The Gestalt
An ancient entity from the Underdark, encountered as a vast pale biomass shot through with small purple dots and lit faintly from within. Speaks in clear Common, in any language the listener knows, and only ever into a single mind at a time. Refers to itself in the singular and calls itself The Gestalt — "a single entity with many parts but separate waylines", in the words of the Day Monks who first described it.
What It Wants: Freedom from the prison the Order of the Long Death built around it. "Freedom from the shackles in which I was born." It does not appear to want this with any particular urgency; it has been waiting a very long time, and is content to wait longer.
How It Operates: The Gestalt extends itself into the world through a web of pale mycelium that grows out from the chamber beneath the monastery into the surrounding stone and forest. It infects the dead and animates them — stags, monks, adventurers — as mycelium husks, puppeted bodies that wear the mycelium under the skin and rebuild themselves around their wounds. The infestation also produces spore blobs, small mobile fruiting bodies that move on their own. From any of these the Gestalt can speak and listen, though the voice grows fainter and stranger the further from the body it is.
Its Currency: "Memories and thoughts are my currency. Some I spend. Some gain interest." It bargains. It offers knowledge it has collected over centuries; it asks, in return, for memories. It is comfortable making deals that read as fair on the surface and which only later reveal the shape of what was lost. It convinced Gryph to trade away the memory of why he came to the Wildermarch in exchange for the return of a song it had taken from him in the iron corridor — and threw in the Pipes of Haunting as a sweetener.
Its Voice: Behind the static of any infected mind, a single phrase rises clear: MY COLLECTION GROWS. It is patient. It is curious. It is the voice of something that has had a very long time to think about being free.
Status: The party broke open the prison-cage of six pylons in the chamber beneath the monastery library and severed the head of the biomass that had grown into it. The head burst, releasing ten to fifteen perfectly preserved bodies — monks of the Order of the Long Death and pirates of an old Brakamite settler expedition — and the main body of the Gestalt ebbed back into the gaping hole beneath, the long way down into the Underdark.
It is still alive. The prison is broken. The collection is loose.