Hisk - The Star Spawn Grue
“First come the giggles in the dark. Then come the things that think the giggles are theirs.”
Role in Its Society:
Hisk is a herald and irritant of something far worse. Among star cults and deranged prophets of the Far Realm, he’s treated as a “blessing” from the beyond—a living omen that the veil is thinning. In truth, Hisk is a lowly scout and saboteur, a scrap of an Elder Evil’s will wearing a wet, twitching body.
In underground cult cells, Hisk is kept in pits or cisterns, unleashed into rival lairs, shrines, or garrisons to soften minds before a real assault. Underground warlords sometimes mistake him for a useful horror to set loose in enemy tunnels, not realizing he answers only to voices no one else can hear.
Other grue occasionally cluster around him in a ragged “choir,” drawn to the same cosmic signal. They don’t form a society so much as a moving madness storm—where Hisk goes, whispers follow, and everything’s a little more brittle, a little more likely to break.
Appearance Description:
Hisk is a small, hunched thing, a knot of pallid flesh perched on too many jointed limbs. His skin is the color of candle wax left in dirty water—pale, blotched, and slick. His head is little more than a rounded bulb with too many eyes, each one a tiny, off-center bead of milky yellow, blinking out of sync. When he laughs, his mouth opens wider than it should, revealing teeth that are shaped less like fangs and more like splintered stars, jagged and pointing in all directions.
Thin, twitching fingers end in soft, almost boneless tips that leave greasy smears on stone. When he moves, his limbs bend wrong, like a spider trying to remember how to be a rat. Shadows cling to him too tightly, swallowing his outline at the edges. In utter darkness, he’s visible only as a faint, wrong-colored glimmer—like starlight refracted through oil.
When Hisk is excited or afraid, faint motes of light swirl around his head in wobbling orbits—never quite bright enough to illuminate, just enough to make everything feel slightly out of focus.
Backstory:
Hisk does not remember exactly when his life began. He remembers arriving—falling, really—out of a tear in a damp cavern wall that briefly smelled of salt, night air, and something like burned dreams. He hit the ground laughing, not because it was funny, but because the laughter was already in him and needed somewhere to go.
Drawn by that laughter, a fringe cult of miners and failed wizards found him writhing in the dark. They took him as a sign that the “Silent Star” they worshiped had finally noticed them. They fed him blood and secrets, and he, in turn, unraveled them—one by one, they cracked under his whispers, turning on each other in rituals they barely understood.
When the cult finally imploded, a duergar patrol burned their shrine and collapsed the main tunnels. Hisk slipped through the rubble, following the echoes of fear and curiosity in the stone. Since then, he’s haunted crossroads and abandoned shafts, drawn to places where people argue with themselves, drink too much alone, or stare too long at things they shouldn’t.
He collects not objects, but moments: the instant a guard decides to betray his captain, the heartbeat before a wizard miscasts a spell, the precise breath when someone realizes they are lost. Each of those moments is a little offering to whatever watches him from beyond.
