Shax

The Blood Marquis
CE male demon lord of envy, lies, and particularly violent murder

Cult

Unholy Symbol: curved white feather sitting in a pool of blood
Domains: Chaos, Evil, Trickery, Air
Favored Weapon: Dagger
Temple: Crooked alleyways, hidden rooms in grand estates, secret dungeons
Worshipers: Babaus, chokers, derros, drow, evil nobles, serial killers, torturers
Minions: Fiendish animals (particularly great cats, birds, dogs, and rats), shadow demons
Obedience: Perform an autopsy on a creature killed within the last 24 hours, using bare hands instead of tools as much as possible. Gain a +4 profane bonus against effects that cause bleed and figment illusions. You treat bleed effects as fast healing. For example, if you suffer an effect that causes bleed 5, you do not take any damage from the effect and instead gain fast healing 5. This effect ends whenever you are fully healed.

Cruel and sadistic, Shax revels in the act of torture and murder, especially if the victim retains hope for survival up to the very instant of death. He is particularly fond of eating the eyes of his living victims, but not until he is sure they have seen the filthy tools and bloodstained devices he intends to use upon their bodies.

Shax appears as a human man with a dove’s head, bird’s legs, and an immense collection of knives and other bloodstained weaponry. His cultists are typically lone murderers or sadists, often killers who lead double lives as upstanding citizens of society and kill in secret. Shax is the creator of the babau race, and those he creates by skinning living victims and then infusing them with Abyssal energies are the most powerful of their kind.

Shax’s realm is the appropriately named Charnelhome, an immense house the size of a city perched atop a slightly slanted bluff surrounded by a vast bog of thorny, blood-drinking plants. Each of Charnelhome’s rooms contains a different insidious deathtrap or horrific guardian—Shax is fond of releasing victims into a wing of the vast manor so he can watch them try to escape, often posing as a fellow prisoner so that the demon lord can experience the victim’s despair and fear on as intimate a level as possible.