Skorlisk - The Carrion Crawler

Role in Its Society:

Skorlisk is the unseen janitor and executioner of a tangled Underdark crossroads—where old battlefields, refuse chutes, and beast warrens all feed into the same fetid caverns. To the creatures of the deep, Skorlisk is both a warning and a promise: if you fall here, you will not be left long enough to rot.

Troglodyte tribes dump their dead into his pits, duergar overseers quietly “lose” troublesome slaves in his feeding tunnels, and even drow patrols steer foes toward his territory rather than risk their own numbers. A few desperate alchemists and necromancers value Skorlisk as a reliable source of paralytic slime and half-picked corpses.

Skorlisk is not worshiped, but he is accounted for—marked as a living hazard on every local map. His movements decide where it is “safe” to collapse a tunnel or stage an ambush; nobody wants to be the one who gets knocked down where the Gutter Maw ranges.

Appearance Description:

Skorlisk is a massive carrion crawler, easily twice the length of a draft horse, his pale yellow-green carapace blotched with bruised purples and corpse-browns from years of blood and rot. A ring of twitching, barbed tentacles crowns a circular maw lined with hooked teeth, always moist with slime that trails in glistening threads as he moves.

Dozens of stunted legs ripple along his underside as he clings to walls and ceilings, each tipped with a black, chitinous hook perfect for hauling his bulk up slick stone. Scar tissue and chipped chitin score his flanks where crossbow bolts, spells, and panicked blades have failed to kill him. Thick nodules bulge along his length where old meals hardened inside before rotting away—giving his body a segmented, knotted look.

His eyes are small, clustered black pits buried above the maw, but they gleam with a slow, insectile assessment. He smells of iron, mildew, and the sour-sweet stink of long-dead things.

Backstory:

Once, Skorlisk was just another carrion crawler spawned in a midden-heap beneath a duergar forge-city. Then came the Red Collapse—a war between drow and duergar that left galleries full of corpses, ruptured alchemical vats, and broken spell-wards. Skorlisk and his clutch gorged for weeks in the aftermath, but where his siblings grew fat and slow, he kept hunting.

Skorlisk learned there are two kinds of meat: meat that runs and meat that thinks it is safe. He followed the blood lines backward—down the drains, through the garbage chutes, into the side tunnels where injured soldiers crawled to die. He began to understand the patterns of battle: where shield walls break, where ambushes fail, where panicked retreats always go.

Over the years, his range shifted to a junction of tunnels beneath several rival strongholds. There, Skorlisk survived poison gas, cave-ins, and even a failed attempt by a drow beastmaster to collar him. He learned to recognize armor creaks, boot rhythms, and the smell of magic on sweat. He is not sapient in a humanoid way, but he remembers.

Now, any major conflict in the surrounding Underdark eventually spills bodies into “his” gutters. Skorlisk is the last beneficiary of every war fought nearby—and he has grown large and bold on the harvest.