Khati Sha the Twisted

The king’s explorer

Ages ago a mighty kerran beastlord named Khati Sha faithfully served his king, Vah Kerrath. When Shar Vahl was carried to the moon of Luclin, he set out at once to explore the new world, serving with honor and widening his people’s knowledge of the moon and its strange inhabitants.

Sources: Library of Erudin: Khati Sha

Into the Grey

He heard stories of a place on Luclin’s light side where the evil snake-folk, the Shissar, held sway. Afraid of the threat they might pose, and perhaps a little too curious, he went into the blazing eternal day to find the region called the Grey. He never came back. The Vah Shir mourned their greatest beastlord, and the Shar Vahl beastlord guild still bears his name. Most believe he died; some think he lives on, watching over his people from the wilds.

Sources: Library of Erudin: Khati Sha

What the Shissar made

The truth is worse. The Shissar captured him in the Grey and took him to their temple, where he suffered unbelievable torment. Curious about the moon’s newest inhabitants, they twisted his body and mind into something cruel and terribly powerful, infected with their xenophobia and lust for power.

Sources: Library of Erudin: Khati Sha · Allakhazam: Shissar

Tashakhi

What had been Khati Sha escaped the Grey, wandered the moon, and finally came back to the Mushroom Forest, where his people worked the Acrylia Mines. Deep in the mines he found a primitive race he named grimlings, and he shaped them as cruelly as the Shissar had shaped him, into a sadistic people bent on spreading death, above all among the Vah Shir.

By the thousands the grimlings burst from the mines, killed countless Vah Shir and drove them from the forest, which became the Grimling Forest. The grimlings worship him as a god under a twisted form of his old name: Tashakhi. Few have noticed, though some say newer grimling buildings mirror Vah Shir design.

Sources: Library of Erudin: Khati Sha

Legend of Lies

The grimlings know the truth and hide it from their own god. The in-game book Legend of Lies says: “To remember what our god does not is folly.” Reminding him of his days as a Vah Shir explorer, or of “his torture and rebirth through death at the hands of the Shissar,” would bring their destruction, “and so we must conceal the truth. Our legends must be lies.” The Shissar side survives as well. In Testament of Night, a Shissar writing in his own blood to the Emperor reports that “the ceremony performed on the Vah Shir captive has failed.” They had tried “to leash the divine, to merge mortal flesh with the power of the gods.”

Sources: Library of Erudin: Khati Sha (Legend of Lies; Testament of Night)

Master Tashakhi

The RPG bestiary Monsters of Luclin describes what he became: a brooding, skeletal being in the depths of the Acrylia Caverns, with the powers of a malevolent nascent godling. He plans to destroy the Vah Shir first, then the tegi, then the Combine refugees of Katta Castellum, Sanctus Seru and Shadow Haven. Only then will he crush the Shissar, in a final, self-destructive act of revenge. He fights with two backward-curving blades fixed to his arms and stays out of reach on small metallic wings. In the Grimling Forest, Agent Tiesh suspects Khati Sha “is somehow wrapped up in the past and present of the Grimlings.”

Sources: Library of Erudin: Khati Sha (Monsters of Luclin — Master Tashakhi; Agent Tiesh)