Choralith

The Choralith (plural choraliths; Chorralith in older Hellrider chronicles) is a Large aberration characterized by three humanoid torsos rising from a writhing skirt of eight muscular tentacles. The creature is notable for the multiplicity of its features — many eyes, many mouths, many limbs — and for the unceasing, overlapping chant of its three voices in Deep Speech, Common, and Infernal. Modern infernal scholarship attributes the species to a failed soul-binding ritual conducted in the upper layers of Avernus under the supervision of the fallen archduke Zariel, though older texts propose alternative origins.

This article is compiled from the field notes and correspondence of Magister Iramys Vauk, Chair of Infernal Cosmology at Candlekeep, with additional commentary by the editor of the Cindered Codex.

Statistics

Choralith — 5th-edition stat block

Large aberration, chaotic evil
Armor Class 15 (natural armor) Hit Points 170 (20d10 + 60) Speed 30 ft., climb 30 ft.
STR	DEX	CON	INT	WIS	CHA
20 (+5)	12 (+1)	17 (+3)	13 (+1)	16 (+3)	9 (−1)
Saving Throws Con +7, Wis +7 Skills Perception +11 Damage Resistances psychic; bludgeoning, piercing, slashing from nonmagical attacks Condition Immunities charmed, frightened, prone Senses truesight 60 ft., passive Perception 21 Languages Deep Speech, Common, Infernal (all three at once) Challenge 10 (5,900 XP) — Proficiency Bonus +4

Traits

• Hundred Eyes. The Choralith has dozens of eyes across its body and on retractable stalks. It can't be surprised and has advantage on Wisdom (Perception) checks. While at least one eye stalk remains intact, it can't be blinded.
• Hive of Voices. Three minds share the body. The Choralith has advantage on saving throws against effects that target only one mind, including being charmed, paralyzed, or stunned.
• Skittering Locomotion. Difficult terrain doesn't cost extra movement. The Choralith can squeeze through any opening at least one foot wide.
• Discordant Chorus. When the Choralith takes damage, each creature within 30 feet that can hear it must succeed on a DC 15 Wisdom saving throw or take 5 (1d10) psychic damage as the three heads shriek in unison. A creature can be affected only once per turn.

Actions

• Multiattack. The Choralith makes four attacks: any combination of Tentacle Slams and Many-Mawed Bites. It may replace one attack with Eye Stalk Gaze.
• Tentacle Slam. Melee Weapon Attack: +9 to hit, reach 15 ft., one target. Hit: 14 (2d8 + 5) bludgeoning damage. If the target is Large or smaller, it is grappled (escape DC 16). The Choralith has eight tentacles and can grapple up to four creatures at once.
• Many-Mawed Bite. Melee Weapon Attack: +9 to hit, reach 5 ft., one creature grappled by the Choralith. Hit: 17 (3d8 + 5) piercing damage, and the target must succeed on a DC 15 Constitution save or take an additional 9 (2d8) psychic damage.
• Eye Stalk Gaze. One creature within 60 feet that the Choralith can see must succeed on a DC 15 Wisdom save or take 14 (4d6) psychic damage and be incapacitated until the end of its next turn.
• Devouring Embrace (Recharge 5–6). Each creature currently grappled must succeed on a DC 16 Strength save or be pulled within 5 feet of the Choralith's central mass and pinned. A pinned creature is restrained and takes 14 (4d6) psychic damage at the start of each of its turns. A pinned creature can use its action to repeat the save.

Reactions

• Wail of the Chorus. When the Choralith is hit by an attack, it can use its reaction to release a piercing scream. The attacker must succeed on a DC 15 Wisdom save or have disadvantage on attack rolls until the end of its next turn.

Etymology

The name "Choralith" is a scholarly coinage, attributed to Sage Brother Pellis Orven of the Library of Oghma in Iriaebor (d. 1487 DR), who combined the Chondathan root chora- ("a choir; voices in chorus") with the suffix -lith commonly applied in aberrant taxonomy. The creatures do not use this name for themselves, insofar as anyone has determined what they call themselves — what one survivor described as "all three voices answering at once, none of them the same word."

In Hellrider chronicles the creature is named sotharach in Infernal, a compound meaning roughly "the gathered-mouth." Common folk in the Western Heartlands know it by the rural epithet the Hush-Bringer, from the persistent local belief that village dogs fall silent for two days after one has passed nearby.

Physical Description

The Choralith stands between nine and twelve feet tall when fully extended. Its three humanoid torsos share a single fused waist; the limb count varies between six and eight arms, with the median observed being seven. Below the waist, eight muscular tentacles emerge from a central ribbed mantle and serve as the creature's sole means of locomotion. There are no legs and no vestige of them.

The flesh is uniformly pallid — a sickly mauve-grey in adults, paler in specimens believed to be young, if such a developmental stage exists (see Origins, below). Subdermal veins are visible throughout, running dark crimson where they pass near the surface. The hide is leathery, slightly damp to the touch in specimens recovered shortly after death, and exudes a faint odour sometimes likened to "wet brass" or "the inside of a struck bell."

Each of the three heads is elongated and gaunt. The mouths are gashes rather than jaws; they part along seams that do not correspond to any humanoid musculature and reveal three or four ranks of inwardly-curved teeth. Additional toothed mouths occur, seemingly at random, across the torsos and tentacles. One specimen examined by the Order of the Onyx Quill possessed thirty-one such auxiliary mouths, eleven of which were on a single tentacle.

The Choralith's eyes are its defining feature. Approximately forty to seventy small, fixed eyes dot the body and limbs; in addition, between nine and fourteen retractable stalks bear larger eyes capable of independent movement and focus. The three main heads each retain a vestigial pair of human-like eyes, frequently sealed over by overgrown flesh. The total ocular count of one mature specimen catalogued at Candlekeep was eighty-three.

Origins: The Triune Initiative

The current scholarly consensus, advanced most forcefully in this author's monograph On the Soldiers She Could Not Make (Candlekeep Press, 1492 DR), holds that the Choralith is the residue of a soul-engineering project undertaken by Zariel in the early decades following her fall.

Following her ascension to the throne of Avernus, Zariel inherited the eternal problem of every blood-war commander: she possessed an unceasing supply of damned souls but only a finite means of converting them into useful infantry. The lemures of Avernus, while plentiful, are slow, brittle, and stupid; their promotion into dretches and higher fiends consumes infernal resources at a rate her treasury could not sustain. Zariel proposed a third path. Rather than transmute a single soul through stages, why not fuse three into one finished weapon at the moment of judgment?

The project — recorded in surviving fragments as the Triune Initiative — was assigned to a consortium of bone devil flayers, working under the consultancy of a single defected mind flayer elder-brain emissary, whose name has been redacted from every surviving copy of the project rolls. From the Reskal Fragments and the partial confession of the apostate Hellrider chronicler Daevath Morr, the methodology may be partially reconstructed:

1. Three souls would be selected at the moment of intake, chosen for compatible (or, in some accounts, deliberately incompatible) resonance.
2. The souls would be braided into a single sheaf and bound to a freshly butchered host — typically a recently-slain tiefling gathered from the bone-fields, the tiefling form being thought to "buffer" the binding against rejection.
3. The braid would be sealed with a tincture distilled from the Styx itself, intended to render the new entity immune to memory of its prior lives.

The Initiative failed.

The souls would not cohere. Each retained too much of itself; each refused to surrender the particular convictions that would have allowed them to merge into a single mind. The hosts survived the binding — Zariel's craft was equal to that much — but emerged as something neither lemure nor devil. Their bodies erupted with redundant limbs, eyes, and mouths in a frenzied attempt by the three constituent souls to express themselves simultaneously through a body designed for one. They could be commanded only by the loudest voice in the room, and they shed any allegiance the moment a louder voice spoke. As weapons of war they were worse than useless. As terror, they were unmatched.

It is recorded that Zariel, observing the first emergent Choralith, ordered the entire experimental cohort destroyed. The bone devils complied with characteristic enthusiasm. They were, however, incomplete in their accounting. At least seventeen specimens are believed to have escaped during the cull, most via the Avernus–Sigil portal network. Several are now established on the Material Plane; others remain at large in Avernus itself, where they wander the Bonebreaker Plains and prey on caravans loyal to all sides of the Blood War.

It is not known whether further Choraliths are still being produced. This author believes they are not; the political risk to Zariel of acknowledging the failure publicly would be considerable. This author also notes that her belief on this point has wavered three times in as many years.

Behavior

The Choralith hunts. There is no reliable evidence of any higher motivation, though this author has cautioned elsewhere that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, and that a creature with three minds at war with itself may simply have no time left over to scheme.

Observed behaviours include:

• The Chorus. A constant, three-voiced chant in overlapping languages. The content is fragmentary and self-contradictory — one head pleading, one accusing, one cataloguing. Survivors of Choralith encounters consistently report that the chant is in some sense recognisable: that they hear, woven into it, their own voice, repeating something they themselves once said. No two survivors have reported the same phrase.
• Argument. Choraliths frequently halt mid-pursuit to argue with themselves. The three heads turn toward one another, mouths still moving but speech becoming sub-vocal, and the body becomes briefly inert. This window — usually two to six seconds — has been the salvation of more than one fleeing party.
• Bell-Avoidance. Every confirmed Choralith encounter on the Material Plane has occurred outside the audible range of an active temple bell or shrine carillon. Whether this represents a physical aversion or a theological one is debated.
• Trophy-Taking. Specimens have been observed retaining objects of personal significance to their victims — wedding rings, locks of hair, prayer books, a single soldier's tally-stick — wedged into the suckers of their tentacles. The function of this behaviour, if any, is unknown. Some scholars characterise it as mockery; others, as memory.

Recorded Sightings

The following incidents are considered the best-documented Choralith encounters of the past century. Numerous additional accounts exist but cannot reliably be distinguished from sightings of other tentacled aberrations.

The Mournful Field (1494 DR)

Three weeks after the redemption of Elturel, a refugee column reported "a many-headed thing on tentacles" pacing them at a distance of half a mile across the Mournful Field. The creature did not approach. Two of the column's dogs died of seizure during the night; no other injuries were reported. The creature was gone by dawn. Of the eleven adult witnesses, four later refused to speak of the incident at all; the remaining seven gave testimony consistent in every particular save the colour of the eye stalks, on which no two agreed.

The Hush at Carrock Bell (1497 DR)

A small farming community in the Western Heartlands reported the sudden silencing of all village dogs over a period of two days. On the morning of the third day, the village's grain-shed was found collapsed inward, its contents replaced with what one witness described as "a great mound of teeth and looking-things." Adventurers dispatched from Berdusk arrived to find the shed empty and the doors closed from the outside. The dogs began to bark again that evening, and one elderly woman, who had been mute for nineteen years, recovered her voice and used it to scream until she lost it again.

Beneath the Sea-Stair (1501 DR)

A surveying expedition into the storm-drain catacombs below Athkatla encountered an organism matching the Choralith description in a flooded chamber three hundred feet below sea level. The expedition lost four members in the first thirty seconds. The survivors escaped by ringing a brass diving bell continuously for an hour as they retreated. The creature did not pursue beyond the chamber's threshold. A subsequent expedition recovered the bell, intact; the chamber, on return, was empty.

The Bonebreaker Plains (multiple, ongoing)

Plane-travelling scholars consistently report Choraliths roaming the open wastes of Avernus, particularly along the southern edge of the Bonebreaker Plains. These specimens are observed in greater numbers than on the Material Plane and appear to display less of the local caution toward bells, suggesting either acclimatisation or a material difference between the Avernal and exile populations. At least one observer has reported Choraliths travelling in a pair, an arrangement otherwise undocumented.

Competing Theories

While the Triune Initiative hypothesis is dominant, three alternative theories warrant mention:

The Far Realm Origin (proponent

Magister Tellos Hark, Sword Coast Conservatory)

Hark argues that the Choralith's anatomy more closely resembles known Far Realm aberrations than any infernal lineage, and that the Avernus connection is incidental — the creatures may merely use Avernus as a transit zone. This view has lost favour since the publication of the Reskal Fragments, but persists in academic circles allergic to the political implications of blaming Zariel for anything she did not explicitly invent.

Aboleth Corruption (proponent

the late Sage Brother Pellis Orven)

Orven held that the Choralith is the product of a soul-merging experiment by an unknown aboleth of the lower Trackless Sea. He cites the creature's tentacular morphology and aquatic-derived suckers as evidence. This author concedes the morphology but argues, with some force, that suckers are convergent.

Divine Punishment (proponent

folk tradition, Selûnite communities of the North)

An oral tradition among certain Selûnite congregations holds that the Choralith is the form taken by mortals who have died with three mutually-exclusive oaths unfulfilled. This view is not scholarly. It is also not absent from this author's private nightmares.

Combat Doctrine

What follows is reproduced, with permission, from the field manual of the Order of the Onyx Quill, a small order of investigators specialising in aberrant threats. The Order has dispatched four Choraliths since 1480 DR with the loss of only two members, a record unmatched by any other affiliated party.

1. Engage at distance. The Choralith's tentacles have a fifteen-foot reach. Anyone within that radius is presumed grappled.
2. Bring a bell. A hand-bell of at least four pounds, rung continuously, has appeared to disorient the chorus and impose disadvantage on the creature's attacks. The mechanism is not understood; the effect is confirmed in three of three trials.
3. Aim for the stalks. Removing the eye stalks blinds the creature in steps. With all stalks severed it is functionally sightless despite its remaining scatter-eyes.
4. Do not parley. The chorus will answer questions. The answers will be sincere. They will not be the same.
5. Cleave the tentacles. A Choralith with four or fewer tentacles cannot pursue effectively; one with none cannot stand.

Cultural Impact

The Choralith is not widely known to the laity, and where it is known it is largely conflated with other tentacled horrors of the deep. However, in the trade towns of the Western Heartlands the rural epithet Hush-Bringer has entered the local idiom as a verb: "to bring hush" is to silence a room merely by entering it. The connection to the creature is rarely conscious in the speakers, but it is persistent, and parents in those towns still tell children that the Hush-Bringer comes for those who lie three times in one day.

In Avernus, the creature is reportedly a popular subject of imp and lemure folk songs, which depict it sympathetically — as a being made of leftover voices, kin to all the small fiends who never amounted to anything. The bone devils, by contrast, do not speak of it at all.

Author's Note

What I cannot bring myself to record above, but what I will record here, is the following. The Choralith captured in the Sea-Stair incident was held, briefly, in a warded chamber beneath Athkatla for examination. I was permitted seven minutes with the creature, through a slit in a lead shutter. In those seven minutes the chorus spoke ninety-one times. Eleven of those utterances were sentences I have spoken aloud in my own life, in private, in rooms I had believed empty. I do not know how the Choralith came to know them. I do not know which of the three voices spoke them. I have not slept well since.

— I. Vauk, Candlekeep, the 12th of Marpenoth, 1502 DR.

References

• Vauk, I. (1492 DR). On the Soldiers She Could Not Make. Candlekeep Press.
• Orven, P. (1483 DR). A Catalogue of Lesser Aberrations of the Sword Coast. Library of Oghma, Iriaebor.
• The Reskal Fragments. Translation by D. Morr (apostate); critical edition by the Cindered Codex (1499 DR).
• Order of the Onyx Quill (1501 DR). Field Manual on Aberrant Threats: Internal Circulation Only.
• Mordenkainen the Mage. Marginalia in the Tome of Foes (folio 47v, "On Failed Bindings").