Faux Faerie

Lying is the faux faerie's life's work, and it adores it. Being woven from magic, it appears as whatever small fey is commonest locally, such as a sprite, brownie, pixie, leprechaun or woodland fairy, and it mimics that guise and its languages flawlessly. Its only tell is that it lacks the real creature's innate powers: it can pass for a leprechaun but cannot pull a single leprechaun trick.

Its deceptions are its deadliest weapon, and some adventuring parties have been talked straight to their graves.

Its defense is even stranger: no spell can touch it. An invisible aura of absorbing, reactive magic swallows every spell cast on it, adding it to a whirl of trapped magic circling the creature. The aura holds 24 to 48 spells, a capacity fixed for life. Until full, it simply collects; once full, each new spell it catches flings out one stored spell, chosen at random, at whoever cast the new one.

This can happen several times in a round, and no physical attack disrupts it. Stored spells may be wizard or priest magic of any school or sphere, typically whatever friends and foes have thrown at it, such as know alignment, charm, magic missile or lightning bolt. The result looks like a creature casting potent magic without words, gestures or components, answering each spell aimed at it with one of its own.

By day it swaps trail markers and signposts, lays false paths that loop back on themselves, and gives travelers bad directions, even blazing trails toward quicksand, rockslides and pits. It blends lies with half-truths so deftly that its misdirection rarely seems suspicious, and it often follows its marks to laugh at them, perhaps changing shape to meet them again. It snacks on nuts and berries.

An hour before sunset it merges with a fallen branch or log no more than three or four feet long, much as a dryad joins her tree, and stays there until an hour after dawn. The wood gives off a very faint blue glow, identical to the natural foxfire of rotting wood and invisible in daylight, at dusk, or near any torch, lantern or continual light gem. Gathering firewood at twilight can be dangerous.

If the occupied wood burns, the faux faerie takes normal fire damage and its aura bursts, hurling stored spells out at six per round until empty or until the fire is doused. Chopping the wood instead releases just six random spells, and next morning two faux faeries emerge, each with half the original's hit points and stored spells. After two weeks as juveniles, their hit points and spell capacity double. This is their only known way of reproducing.

Captured before its aura fills, a faux faerie can be loaded like a battery. A cleric might pour high-level healing spells into it, so that later any caster could zap it with a cheap low-level spell and get a cure thrown back mid-battle.

The drawbacks are real. The creature is hard to catch, and harder to judge whether its aura is full. Each spell drawn out makes the next return less likely to be the one wanted. And faux faeries hate being used this way and will try hard to escape.