Zirrxilos - The Flumph
There’s a presence in the caverns that hums when you're not listening. It doesn’t speak, not with words. But the sound in your bones? That’s it trying to warn you.
Role in Its Society:
Though Flumphs are often dismissed as harmless or even comical, Zirrxilos is no jest. It is an Echoluminary — an elder among its kind, tasked with observing great psychic disturbances. Other flumphs drift quietly through Underdark spaces or hidden mental realms, but Zirrxilos has taken a different role: guardian, interpreter, and harbinger.
It collects whispers from the Far Realm and warnings of breaches between the Material Plane and other worlds. Mind flayers, beholders, aberrant entities — all are tracked by Zirrxilos, not to fight, but to warn others before it’s too late.
Despite its fragile appearance, many aberrations fear Zirrxilos. Not for its power — but because where it floats, something worse is usually coming.
Appearance Description:
Zirrxilos is larger than typical flumphs, nearly four feet across, with a translucent, bioluminescent jelly that pulses with rhythmic light. Its tendrils trail behind it like slow lightning, twitching with thought. The underbellies of its discs shimmer like a star chart — a psychic map of where it's been. Its color shifts slowly, cycling through deep purples, sea greens, and eerie whites.
Backstory:
Zirrxilos was spawned in the abyssal trenches of the Underdark beneath Eldervast, where the veil between the Prime Material and the Far Realm is thin. There, flumph colonies watched from afar as mind flayers and deep aberrations warred. But Zirrxilos was different. It began to dream back, forming interpretations of psychic frequencies others ignored.
Eventually, it “rose” from its colony, becoming a solitary emissary who surfaces only when the world needs warning. It now follows the tremors of planar disturbances, often arriving moments or days before calamity — misunderstood, ignored, and occasionally worshiped by fringe mystics.
