ocean.

Resurrection

In Vudra, it is considered a crime to speak aloud the name of Kothogaz, and talk of his return is punished with the exile of entire households. Still, there are persistent whispers that the beast’s still-beating heart was cut into 101 pieces, with a single quivering sliver given to each king who swore allegiance to the first maharaja; the largest piece, it is said, was taken to far-off Jalmeray and buried beneath the pleasure-city Padiskar, the better to ensure that the Dance of Disharmony would never rise again. Should the pieces be reunited, however, it’s possible that the amorphous heart might grow itself another body.

Species

Spawn of Rovagug