Rast

Hailing from the barren wastes of the Plane of Fire, the rast is as dangerous as it is bizarre. Its body is a single tumorous sack that bulges with hidden organs and veins and bears no sensory apparatus beyond two miniscule eyes almost lost in the folds and wattles of its flesh. Instead, its defining feature is a mouth of flesh-ripping teeth and a wriggling mass of tangled legs. The exact number of legs on a particular rast is seemingly a random trait. Strangely, these tangled limbs do not support the creature, but rather hang twitching and waving beneath it as the rast floats through the air with an easy grace, only reaching out to manipulate objects or—more often—to slash at its prey.

Though rasts do not appear to have any spoken language, they display a degree of intelligence that places them above mere animals, and use this innate cunning to aid in their hunts. As prey is scarce in the barren, ashy deserts of the Plane of Fire where they make their home, rasts prefer to hunt in packs, swarming through the skies like schools of fish, their movements precise and coordinated despite their thrashing limbs. When they come across a likely target, they descend en masse, paralyzing those foes susceptible to their gaze and then abandoning them temporarily to focus on any opponents that remain mobile and dangerous, slashing with their claws and latching on with thick-lipped mouths to suck their victims' blood and viscera. Though each rast has roughly a dozen limbs, it can only control up to four at any given time, leaving the others to dangle uselessly.

Rasts make their homes in small ashen burrows, no more than holes scooped out by the thrashing of their claws, and bear their squirming young live. An adult rast is the size of a human and weighs 200 pounds. Rasts tend to be red, yellow, or purple, with darker coloration on their legs and heads, the better to blend in with the fiery plains of their homeland. Though most other intelligent species on the Plane of Fire are powerful enough (or wise enough) to avoid direct conflict with a rast pack, a cluster that stumbles through a portal to the Material Plane (or perhaps more tragically, is summoned to the Material Plane by a foolish spellcaster) can prove disastrous for the local ecosystem, consuming everything in its path with seemingly no limit to its repulsive hunger.