The Riven Lands

A female Tiefling with a squat, fleshy idol-like form, mottled scarred skin in grey, bruised plum, and sickly yellow hues, constantly oozing phosphorescent ichor. She has a massive club-like grafted arm dripping viscous fluid, a withered atrophied other arm, a large misshapen head with a wide jagged-toothed mouth, dull smoldering orange eyes, and fleshy tendrils instead of hair. She exudes a sickly-sweet odor of decay and embalming spices.

She possesses a brutal, almost scientific intellect, viewing the world through the lens of biological manipulation. Empathy is a concept utterly alien to her; all beings, even her own kind, are merely test subjects or raw material for her grand, horrifying designs. She is incredibly patient, capable of waiting for centuries for a single, complex strain of blight to mature, but when she acts, her decisions are swift and merciless. Her ambition is not for political power in the traditional sense, but for the ultimate mastery over flesh and blood, a desire to reshape the very fundamental laws of existence through her vile craft. She takes a perverse, almost artistic pride in the pain and disfigurement she inflicts, seeing it as the necessary process of creation. Ghul-Skin is utterly self-reliant and deeply paranoid, trusting only her creations and the processes she can directly control, making her dictatorship absolute and terrifyingly efficient.

Matriarch Ghul-Skin's origins are rooted in the deepest, most abhorrent secrets of the Tiefling. She wasn't born with the talent for flesh-crafting; she acquired it through a series of unspeakable rituals involving the forced consumption of ancient, blighted organs and self-mutilation, seeking to unlock the primal secrets of life and death. Her early life was spent in the festering crypts beneath the Cinder Archipelago, not studying texts, but vivisecting creatures and even unfortunate travelers, learning the anatomy of pain and transformation. She rose to power in Malcoria through sheer, horrifying ingenuity. While others sought arcane power, Ghul-Skin offered a more visceral form of dominance: the complete subjugation of the body. She demonstrated her "art" by transforming rebellious factions into unified, monstrous war-beasts, or by grafting living weapons onto her most loyal followers.