Jhero Magoni

Jhero Magoni (pronounced /ˌdʒɛəroʊməˈgoʊniː/) is one of the most notorious archdemons of the cosmos of Nanben. It is sometimes called the Prison Lord because of its fondness for placing its enemies—as well as random innocents it torments just for fun—in extradimensional dungeons that it calls cloisters. Jhero Magoni is served by a cult that emulates its behavior on their own worlds, creating their own facsimiles of their lord's cloisters in which to cast prisoners.

Description

Jhero Magoni has three fat, snakelike bodies, joined at the "waist" by broad horizontal connections, the largest of the three in the middle. It usually crawls simultaneously on the back end of all three bodies, the front being raised up off the ground. Each body has its own head, none of them like any known creature, though the head on the left has been described as vaguely leonine, the right head orocate, and the middle head somewhere between human and ursine. (There is no indication of whether or not the heads each have their own consciousness; obviously, Jhero Magoni has never been the subject of any serious anatomical or psychological study.)

The archdemon has fourteen arms, four on each of the side bodies, arranged vertically one over the other, and six on its central body, three on the front and three on the back. The top four arms are tentacles, each splitting halfway down their length into six subtentacles. The next six arms resemble muscular, hairy human arms, but longer, with two elbows each, and ending not in human hands but in awful root-like masses. The bottom four arms resemble the jointed arms of a crab, and like them end in strong chelae, though these chelae have not two fingers but three, symmetrically arranged.

From each of Jhero Magoni's shoulders jut large spines, at the base of the front of which is an anomalous eye. Similar but smaller spines run in rows down both sides of the back of its central body, their eyes giving the archdemon full vision of the area behind it without its having to turn any of its heads. The two outer tails of the demon end in grasping pincers of gleaming bone, while the middle tail ends in a slavering mouth that can spit endless gobs of adhesive fluid to immobilize its victims.

Servants

Jhero Magoni's will is done by several varieties of demonic servitors. Among the archdemon's favorite agents are the vaguely scorpion-like chongei, the many-tentacled ceneruke, and the four-headed hilhock. Many of Jhero Magoni's servitor demons are specialized to aid in its work of imprisonment, such as hessers, entities made of chains that wrap around their quarry to drag them to their master; suams, great sponge-like things each "pore" of which is a separate cell to hold prisoners; and oubiks, imp-like creatures with ten eyes each of which can imprison victims within.

The archdemon also transforms other life forms into forms it feels better suited to its service. Willing human or humanoid servitors can be transformed into beings called glossacks and nattles, or trios of servitors can be merged into three-bodied dorycopes. Jhero Magoni has also molded breeds of kake to serve its purposes, creating the speswan and the suaroa.

Behavior

While many archdemons are terrible forces of destruction, indiscriminately killing and maiming anything in their paths, Jhero Magoni is far less violent. That is not to say it is any less malevolent or dreadful. Rather than kill his victims, Jhero Magoni simply imprisons them... generally for the rest of their lives. Sometimes it even extends their lives to prolong their imprisonment—or it accomplishes this goal by keeping them imprisoned as undead even after their deaths.

Jhero Magoni typically imprisons his victims in pocket planes it calls cloisters, specially designed for that purpose. A cloister can be much larger than a single room; many of the archdemon's cloisters are fairly elaborate affairs, covering hundreds or even thousands of square meters of space, though they are still ultimately prisons. Nor are they necessarily just empty chambers; the cloisters can be lavishly decorated, and may contain dangerous traps and hazards for the unwary. Of course, a cloister will seldom contain anything outright deadly, since the archdemon doesn't want its victims dead, but they will contain many things that can cause pain, discomfort, or other unpleasant effects. While sometimes Jhero Magoni traps a solitary victim alone in a cloister, more often it enjoys trapping multiple victims together, perhaps on the theory that in their mutual frustration at their inability to escape they will torment each other better than the archdemon itself.

Though the cloisters are sealed off from most forms of interplanar travel—save, of course, by the archdemon itself—, they are not completely inescapable. On the contrary, each cloister has an exit built in. There are three problems that make it difficult to use these exits, however. The least of the problems is that they are hidden. Another problem is that the exit requires some type of trigger object, the nature of which is a secret. The third problem is that the trigger object is never found in the cloister itself. Entering the cloisters is easier than exiting them; Jhero Magoni makes sure that somewhere there is a portal that leads into each portal—but not out. Moreover, it will gladly answer (or rather have its servitors answer) any requests to know where the portal into a given cloister is. These exits therefore work into Jhero Magoni's plan, because they lure more victims into his cloisters—would-be rescuers who fail to find the exit, or who arrive with the wrong key. This latter is especially easy, since divinations are notoriously unreliable in discovering the nature of a key to a cloister, and the archdemon's agents respond to questions about the keys with answers that are extremely misleading (without ever being completely false). Thus, if a few rare victims actually are successfully rescued through the hidden exits, this is more than made up for by the additional victims that accrue from failed rescues—not to mention the frustration and psychological torment of those who seek fruitlessly for the means to free their friends.

Cult

The cult of Jhero Magoni operates on many worlds of Uren and beyond. When they work openly, they wear masks resembling one of their master's heads—in most cult organizations, which head they choose their mask to resemble is arbitrary, and is no reflection on their duties or their position in the cult. Like most archdemonic cults, however, they often find it necessary to work in secret, blending in with other people the better to effect their schemes unseen.

One of the main pursuits of Jhero Magoni's cult is the capture and imprisonment of suitable victims. "Suitable victims" include foes of the cult who can be conveniently be gotten out of the way, but may also include strangers captured and imprisoned for no better reason than because they happened to cross the cult's path or to be where the cult was looking for new prisoners. Like their master, the cult doesn't need a reason to keep someone prisoner; it imprisons people for life simply because that's what it does. Some branches of the cult maintain magical prisons of various sorts, perhaps in pocket planes or mipped objects; some few are given access to Jhero Magoni's own cloisters. Many cult groups, however, must simply maintain ordinary prisons and oubliettes in hidden locations. The best that can be said for these cultists' methods is that they generally keep their prisoners in reasonably good health. They don't want their prisoners dying—they want them to remain imprisoned for as long as possible, for the greater glory of Jhero Magoni.