Garigal

Pronounced ga-REE-jall, the garigal travels more strangely than any other magical beast that bonds with wizards. It is a dusky blue, armor-plated caterpillar with no legs that nonetheless crosses almost any ground swiftly by magic. Its coat is also magical, giving it an unusually good Armor Class. Black, diamond-like eyes stand out against pale scales, and a glossy black, twitching snout juts nearly a foot from its body.

It talks telepathically with any spellcaster and can speak with insects, and a wizard within 60 yards of it gains that same power. It can vanish at will, but gazing, casting or attacking requires it to show itself. Once a day each, at 9th level, it can use trip, summon insects, meld into stone, pass without trace, detect charm, detect snares and pits, detect poison, detect magic and cure light wounds.

It strikes from invisibility with a long, rough, whip-like tongue coated in slime, dealing 3d6, and the slime dissolves nonmagical cloth and leather in 1d6 rounds. Trip and summon insects keep foes off balance. Its deadliest tools are a pair of gazes, each usable once per day in a 90-foot cone that widens from 1 foot at its face to 60 feet: one acts as shatter on everything in the area, the other as ray of enfeeblement from a 7th-level wizard. After shattering, it often scurries among its foes licking up spilled potions. It never seeks fights, but is the most eager of its kind to join one.

It reportedly prefers human wizards to elf or half-elf ones. Legends place it in the eastern swamps of the old imperial heartland and the western marshes of the sunlit southern realms.

It is vegetarian, liking rotting plants and decaying wood best but eating live plants when hungry, and like several of its kin it adores drinking magical elixirs of every kind.