Ulunat

Festering Ulunat, The Unholy First

Of all the Spawn of Rovagug, the image of Ulunat is perhaps the best known throughout the world. A stylized variation on his terrible visage now serves as the official standard of modern Osirion, and his broken carapace acts as the centerpiece around which their capital city, Sothis, now curls. A slavering, hulking, three-eyed abomination possessed of a midnight-black, mirror-sheened outer shell from which once unfurled four razor-sharp falcon wings, this alien and beetle-shaped thing is said to have breathed a noxious vapor that set flesh to ruin and steel to rust. Its 10 mighty limbs ended in warped, oversized blades resembling a juxtaposition of lobster claws and bird-like talons; from the nostril-like pores of these wretched hooks extended flailing, multi-jointed things like mucus-covered human fingers.
The jaws of Ulunat, long ago wrenched from its unmoving body, dripped an acid capable of carving holes in solid obsidian, and the monstrous serrated ridges themselves are said to have laid entire buildings to dust as the Spawn’s dozen barbed tongues flicked forth from its maw to snatch up soldiers, livestock, and entire caravans. The horn of the great beast, now cracked with the passage of ages, was once its most terrible aspect: tales older than the wars between Nex and Geb suggest that Ulunat devoured arcane energy and radiated back a kind of necrotic, phantasmal madness, striking down those wizards and sorcerers who opposed it with heart-stopping nightmares which stained the deserts black.

Lore

There is no solid proof that Ulunat was truly the first of the Spawn of Rovagug; surviving accounts from the lands of Ninshabur in those days (–3923 AR), acquired at great cost and difficulty from the mysterious temple-vaults of Tabsagal, mark only the passage of “a monstrosity unlike any other, truly a leviathan from the Pit, of size beyond size, rage beyond rage, and ever unmarked by spear or spell... by greatest miracle alone sent west across the sea and away from the world."
The most readily accepted theories suggest that this was, in fact, the creature Ulunat, as the first accounts of that monstrosity’s depredations upon the lands of Garund were recorded in –3729 AR, when six of the finest legions in the Jistka Imperium were obliterated to a man by “a sky-filling darkness that flies on four hellish wings, vomiting always death.”
It is believed that Ulunat was finally thrown down and slain in the first days of the Age of Destiny (circa –3470 AR), at the founding of Ancient Osirion; indeed, several Osiriontologists speculate that the God-Kings of that incomprehensible empire first united in power to defeat the beast, later claiming the creature’s hunting grounds (an area said to range from modern-day Rahadoum to Katapesh) as their spoils of war. So little is known of the time, however, that none can say how the black titan was finally felled—theories range from limitless armies of bound elementals to necromantic sacrifice of 10,000 slaves, to direct intervention at the hand of Nethys himself or interference by the ever-popular “outsiders” rumored to have guided Osirion in those unfathomable ages.

Resurrection

A folktale persists, told in the dusty back-streets of Sothis and out into the wildlands of the Salt Hills and Sahure Wastes, that the gargantuan Ulunat is not dead but only sleeping, the victim of some archwizard’s gambit which slows its mighty heart to but a single beat each century. These tales note, of course, that Ulunat bears not a single visible wound, and no stain of blood or stench of rot has ever been observed spilling forth from the shell—the few scrapes and scratches apparent on his immense form are only notable, in fact, in that they are so much less grievous than one would expect to see upon the corpse of a crushed insect lying dead in the sun for 85 centuries. Such stories continue that the capital of Osirion is ever maintained in the shadow of the vast horror to guard against its eventual awakening: when the beast arises once more, the city’s 100,000 citizens will be asked by their pharaoh (or prince) to lay down their lives in an effort to somehow slow the creature’s passage, thereby allowing their leader time to mount a defense—or an escape.
Although such a grim fairytale is only half-believed by even the most superstitious of Osirion’s populace, there are few who do not, from time to time, watch for signs of life beneath the great black shell, especially when the night wind roars in from the Inner Sea across the sparkling port, and the vast creature seems to somehow shift in the dark.
If such tales are to be believed, of course, the spell could wear off at any time; more pressing rumors circulate among the nobility of Sothis and Ipeq that a century ago, during the bloodless coup of Prince Khemet I against the Padishah Emperor, a cabal of Qadiran sorcerers undertook a series of mighty and blasphemous divinations with the goal of learning how to resurrect Ulunat in a final, lethal strike against their disobedient servitor-country. While none are believed to have been successful in this task, a minority theorize that Qadiran agents might still be searching for the secrets of returning Ulunat to life—if only for a single day. Terror holds the hearts of many, convinced that some scholarly servant to Xerbystes II, especially one with access to the Mouthpiece of Gurat, might be able to piece together a functional spell that could breathe animation into the god-born behemoth once more.

Species

Spawn of Rovagug