Hallajin

ECOLOGY

Environment any
Organization solitary

Hallajins can use their light leap ability to appear and vanish at will, fly swiftly, pass through material barriers, and cross vast distances in the blink of an eye. Early adepts of Arkanen discovered that hallajins either will not or cannot pass through intense electrical fields, and they found that electricity appears to cause hallajins pain— or at least that they recoil from it. Researchers theorize that electricity interferes in some way with the creatures’ energy matrices. This weakness provides a means of shielding against hallajin intrusions, although intense electrical energy fields also appear to draw the creatures’ attention, perhaps being especially visible to their senses.

Large concentrations of minds, particularly emotional ones, seem to likewise draw the creatures, and researchers must keep their minds carefully shielded with specialized armor or magical protections.

What hallajins want, if anything, is unclear. The little of their culture recovered from ancient ruins and brief interactions indicates that their advancement to their current form was part of an intentional cultural drive to attempt to reach collective godhood. Whether the creatures intentionally stopped at their current state or simply couldn’t progress any further remains unknown. Today, hallajins appear capricious and intensely curious, and their behavior is unpredictable.

They are almost always encountered singly, although small groups of them have been sighted in the distance. Yet despite their apparently solitary behavior, they remain in near-constant communication with others of their kind across vast distances. They don’t appear to understand or respond to any known spoken languages, and attempts to contact them telepathically usually end in disaster. The hallajins sometimes initiate contact, telepathically “speaking” in an unsettling chorus of voices to their listeners, but rarely say anything intelligible. Hallajins occasionally follow visitors to their home planets, exercising their telekinetic abilities to shift objects around or cause random poltergeistlike phenomena, sometimes dangerously. In a few cases, the energy beings turn suddenly hostile, attacking with bursts of searing energy or overloading victims’ minds.

Interestingly, hallajins appear incapable of recognizing mechanical constructs as anything but objects, even if such creatures are intelligent.

The unexplained behavior, strange powers, and eerie appearance of hallajins lead some intelligent creatures to revere them as examples of universal forces or enlightened beings. A few visiting scholars have started single-minded cults around the creatures, believing that hallajins hold the secrets to assisting corporeal beings in attaining a similarly evolved state, if only they can be persuaded to share them.

Due to their aberrant anatomy, it is incredibly difficult to determine the average size of a hallajin. Most scientists posit that they range from 14 to 20 feet in length and, as beings of energy, weigh next to nothing.