The Vile Mass

There are strange things in the deep ocean, creatures that captivate and terrify us because of how little we understand them - and how little it feels we even could understand them. The Vile Mass embodies this. All Leviathans have alien aspects, but also more familiar human and animalistic aspects - they are driven by food, territoriality, pride, even ideology. The Vile Mass, however, does not act like an animal, or particularly much like a human. It moves in incomprehensible shapes and pursues mysterious goals. It combines the essential eldritch power of an Elder Leviathan with the nightmare echo-logic of Ederstone, just as it combines their power. The Vile Mass not only is alien, but it gains power from representing alienation and alienness; it not only is fundamentally strange, but it quietly drips strangeness into all other parts of life, transforming the mundane and familiar into the unknowable. 
The Vile Mass preys on those who are lost, alienated, or fascinated with the unknowable: victims of shipwrecks lost in foreign lands; lonely wanderers who lost everything they used to be through Ederstone transformation and now find the world to have no place for them in it; eccentric outcasts drawn to immerse themselves in impossible dreams; normal-seeming everyday shopkeeps who feel like their outward identities are runaway masks that imprison their inner selves. Who among them catches the attention of the Mass is seemingly random. But once it has noticed you, your dreams grow strange. A strange part of the Astral Plane envelopes your sleeping mind. It is like water that isn't water and isn't air and isn't void, bleeding the colors of the flesh and warping the dreamer's imaginary body. You vomit memories, that dance performed by mocking strangers that are at once your prior selves, are strange paintings, are vicious onlookers. You fall, plummeting - or perhaps pushed by tides - in an vast ocean expanse of warped colors and writhing half-familiar detritus. Always in view is the Mass itself, a mountain of multicolored assymetrical flesh in the vague shape of a sea monster. It does not speak, but it sees you. Somehow, wherever you look, it is always on the horizon. It calls to your flesh, which sings and squirms back - your own body is a stranger here, eager to betray you to the inevitable. You can't understand what this thing is or what it wants from you, but you can choose: do you let it in? Do you accept its reality, or do you bury these dreams and suppress the parts of this that feel right? Let it in, and you wake up with power - and a permanent mental bond with your new patron. 
To have a pact with the Vile Mass can mean many things. Perhaps it rescued you from a shipwreck but doomed you to live with its strangeness leaking into your head - slowly breaking you down and consuming your sense of personhood like a spider liquifying its bound prey before biting in. Perhaps it drew you in during a dream and now gives you strange and arbitrary objectives. Perhaps you drew its attention on purpose and it is exploring the world through you in a more symbiotic arrangement of mutual unknowing. Perhaps you are so touched by Ederstone yourself that you channel the leviathan near-naturally, as it gives you strange visions and powers in its own attempt to foster a kinship that can never fully be. Vile Mass warlocks are one of the more common types, but they all have their own patron relationship. Only a few actually earn more than apathy and vague distant (possibly predatory) interest, though. 
The Vile Mass keeps its physical form near Stildane, where it rules the waters - though it has been known to appear in the Eastern waters of Desmia. Vile Mass warlock covens are certainly most common in Stildane, but these warlock pacts can be made with mortals anywhere.

Current Location

Astral Plane

Species

Leviathans