Elder Fiend [Greater Mercenary]

An elder fiend is all long, spindly limbs wrapped in oozing gray flesh, crowned by an oversized horned head. Its mouth is nothing but teeth and tongue, and its distant, glassy yellow eyes leak a fluid far fouler than tears. Worse than its body is its manner: a cold, unseeing indifference to the agony it constantly causes, joined to a bottomless appetite for misery that it feeds with mechanical, methodical harm.

It rakes with claws for 1d8 per hit and lunges with its huge mouth for 2d6, and it never uses weapons, equipment, or magic items. Three times a day it can make the wounds it has dealt tear open again: choose a single round within the past 24 hours in which it hurt a target, and that target instantly takes the same damage once more. If it clawed and bit a prisoner for 13 points, then locked him away, it could return any time the next day and inflict 13 more. No save is allowed, though magic resistance applies; the victim must be visible and within 10 yards, and this comes in addition to its normal attacks that round.

The reverse is also true. At will, within 10 yards, it can instantly heal any amount of the damage it has inflicted, keeping captives and even enemies in a fight alive so the suffering continues. It is clever enough never to heal foes to its own peril.

Besides the powers shared by all mercenary fiends, it can use one of the following each round at will: fear, suggestion, emotion, detect magic, detect lie, and darkness 15-foot radius; true seeing and cloudkill each 3 times a day; demand and symbol once a day. Like its kin it is immune to poison, acid, iron weapons, and normal or magical fire, takes half damage from cold, and can be harmed only by magical weapons.

These are outcasts among the mercenary fiends. They keep apart from their kin, dwelling always in the gray wasteland of despair and never on the volcanic plane where so many others have moved. Some suspect they are not true mercenary fiends at all but something older and more primal, which would mean both races are maintaining a deliberate deception, hardly unthinkable. Physically they may be the weakest of the greater ranks, yet their kin treat them with a deference no one can explain.

Usually solitary, sometimes accompanied by nightmares or night hags, an elder fiend lairs in a warped, menacing tower in places bleak even for that plane. Scholar fiends keep the records, but elder fiends seem to know more secrets about fiends and lower-planar life than any other single source. Above all they see themselves as bringers of pain and torture for its own sake, never for information. They also wound with ruined plans, cruel lies, and dreadful revelations, watching the fallout with a chilling, joyless, unrepentant stare.

A renowned planar sage once cast the tanar'ri as destroyers and the baatezu as subjugators, the two poles of evil, and the mercenary fiends as evil in its purest form: suffering at worst, cold detachment at best. The theory is too neat, since demons organize and devils destroy, but elder fiends fit it better than any of their kin, sneering at the schemes the others hatch to control their surroundings. Oddly, the Ledger of Binding never mentions them.

Elder fiends can go mad. Uncommonly, one is seen leading a brigade of mixed fiends in a skirmish, and at least one advises the foremost mastermind fiends. Their insanity is not raving but a creeping, warping sickness of thought. Alone or together, they set out to steer events, quietly enslaving the lower planes while plotting the ruin of everything, pursuing total order and total destruction at once. Exceptions among exceptions, they are still the elder fiends adventurers are likeliest to meet, since the rest are reclusive and idle.