Ancardia's Greatest Monstrosities: The Manananggal
Classification: Monstrosity (horror)
Habitat: Warm, humid jungle and caverns.
The Manananggal is among the most feared monstrous undead horrors to be found in all of Ancardia, made all the worse by their evil-natured method of creation and their great calculating intellect. These creatures can assume a form which very accurately passes as a normal humanoid, which they maintain during the day. At night, they shapeshift back into their true hideous form and separate their upper portion from their lower one, leaving it behind in order to fly out and seek out victims. Like ghul, the manananggal must sustain itself with either raw flesh or living blood, and given how it is created it usually chooses the latter, and in egregiously lethal ways.
Manananggal are created by particularly sinister necromancers, usually in service of a violent cult but sometimes also on their lonesome for purposes of vengeance or threatening locals. Unlike ghul, manananggal are not conscious individuals with free will, but rather animated by the will of a possessing evil entity, usually a lesser demonic or stagnatic being. When the manananggal’s body is destroyed or consecrated, the link between itself and the fiend is severed and it can no longer control the body. One of the primary methods of monster-hunters to rid an area of a manananggal is to find the place where it stashes its lower body each night, usually in a damp cave, cellar, or in a locked room somewhere. Once the lower body is found, burning it, salting the cut-off stump, or lacing the stump with a potent natural acid such as lime juice or vinegar are the usual ways to prevent the upper half from rejoining before dawn; if the manananggal can’t reconnect with its lower half, it will wither away and die automatically.
During the day, manananggal are generally indistinguishable from ordinary folk—whatever species they choose to resemble. Many reported manananggal have taken the form of humans, and some of ratlings, hurthlings, half-orcs and the odd wood elf; manananggal in some areas are known to have disproportionately created from the corpses of women, generally in regions where femicide is more common and usually at the hands of the necromancer taking out violence against women and girls they know. This has, in some of these areas, led to the idea manananggal are all female and are not possessed of evil beings, but are the result of promiscuous, improper, or otherwise taboo behaviour in women and arise from the lady’s jealous ghost. This unfortunately tends to reinforce the social trend towards misogyny in these parts. In some regions, these horrific creations are known as Penangglan, or as Krasue, but they are all three some variation on this bloody and evil-natured ritual.
