Ximtal

The struggles of loneliness and the anxiety that accompanies that feeling plague many creatures, and ximtals delight in exploiting this fear for their own perverse gain. Appearing as hybrids of rats and crabs with grasping tentacles, these scheming fiends manipulate their victims over long spans of time, like pakalchis, to savor the most fear they can. Ximtals use subtlety to entrap their prey and often don't directly engage their targets. They use insecurities as a tool and force poor behavior in mortals they set their sights on. They prefer to focus their machinations on strong-willed and well-intentioned mortals, hoping to erode their pride and self-worth and ultimately lead them eschew altruistic efforts.

Rather than focusing on a single victim, a ximtal might instead seek out a particular cause of interest to the sahkil's appetites. These creatures often wander the multiverse seeking to sabotage societal crusades or suppress divergent ideologies.

While most ximtals work alone, they sometimes enlist the assistance of pakalchis, who share similar tastes in mortal fear. Together and focused, these two types of fiends can dissolve individual self-worth, relationships, and even entire organizations.

Ages ago, when this cycle of the multiverse was still adolescent, a cabal of psychopomps who already felt bored and restrained in their role of ushering souls to their ultimate resting place rebelled against their station. It was this corruption of the cycle of souls that spawned the first sahkils.

Ambivalent to the prescribed order of the multiverse and spiteful of mortals, sahkils delight in spreading fear and unease to all beings, clogging up the metaphysical cycle with anxiety-ridden mortals too scared to achieve their potential. These fiends have drastically changed from their dedicated psychopomp predecessors. They are creatures of spite and torment, fear and disgust. They exploit the most common and rare fears for their own perverse satisfaction, and they want nothing more than to frighten mortals and make them question their reason for existence.

Most sahkils lurk on the Ethereal Plane, but they frequently invade the Material Plane to torment mortals and spread terror. They use their innate ability to slip between the veils of the Ethereal and Material effortlessly, often stalking their targets for days or weeks before enacting their devious plots.