Veshra - The Cloaker

Role in Its Society:

Veshra is a living ambush and a legend whispered in any Underdark outpost near her hunting grounds. To most denizens, she’s just a nightmare tale: a cloak that falls from the ceiling and never lets go. But to those who trade in secrets—drow information brokers, deranged sages, and deep cultists—Veshra is a negotiable hazard and sometimes a contractor.

Veshra stalks a cluster of vertical shafts and mushroom-lit caverns where caravans must pass under high ceilings. She listens to gossip, maps patrol schedules, and chooses prey with unsettling care: lone scouts first, then noisy leaders, then anyone foolish enough to wear a long cloak. She has struck pacts of convenience with smugglers and cultists—spare a tithe of meat and metal, and she will not shriek when their enemies pass below.

She is not part of any faction, but factions must plan around her. Tunnels where Veshra haunts are mapped with extra care; whole routes are abandoned if she’s seen too often. In a place where the ceiling is already dangerous, Veshra is the name whispered when torches suddenly go out.

Appearance Description:

Veshra appears at first glance to be nothing more than a large, tattered black cloak draped over a stalactite or dangling from a hook of stone. The “cloth” is leathery, dark grey to inky black, with pale, veinlike streaks and ragged edges that sway with nonexistent drafts. When she spreads herself, you see the truth: a manta-like body with a rubbery underside, a maw of needle teeth in the center, and four faintly glowing eyes set in a skull-like bulge.

Her back is mottled with scars and chalky markings—white smears where stone dust has worn into the hide, and thin slashes from blades that never managed to cut deep. Up close, her underside reeks faintly of sour milk and cave mold. When she engulfs a target, she tightens around them like a weighted shroud, her “hem” bristling with tiny barbs that cling to armor joints and clothing seams.

When she glides, her silhouette looks exactly like a cloak caught in a slow-motion fall. When she hangs still against the ceiling, she is just another patch of shadow.

Backstory:

Veshra was spawned in a brood of cloakers that haunted a now-collapsed cavern, once a thriving duergar forge-chamber. Long ago, a magical accident—an overcharged illusion lattice designed to mask the forge from scrying—imploded and bathed the cloaker nest in warped shadow-magic. The others died, or melted, or simply vanished. Veshra survived.

She crawled out of the wreckage with her senses changed. The world was no longer just sound and scent; it was fear, lies, and images—she could taste the edges of illusions, feel the weight of attention when someone looked at something too long. Over years, she learned to ride those impressions, using her own natural phantasms with surgical precision.

Veshra watched duergar, drow, and smugglers come and go, learning their languages from the dark: Undercommon hissed between guards, Deep Speech crooned in cultist rituals. She discovered that fear is a kind of light, and where it shines, people make mistakes.

Now she rules her stretch of ceiling like a quiet queen. Sometimes she chooses to announce herself with a bone-rattling moan that sends caravans scrambling. Other times, she lets entire patrols pass and takes only the last straggler. Those who try to tame her end up as muffled screams beneath a leather shroud.