Duruch'i-lin

The duruch'i-lin, sometimes called the eastern unicorn, is among the most cherished creatures in the world. Few people ever see one, but its coming is always linked with health, long life and luck. Females are known as ch'i-lin, males as duru.

The female outsizes and outmuscles the male. She looks like an enormous, heavier-bodied unicorn, usually 50 to 75 feet tall and sometimes 100 feet or more, with a horse's tail, a wolf's long muzzle and a 5-foot horn that is rounded and fleshy rather than sharp. Her coat is a jumble of blue, white, red, black and yellow patches over a belly that is always bright yellow. Her voice rings like small silver bells, and she speaks every human language and the tongues of all forest creatures.

Ch'i-lin are gentle and fight only when nothing else will do. The horn is too blunt for goring, but each round it can loose six magic bolts at six different targets, each +4 to hit and dealing 3d6. A ch'i-lin can turn invisible and plane shift at will, and cast bless and crystalbrittle once per round each. Touching a living ch'i-lin's horn grants the power to cast omen for one hour. If pressed into melee, she kicks with two hooves for 1d10 each and bites for 3d6.

Poison cannot touch her, nor can hold, charm or death magic, and saves as a 20th-level wizard. A halo of golden fire around her works as a deflection spell that never ends, and she walks on water as easily as on land.

Ch'i-lin feel kinship with every living thing, above all the forest creatures that trust them. They keep no lair and own no treasure, wandering from wood to wood with animal companions. When they want solitude they plane shift away to meditate, sometimes for up to 10 years. They avoid civilization, but often appear shortly before the birth of a sage of great wisdom or an unusually kind monarch.

Legend says the first ch'i-lin was made from two now-vanished beasts, the ch'i, a stag whose antlers were silver and whose eyes were emeralds, and the lin, a golden war horse whose hooves split the ground. It rose from a sacred river before an early emperor of an island realm, carrying rows of written symbols on its back, and that emperor's copy of them became the realm's written language.

Courtship is long and intricate. The male presents his chosen mate to an assembly of woodland beasts that must include at least one member of each kind of beast living in his range, which typically covers 10,000 square miles or more. If they approve, he introduces her to envoys of the celestial court of heaven. With their blessing, the pair withdraws to another plane for at least five years of sharing every detail of their lives. A single foal is born and raised there until grown, at about 50 years, and then the family parts ways.

Ch'i-lin rarely touch the ground, fearing they might crush an innocent insect or harm a plant. Their food is mineral, and they drink from none but the clearest streams. Powdered horn is an antidote for any poison, and the coat keeps its deflection power after death, making it a treasured material for protective garments.

The male is smaller, quicker and weaker than the female, but otherwise looks and thinks the same, apart from a blue belly and a silver aura. His horn looses just three bolts per round, at +2 to hit for 2d6 each. His courtship follows the same pattern described above.