Peryton

File:Perytons.jpg

A pack of perytons attacks

Neither a creature or a construct, but containing elements of both, the peryton is a shell of matter inhabited and animated by the soul of a former human being.(1) Perytons are members of the larger class of inhabitions, q.v., and should not be confused with demonic presences, which may sometimes possess physical objects or beings for a time.

Perytons are built by the Lone Power, and manifest in shapes which the beings they pursue will find frightening and evocative of their purpose: for humans, this often means wolves, though other shapes are possible depending on what cultural context is native to the beings they are pursuing. (This alteration of appearance is an automatic response and not to be confused with shapechange, which is an active function of wizardry.) The Lone Power builds the physical shells of the perytons and then lures into them the degraded or deranged souls of human beings after death -- souls either in a state of rage or denial about their own deaths, or so deeply drowned in the "unfinished business" of some hate-based event or situation of their previous lives that they actively refuse to move on to what awaits them. Other useful victims -- perhaps the ones the Lone Power most prefers to catch -- are those souls of the enraged dead who formerly felt most alive when they were killing or causing pain to others. Whatever the case, these souls act as "power source" for the Lone One's constructed shells. The human eyes that seem to look out of the perytons' animal bodies are the clearest token of their presence and willing servitude. In return for being granted this grim post-mortal existence, the perytons willingly serve the Lone One as hunters, trackers, and instruments of torture; packs of them are especially effective against still-living humans. A human's scent enrages perytons beyond anything else, and they will immediately kill any human they catch.

Since they are no longer associated with a genuinely living body, and (because in the service of a Power which so hates life and the living) cut off from Life itself, the span of perytons is by no means as long as the Power which decoys the activating souls into them would like those souls to think. A peryton may persist for a matter of centuries before the soul within it becomes sufficiently vitiated to cease to exist. There have apparently been a very few cases of a soul within a peryton escaping its prison: these have always been souls which were merely deranged rather than degraded, and which came to their senses and departed the shells that held them. However, the Lone Power is usually skilled at selecting souls which are too hate-filled ever to exercise this option, and prefer their eventual fatal dissolution to any hope of escape into a more merciful but also more uncertain and uncontrollable universe. (Though the Wizard's Manual states categorically that no soul which desires to escape prison will ever be denied its desire, however long its liberation may take, the statement has an unhappy corollary: no soul that wholly desires its imprisonment can be rescued from outside.) Normally, after the extinction of the soul inside a given peryton-shell, the Lone One merely sets the shell out on the "open market" and waits for another soul sufficiently hate-filled not to care what happens to it or how much longer it'll last, as long as it (initially) looks like eternity.

(1) The soul is still a soul, but its continued humanity is in something of a qualified state under the conditions by which a soul becomes part of a peryton. Alien versions of the peryton exist under other names, as the technique -- trapping something of the One's making in a prolonged and mostly inescapable prison -- is a favorite technique of the Lone Power's. (SYWTBAW)

See also: Constructs: Overshadowing, secondary: Soultraps: Thaumalepsy.