Kasharin [Gazer Tyrant]

The Blinding Rot withers a gazer tyrant's eyestalks until they rot and drop away. Aboard the Great Starship at least half the tyrants caught it, and most were killed early by their own kind, who cannot bear any difference. The kasharin are those who lived long enough to seem to die of the disease itself. In truth it left them in a living death. They still count as alive to the ship's life-sensing guardians and so still draw rations, and the tyrants in their tower keep them going with healing magic and minimal food, hoping to make them servants of the Ashen Eye, the tyrants' leader. How long this borderline state can last is unknown.

A kasharin looks scorched and blackened, its scales curled and split apart as if by fierce heat. The stalks are burned and useless, but the central eye still works.

That central eye, with its old range intact, is the gazer-mummy's main weapon. Against any creature that can be charmed, it works as a strong charm monster or charm person; against one immune to charm, by magic resistance or otherwise, it becomes an equally strong death ray. Everyone facing a kasharin saves at -4. A charmable victim who fails the first save also rolls at -4 on every later attempt to break free, while an uncharmable one must save vs. death magic at -4 or die immediately. Priests can turn or destroy them, treating them as ghosts or similar 10 HD undead.

Their hatred of difference survives, but it now targets every living tyrant. Oddly, they are more tolerant of other undead, at least those that cannot harm them. Only gazers who have gone all the way through the Rot's transformation count as true kin, whatever their former subrace, while living relatives are outcasts. The endless feuds of the living have been boiled down to living versus unliving, which may yet prove a strange mercy for the quarreling factions.

The disease reshaped them in body and mind, though many tyrant habits remain. The plague came from beyond the starship, so whole colonies, perhaps whole worlds, of infected gazers may exist somewhere among the known star systems. It was bred as the final unifier of the race, gathering every gazer race and subrace into one shared death from which a single race of gazer-mummies would arise. The creed holds that all of space belongs to the gazers, and now all undeath belongs to the gazer-mummies.