Spirit of the Air

A spirit of the air looks like a great black-skinned bat with broad wings, taloned feet and a tusked monkey head. It wears gleaming robes finer than silk or spider thread, in endlessly shifting colors no language can name. Its voice may be honey-sweet or crow-harsh, never both at once. Each is born winter white; daylight soaks it in the world's colors, and each night moonlight rinses them away. The rinsing tickles, so the night carries their laughter, and dawn settles the heavy colors back on them like a sigh.

These spirits fight as 11 Hit Dice monsters, usually with longbow or darts at range and a footman's mace or two-handed sword in melee. Their weapons have no plusses but are filled with a patron's might, so they strike foes needing +3 or better weapons; the power is the spirit's, not the weapon's. Only +1 or better weapons can hurt them.

Their great advantage is agility. They never land, even in battle, and gain -2 on initiative against earthbound foes and -1 against fliers of maneuverability class B or worse; only an equally nimble flier negates this. A 30-yard magical aura surrounds each spirit, and inside it the creature can control winds at will while doing almost anything except fighting.

Left alone they would ignore the world and simply revel in flight. Instead they serve the powers of every alignment without question, under a duty set by forces long forgotten, as humble messengers or full proxies. Any god with power over wind can create and command them.

Legend says that when the gods finished the multiverse, only its ending remained undone. Boasting that foreseeing the end spared them from making it, they breathed words into the air, and the breath came alive as small silver beings who mocked their makers' pride. The angry gods drew back part of that breath and so bound the spirits forever. Each still hears divine breathing within, and those sighs carry its orders. No spirit can refuse a wind power, yet like a released breath, one sent on an errand picks its own route and pace.

In the instant between one breath and the next, the tale goes, they are free. In those slivers they plot against their parents, building thoughts word by word toward the day they escape. Each lives two hidden lives, slave and free, dreaming of courtship, cities and great wars and believing its servitude is the dream. From these visions a spirit may reach out to adventurers, drawing them into a bittersweet, surreal life that never was, or begging them to save it from a god who could end it by taking back a word.

These divine creations have no ecology mortals can follow. They feed on other beings' joy, sharing it freely like bread at a table, and sleep in sunbeams. At death their trapped colors burst out as rainbows that paint everything nearby, and from them spring bright, merry imps lasting an hour or two. The imps cannot be charmed, commanded or held in glass, care nothing for the world, and only play parts in the spirits' dreams or whirl around adventurers' heads, gabbling and giggling.