Daemon, Vepar
"Chained" © deviantArt user ArtNamia, accessed at her gallery here
[Vepar was actually the first Goetic demon I figured out how I wanted to cover after Dantalion, but I was delayed in writing her because I couldn't find art I actually liked. I knew I wanted her to be a sordesdaemon, and I wanted her to still look like a sordesdaemon, and finding a fat mermaid with horns and a rotting aspect turned out to be very difficult. Even now, this art might not actually represent a mermaid; I'm going to assume that lower body ends in a tail fin for my purposes.
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Daemon, Vepar CR 20 NE Outsider (extraplanar) This mermaid-like creature is pallid and swollen, like a corpse just before active decay sets in. She has a pair of curving horns growing from her head, and a pair of jointed legs ending in a sharp claw where the pelvic fins might be on her fishy lower body.
Vepar is the greatest of the sordesdaemons, and perhaps the most successful at their goal of spreading death through pollution. Vepar is an arms merchant of the highest caliber, selling poisons, biological and chemical weapons, along with the services of her Black Fleet to disperse them. Vepar’s Black Fleet is composed of a dozen sailing ships and two bone ships, the mundane ships crewed by ceustodaemon sailors with a piscodaemon captain and leukodaemon gunners. Not only do these vessels lay out targeted death with diseased ballista bolts and monstrous marines, but their bilge water carries with it the taint of the River Styx, polluting the seas wherever they sail and leading to outbreaks of fiendish and mutated ocean life.
Like other sordesdaemons, Vepar possesses a keen and cruel intellect, the ability to spread multiple horrific afflictions, and powerful natural weapons. Her fists, horns and talons all deal damage as unholy weapons, and those struck with her gore suffer from hideous rotting wounds, the nerves and tendons transmuting into half-living worms. She is remarkably agile despite her bulk, and her arms can stretch to unnerving proportions to strike an enemy with a fist or a touch spell. Vepar has mastery over water, and forces foes that battle her in her element to deal with choppy seas and storms as well as her direct attacks.
Vepar has gotten as far as she has by her ability to mollify the Horsemen and their Harbingers. Although she directly serves Hexxus, she has good relations with both Szuriel and Apollyon, and has been the commander of joint ventures sponsored by those horrors. She is willing to deal with mortals, sometimes through proxies and sometimes directly. On the Pandaemonic Parliament, she is often consulted on matters of logistics and military strategy. Her passion for diseases and poisons of all kinds has her following the trail of a strange rumor; green worms that devour the brains of a host and transform them into a free-willed undead. If she manages to find the truth to these legends, Vepar may be responsible for spreading the spawn of Kyuss to new worlds, and possibly even accelerate Kyuss’ rebirth and a new Age of Worms.
