Juiblex

Tairos is very old. Everything we know and everything we think we know is all a thimble full of water pulled from an ocean of time.

— Lecture overheard in the classrooms of Ghal Pelor's university

  Those alive today think of events like the Fang Crusades as being impossibly ancient. The tribal age before Melanthris and the other great nations were founded is about as far back as most written records go. Only the most studious and well-traveled historian would have scraps of surviving records from the age of the Golden God and his doomed empire. Before that, no written words exist.   For billions of years, the rock and water existed, absent anything recognizable as life today. The bones of this world played host to entities from the void of space, beings born in the corona of stars, or forged from the strange empyrean of the distant planes. In the modern age wars are fought over resources and ideology, but in this distant epoch, battles were waged by beings that warped the physics and laws of magic around them. They fought over who gets to define reality while barely recognizing each other as sentient. Creatures like the Scorned One, the Black Brilliance, the Architects and so many others have all touched Tairos at one point or another (time has little bearing on their action so the "when" related to these interactions is a nebulos thing to quantify). Juiblex is one of these inscrutable precursors.   This formless tidal wave of mouths, teeth, eyes, and flesh exists as a ravenous celestial tumor adrift in the black sea between stars while its maddening dreams can take the form of avatars across dozens of worlds. These dream-things appear as shapeless, annihilating blobs that consume everything in their path. Still, mortals willing to risk their souls and their sanity can sometimes shape these avatars into more useful forms. Some speculate that The Autumn Queen was one such mortal who found a piece of Juiblex and subconsciously shaped it into the Jaberwocky.   Juiblex's lesser spawn are common horrors seen frequently in the myths and stories of Tairos- Mimics, Doppelgangers, Gibbering Mouthers, Yochlol, and all manner of slimes, puddings, and oozes. Some of these creatures are fascinated in their own alien way with the behaviors of solid-form beings, while others are simply ravenous creatures with minds too strange for mortals to comprehend. The goal they share is the same: render down what is solid into formless waste... and then to spawn from it. These are caustic beings with an affinity for acids, poisons, and entropy.   If Juiblex has a greater goal, it's impossible to discern. However, if its cults are to be believed, then it has something to do with mutation and rebirth. They pray to this shapeless insanity in exchange for power, usually in the form of new bodies, acidic power, and summoned horrors. Many are obsessed with the idea of summoning Juiblex's actual physical self so they may join with it and be moulded into a new, glorious form. In truth, Juiblex's mass and size is such that most planetary bodies would break apart under the gravitational tides it exerts. Those chunks of a world would be destined to splash down into the living ocean of Juiblex's body and be consumed. In this way, Juiblex's end goal is the same as all the other precursor entities... consume. Many who study such entities (while maintaining some level of sanity) speculate these beings are driven to devour so that they may bloat themselves enough to collapse the cosmos and, in some way, become the germinating seed for a new cycle of creation. If this is true, then Juiblex is certainly well-positioned to win the final prize.