Glimmertongue - The Xorn

Role in Its Society:

Glimmertongue is not a monster in the usual sense—he’s a hungry toll-keeper and neutral broker wedged between surface miners and Underdark powers. Native to the Elemental Plane of Earth, he now rules a cluster of trade tunnels where rich ore veins and caravan routes intersect.

Dwarves, duergar, and deep gnomes know him as a gem-taker: a three-legged, many-mouthed elemental who emerges from solid rock to “negotiate” tolls in cut stones and ingots. Refuse, and he’ll happily eat through your strongbox—or the tunnel beneath your wheels. Pay fairly and he becomes a surprisingly reliable ally, warning of collapses, raiders, and rival smugglers who tried to short-change him.

He deals information as casually as he eats jewels. To Underdark factions, Glimmertongue is a neutral third party who can be bribed to look the other way—or to mention, in that gravelly, amused voice, that a heavily laden caravan passed through “two sleeps ago… very shiny.”

Appearance Description:

Glimmertongue is a classic xorn shape—a squat, roughly cylindrical body with three thick legs spaced evenly around his base and three stout arms ending in stone-crushing claws. His hide looks like living rock: banded layers of granite-grey, iron-red, and quartz-white, with jagged ridges running along each limb.

His most striking feature is his vertical, triple-lidded mouth at the top of his body—a ring of jagged stone teeth surrounding a glistening, gem-scarred tongue. Around the centerline of his body, three lidless eyes peer out between armor plates, each glowing faintly like a buried ember.

Glimmertongue’s body is studded with tiny, embedded chips of gem and metal—fragments that clung to his hide instead of disappearing fully into his digestive stone. There’s a faint shimmer when he moves: glints of garnet red, sapphire blue, and dull gold flashing between plates. Someone long ago hammered a decorative gold band into one of his arm ridges; he never bothered to remove it.

When he phases through rock, his outline blurs and grainy dust sloughs off, like a statue shrugging itself loose from a quarry wall.

Backstory:

Glimmertongue remembers the Elemental Plane of Earth as an endless banquet: rivers of ore, mountains of crystal, caverns where diamonds grew like stalactites. He hunted there as many xorn do, drawn to the “song” of precious stones.

His exile began when a dwarven mage-thane and their circle opened a planar conduit to strip rich veins directly from that plane. Glimmertongue followed the scent of spilled gems through the rift, expecting an easy feast. He erupted into a ritual chamber piled with offerings and gobbled them down before the stunned mages could react.

Then the conduit collapsed.

Trapped in the Material Plane near a deep mine, Glimmertongue rampaged at first—smashing through mine walls, devouring ore stockpiles, and terrifying workers. But this world’s richness was patchy, and every binge was followed by lean stretches. He learned quickly that killing everyone who carried gemstones meant ending the supply.

So he adapted. He learned broken Dwarvish and Undercommon, enough to growl, “Pay stones, no crumbling,” and understood that if he let caravans pass, they would return with more offerings. Over years, his crude toll-taking became a kind of mercenary contract:

• He tunnels warning vents to bleed off dangerous pressure.
• He collapses side tunnels raiders might use.
• He devours dangerous oozes and pests that threaten “his” trade routes.

All of this, of course, in exchange for payment in glittering, delicious mineral wealth.