Forgotten Realms

Bhaal’s mortal guise is a contradiction: beautiful and terrifying. His skin is bloodless, almost translucent, with faint blue veins visible like rivers beneath snow. His eyes are coal-ringed irises with no whites—deep, depthless pits where light goes to die. He wears a robe of layered crimson and black, stitched with thread made from actual hair, and fastened with clasps shaped like weeping skulls. His steps make no sound. A faint scent of clove and iron clings to him. When he speaks, blood beads in the ears of the weak-willed. His hands, always bare, are long and clean, but his shadow holds a dagger no one sees until it’s too late. Every movement is deliberate, smooth as falling silk, yet as tense as a coiled garrote. In battle, his form sometimes flickers—becoming a silhouette of knives and antlers—then reforms with a grin.

Bhaal is not wrathful—he is intentional. He speaks quietly, with a predator’s patience, using language like a knife—careful, precise, and always drawing blood. He is obsessed with purpose: to kill without reason is wasteful, but to kill with meaning is art. He delights in cultivating assassins, manipulating ideologues into becoming blades for his will. He does not rage; he plans. Bhaal watches mortals like a gardener watching weeds—some to be culled, others twisted into thorns. To his followers, he is a god of perfection through death. To his enemies, he is the knife behind the next heartbeat. When Bhaal speaks, even the air holds still. He is not merely death—he is the motive behind it.

Once slain in the Time of Troubles, Bhaal has clawed his way back into the weave of the world—piecemeal, patient, and blood-bound. Worshipped by assassins and feared by all, Bhaal wears many faces across Faerûn, but when he chooses to walk the mortal realm, he takes the guise of a pale, ageless man draped in crimson and shadow. His return was seeded in a thousand small deaths—each one a whisper, a memory, a promise. Cults call him The Butcher Returned, carving his icon into skin and stone alike. He needs no throne, no temple—only blades and believers. When Bhaal appears, it’s rarely to strike. He listens. He marks. And then the killing begins. Whether in dreams or flesh, his presence signals one thing: murder is not random. It is worship.