Korthyrax - The Behir
Where lightning strikes twice, it is because Korthyrax has turned around.
Role in Its Society:
Korthyrax does not rule territory in any conventional sense, nor does it form lairs meant for long-term habitation. Instead, its presence reshapes regions through repeated devastation, carving storm paths that become feared travel corridors and cursed landmarks. Mountain passes, deep ravines, and lightning-scarred plateaus often owe their hostile reputations to a behir like Korthyrax passing through over decades.
Among frontier settlements and nomadic cultures, Korthyrax is spoken of less as a creature and more as a cycle. Shepherds track storm seasons around its migrations, while caravans consult “thunder maps” marking where the ground still hums faintly from past encounters. Some cultures leave offerings of conductive metals—copper rods, broken blades—not in worship, but in the hope that Korthyrax will be drawn elsewhere.
Scholars of draconic and elemental lineages debate whether behirs represent a failed evolutionary offshoot of dragons or an intentional counterbalance—creatures designed to punish hubris tied to the sky. Whatever the truth, Korthyrax exists outside politics, bargains, or allegiance. Its only interaction with society is collateral.
Appearance Description:
Korthyrax is a colossal, serpentine monstrosity, its elongated body supported by powerful, clawed limbs that anchor it to cliff faces and cavern walls. Its scales are a deep storm-blue, slick and reflective like rain-polished stone, each one faintly etched with lightning scars that pulse with inner light when it draws breath.
Its head is crowned with backward-curving horns that crackle constantly with static discharge, and its eyes burn gold-white like distant storm fronts. When Korthyrax opens its maw, arcs of electricity leap between its fangs, briefly illuminating a throat lined with ridged, conductive flesh designed to channel lightning outward rather than contain it.
Even at rest, Korthyrax warps its environment. Pebbles vibrate, metal hums, and the air smells sharply of ozone. When it moves, thunder follows—not as sound alone, but as pressure, rolling through stone and bone alike.
Backstory:
Korthyrax hatched during a planar convergence when a violent thunderstorm tore open a rift between the Material Plane and a lightning-charged region of the Elemental Chaos. Unlike other behirs born into storm-swept mountains, Korthyrax absorbed an abnormal concentration of planar energy, fusing lightning into its very metabolism.
Its earliest recorded devastation destroyed an entire dwarven sky-bridge network—massive stone spans reinforced with metal lattices meant to withstand wind and weather. The bridges held against storms for centuries, but failed catastrophically when Korthyrax coiled through their supports, discharging lightning with every movement. The resulting collapse reshaped the mountains permanently.
Since then, Korthyrax has wandered widely, drawn instinctively to regions where lightning is trapped, redirected, or exploited—mage towers with storm engines, cities crowned with lightning rods, or ancient sites where weather is magically stabilized. It does not seek destruction for pleasure; it unleashes energy where it feels constrained, then moves on.
