Azoragon, Prince of Worms

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"Azoragon the Gorger, Az'uth'gorat the Smiling Moon, Ah-Sashamet-Gi the Sour Bargain, O'sossoth makish z'ze shakkon'ost! Hungry host of whispered promises, prince among worms, I command thee to be made manifest. Come forth from the yawning gulfs of horror and unto my bosom, bared to thee, and drink deep with thy lamprey teeth the succor of my bile and cruel desire, O leech of leeches. Sh'ke makish z'ze ni orbeth! Legion are my enemies and thou shalt glut thyself to thy satisfaction on their smitten entrails once my vengeance has been wrought!"

Anamut. Az'uth'gorat. Krokul-Bazaruk. Azoragon. Many are the names of the Worm Prince, but that last is by far the most common, the name by which he is known in the Common Tongue across Arethil, among the depraved practitioners of the Dark Arts who have called upon him for bargains. Azoragon is a demon of the outer darkness, immortal and ageless, and has been tempting men and women to perform evil deeds since long before entire civilizations have been swallowed by the earth. He exists within a strict hierarchy of higher-ranking entities, serving a retinue of faceless 'Masters' for whom he acts as a mere intermediary. Who these masters may be is quite unknown, be they the Three, yet more powerful demons than he, or the Dark Ones themselves. Some tomes from the Age of Wonders seem to suggest he may be the servant of the demon-lord Ozorthomai, a serpentine being of vast enormity who feeds on mortal ambition and envy who was once worshiped as a god by certain tribes of goblinoids and loosely affiliated cabals of evil sorcerers, but Azoragon's true loyalties are difficult to calculate. In the end, his only obvious agenda is to serve his own debaucherous and deplorable gluttony for mortal souls.

Work in progress

Being a demon, Azoragon has no 'natural' form, and takes whatever shape pleases him most when summoned to the mortal world. However, the size and power of the form he takes is dependent upon the amount of his power he is able to physically manifest.

When bound to a mortal summoner, for instance, he will generally take the shape of a squat, man-sized figure; a grotesque, corpulent blob of putrid flesh swaddled in exquisite finery, clad in the luxurious robes of a duke or baron. A sinister, maw-like smile splits his cyst-riddled face, the texture of a rotten gherkin, from one end to the other. In this form he conveys the appearance of a disgusting but relatively harmless creature, a sniveling schemer and squirming manipulator, the consummate politician among extraplanar fiends.

When unleashed and unbound, however, his wretched power allowed to blossom and the illusory curtains peeled back, a far more horrifying image is revealed. The demon's 'true' form, if indeed it possessed such a thing – at least, the closest thing to a true form the mortal mind can fathom – is that of a nauseatingly obese patchwork of rancid meat, weeping with an unctuous, toxic sweat from every hideously dilated pore, undulating in a huge, bloated, quivering length. A vast chasm of fangs enshrine its leering eyes, winding into a gullet that seems to extend forever across its body: a long, serpentine bulk, slug-like as it slithers through the void, bloated with ever-digesting souls. The Prince of Worms.

But this is a form the demon is rarely able to take within the mortal world, shackled as he ordinarily is by mortal intent when a summoner allows him to cross the barrier. Only when a fixed gateway is opened that permits semi-permanent entry across the planar membrane, without constraint, would his vile mass be rendered before the gaze of mortals in its hideous splendor.