Protean

Guardians of disorder and natives of the primal plane of chaos known as the Maelstrom, proteans consider it their calling to spread bedlam and hasten entropic ends. The most powerful proteans are demigods known collectively as the protean lords, although they are mysterious entities whose cults on the Material Plane tend to be obscure and secretive.
Proteans divide themselves into a loose caste system and possess a dizzying variety of powers. Most proteans have a serpentine body with the head of a primeval beast. Scholars have long been intrigued by this fact—that scions of dissolution and disorder would share so many features—pointing out that even in the purest chaos there is some semblance of order. Others note that the serpentine form is one of the most primeval shapes, perhaps suggesting that in a reality at the dawn of time, such shapes were all that could exist. The proteans themselves have little to say on the matter, which, perhaps ironically, only adds to the confusion and lack of consensus surrounding their kind. After all, if even chaos cannot be trusted to be chaotic, would that not be the purest form of entropy?

Like bizarre, primordial sea serpents cavorting through the Maelstrom’s endless depths, proteans are among the eldest of the monitor outsiders. They are the physical embodiment of chaos and change, uncorrupted by good or evil. Protean culture, if it could be said to exist as a monolith, embodies one maxim: change occurs, and each protean is an agent of that change. Proteans view the other planes as some combination of mistakes, curiosities that will fade in time, or metaphysical cancers lodged painfully in the Maelstrom’s flesh. With inscrutable motives and actions that are often bizarre and whimsical, proteans are difficult for mortals and even many outsiders to comprehend and interact with,
a situation compounded by the fractured nature of proteans’ immediate goals at any given point.
In many ways, proteans exist as not only supremely self-willed beings of creation and destruction but also extensions of the Maelstrom itself. They function as the plane’s senses, its myriad limbs, and more properly as its immune system, reacting violently against the pathogen of law and stability that riddles the ocean of quintessence that is its corpus. Paradoxically for creatures of chaos, proteans are organized into groupings known as choruses, each led by keketar and izfiitar priest-kings that seem to share a deep connection with the Maelstrom.
The protean lords themselves are not ruling entities, instead functioning as itinerant prophets with a status above and beyond the choruses’ quasi-hierarchy. Most proteans believe the protean lords to perceive the will of the Speakers of the Depths, the inherent purity of the chaotic nature of the Maelstrom made manifest. The protean lords appear to share a fragment of the Speakers’s own chaotic influence, allowing them to communicate with the ever-changing gods and present the current will of the Maelstrom. Choruses approach protean lords for aid, for guidance, or simply to offer themselves in service for a time if they perceive the Speakers may desire it. However, outside of a few specific choruses formed less in service to and more in self-realized emulation of a given protean lord, the Maelstrom’s demigods do not rule, as the very concept strikes them as both bizarre and abhorrent.
Proteans dwell within the Maelstrom’s infinite, ever-changing depths, reveling in its endless creation and destruction, joyously eschewing permanency. Proteans move about freely through the plane, creating discordant harmonies and elegant calamities from
the planar matter around them, and thus they
partake in the same erosive creativity of their home.
Many proteans see this constant experimentation
as necessary to understand the ebb and flow of the
Maelstrom, though they are also content with the
fact that this cycle of making and unmaking is
ultimately futile. Regardless, the skills learned
along the way are useful for proteans that
leave the Maelstrom to enact their will to the rest of the Great Beyond. Most creatures that encounter proteans do so when these serpents rampage into the Maelstrom’s borderlands and beyond to assault other planes, seeking to return the cosmos to the freedom of true chaos
from which it originated. Illureshis,
imenteshes, and pelagastrs are most prone
to venture far and wide, acting as ideological viruses on the Material Plane or even in the gods’ realms. There they inspire new creation or provoke conflict and instability, hurling metaphorical spanners into the gears of cosmic law. Where they can, they use their abilities to slowly erode the edges of existence, tearing the edges of a plane as an unraveling tapestry. Only the most powerful proteans are able to unmake any part of a plane in this way, but many proteans are content with the figurative and metaphorical unraveling they cause by sowing the seeds of chaos.
Proteans ultimately seek a beautiful dissolution of static reality, but they aren’t above working with allies to achieve shared goals, or even simply because it amuses their whimsy. Chaotic outsiders like azatas and especially lillends are frequent allies and collaborators. Demons and qlippoth are hated as perversions of true chaos, yet bebiliths avoid this fanatical scorn; in fact, proteans regularly hunt demons for sport alongside bebilith, suggesting a connection with the creatures not yet properly understood. The proteans’ most beloved allies are valkyries, einherjar, Calistria’s empusas, and chaos-corrupted inevitables known as unshackled. These rare outsiders result from inevitables suffused with raw chaos or possessed by pelagastrs, leaving them harboring a spark of chaos Proteans find other outsiders changing their alignments to be a thing of sublime beauty, explaining why the city of Basrakal survives untouched within the Maelstrom.
Proteans travel to the Material Plane like many outsiders, but their motivations range from specific tasks to simply acting on a whim. Their greatest barrier to travel is their own aversion to unduly manipulating mortals, as it reeks of diabolic authoritarianism or archons’ well-meaning and gilded metaphorical chains. Most proteans find travel beyond the Maelstrom uncomfortable at best, and infuriatingly, physically painful at worst, and so any excursion comes with a cost most simply don’t care enough to pay.
Finally, there are the gods themselves, whom proteans perceive as loud, unruly, profoundly ignorant infants on reality’s playing field, yet who nonetheless have the power to intervene and stop mass protean intervention on the Material Plane, even as the Maelstrom inevitably gnaws at and grinds down their own planes.
Proteans on the Material Plane have a reputation for madcap destructive or constructive mayhem, but also for profoundly subtle, insidious, and long-term games of influence. These schemes play out over time spans suited to the patience of one of the multiverse’s eldest species, though proteans are never above simply eating a linchpin mortal standing in their way. At the same time, proteans view mortals’ capacity for true free will as a delightful quality, almost regardless of how those mortals ultimately utilize it. Encountering one of these chaotic serpents might be terrible or beatific, as proteans’ innate tendency to gleefully embrace both creative and destructive pursuits alike makes them
unpredictable and often dangerous: there are raging naunets, imenteshes whispering guileful and reasonwarping secrets, obnoxiously chatty illureshis handing out magic with joyous irresponsibility, pelagastrs and azuretzis simply wanting to experience new things, and keketars bending reality by their very presence. No matter how helpful a protean may seem, they are all agents of change without regard to consequences, and so creatures are well warned to be wary of them.
In addition to their travels to the Material Plane, proteans find joy in sowing discord and disorder all throughout the Great Beyond. This usually proves difficult, as many denizens of these planes are quick to push a protean out of their planes or even attempt to slay the proteans outright. In such realms, proteans employ mortals’ malleability as a tool for their havoc. These mortals receive gifts from proteans in the form of knowledge, magic, or even just subtle pushes to travel the planes. The mere presence of these mortals is only the most minute form of disruption but, depending on the will of the mortal, can ripple forth into great waves of chaos.
Long-term protean influence strives to combat law, such as the diabolic influence in Golarion’s nation of Cheliax, which has garnered the attention of the Chorus of Laughing Exceptions and the Chorus of Bleeding Steel. Historically, proteans railed against axiomite influence in Thassilon under Emperor Xin, and imenteshes and illureshis have visited the Padishah Emperor’s court, both in mortal guise and openly, seeking to influence or break Golarion’s largest empire and the stability it represents. Yet most proteans on Golarion are found within the Worldwound, where the Chorus of the Gossamer Expression has compromised the ranks of demons and mortals alike, not so much helping mortals as striving to ensure that the Abyss remains mired in an unwinnable conflict, thus diverting a fraction of its infinite resources away from its concurrent wars against the Maelstrom’s children.
Mortals find the study of proteans to be both an extremely interesting and aggressively frustrating practice. The ever-changing nature of a protean’s whims makes it difficult for anyone researching the creatures to maintain any sense of cohesion in their studies. Attempting to chronicle the personality or motivations of a protean is ultimately an act of futility, though those who embrace this fact soon learn to follow a protean’s constant changes in action and attitude in a way that borders on the enlightening. This perpetual change becomes the only constant in such research, and those who commit to long-term studies of proteans report strange changes to their own faculties and personalities. These changes suggest that even the subconscious chaotic nature of proteans is capable of perpetuating the influence of chaos.