Hargin
"maggot princess" © @bowelfly, accessed here
[The hargin is a monster I first heard of recently, thanks to @abominationimperatrix. They're found in the stories of Gilgit, a province of west Asia currently belonging to Pakistan. The idea of a shapeshifting, charming, monster bride being a giant maggot is delightful to me, a novel twist on the various swan maidens and selkies of Western Europe. As is the idea that bioaccumulation can result in scavengers becoming magical. In Gilgit, the ibex is considered a fairy animal, and so maggots that eat a dead ibex are those that turn into hargins. I expanded it to fey of all kinds.
Also, how cool is the art? @bowelfly knocked this one out of the park. I sent them references for traditional Gilgit-Baltistan clothing.]
Hargin CR 3 CN Fey This creature has the body of a woman, but the head of a giant maggot. Her neck stretches to impossible lengths. She wears fine robes and carries a stringed instrument.
A hargin is a fey creature that becomes a fey creature through unusual means—its diet. Hargins begin their lives as the ordinary maggots of flies, laid in carrion. The difference is that the carrion is a fey creature of some kind. By eating flesh imbued with fey energy, the maggots themselves become dimly magical and sapient, and then rapidly turn on each other. By the time one had devoured its peers, it has grown to monstrous proportions, and then molts not into a fly pupa, but into a humanoid hargin. The hargin is capable of changing its shape, and then proceeds to enter humanoid society in disguise.
Hargins differ in terms of their alignments, but most have acquisitive personalities. A hargin typically wishes to gain some sort of power, prestige or fame in their humanoid form, or barring that, get rich. Some hargins turn to performance, others to theft, and others seduce their way into the households of the nobility. Although hargins are somewhat naïve, they are charming and capable, and have a handful of magical tricks to assist them in either social climbing or larceny. They spend almost all of their lives in disguise, returning to their monstrous forms only in order to defend themselves. Hargins are more likely to view other members of their own species as threats than allies. Hargins are sexually compatible with the humanoids they mimic, and some fey or aberrant blooded sorcerers have a hargin ancestor somewhere on their family tree.
In combat, a hargin uses its bite attack as its primary weapon, but may carry weapons to defend itself as a humanoid in order to not blow its cover. Its mandibles ooze digestive acids, and it can concentrate them into a caustic bolus. A hargin’s neck can extend impossibly far, even in humanoid form, and they are sometimes mistaken for rokurokubi due to this ability.
