Volnagur

Volnagur the End-Singer

If the Great Tarrasque is the best-known of the Spawn of Rovagug, the Rough Beast’s progeny Volnagur is the most widely traveled: reports matching the description of this vast, winged horror have been collected from throughout Garund, Casmaron, Arcadia, and Sarusan. It is always attended by freakish winds and incomparable storms, appearing from the churning skies to watch over scenes of panic, abandon, and mass murder.
An account collected from the western interior of Arcadia, transcribed from the signs of a deaf shaman, notes the End-Singer thusly:

• Its gross, pale, and warty body is shaped like a many-pointed star.

• At the center it has a lipless mouth shaped like a cross, which is full of needle-like teeth.

• Three very long and very thin tongues like whips or hairs extend from the center of its mouth and lash around. A fathomless black eye rests near each angle created by each segment of its four-parted mouth.

• The entire thing is lifted off the ground by many mismatched wings: some look like sickly vulture wings, other like tattered bat wings, and others totally alien. Wings jut from every side of the thing’s body, all flapping madly but somehow keeping the monster aloft.

Lore

Much as with its cousin, the crawling and unclean thing called Chemnosit, the deepest horror unleashed by the profane power of sky-borne Volnagur is not purely physical, but travels with its very presence: the morbid sound that keens from the hovering End-Singer drives humans and animals alike to the brink of madness, violence, suicide, and over into bleakest abject insanity. The winged form of Volnagur appears from leaden clouds, brings to boil macabre visions in the minds of those who hear it sing, then slays all those who resist with its 50-foot-long, razor-tipped tongues, or with nausea-inducing bolts from its eyes that cause its victims to wretch blood until dead.
The End-Singer possesses great speed in the air, outpacing all but the fastest of elementals; similarly, it may hang still in space indefinitely, and perhaps even rest, without ever touching down upon the earth. Many theories suggest that Volnagur may be gifted with some natural form of invisibility, for it most often appears above habitations out of thin air, then vanishes silently once more into a thunderstorm over empty, blood-slick streets. While this eerie manifestation of Rovagug’s hatred is truly an enigma, it is said to have been defeated on multiple occasions: at the ruins of Holy Xatramba in 909 AR, above the Zho Mountains in 1540 AR, and again in the valleys surrounding Mount Na Ken in 2062 AR—yet each time, the beast has returned. The End-Singer has been unseen since 4540 AR, when it turned a mining colony of 8,000 men upon itself in Sargava (then still ruled by Cheliax ), leaving none who know what has become of the horror—or when it will strike next.

Resurrection/Summoning

Because it is unknown if Volnagur is truly dead, imprisoned, or merely departed to some mysterious destination outside the universe understood by mortal scholars, few cults practice any magic that might draw the attention of the beast. A grim but nevertheless well-known ritual thought to be capable of “calling down” the End-Singer involves self-crucifixion and the destruction of 100 rods of lordly might; to what purpose a spellcaster would attempt such a thing remains unclear.

Species

Spawn of Rovagug