Armillaria

Armillaria • she/it

🎵 Bad Blood - Creature Feature 🎵

Armillaria is a morally dubious magical ghost dragon who is apart of Amongst the Oleanders. She is an ancient being that chooses to inhabit the mansion where the main characters live. It can turn itself invisible to hide from people and has very potent magic, which infuses the mansion with magic by extension. It can also change its size at will, but is typically the size of a great dane. Armillaria usually just floats around like typical ghosts do, and can also go through walls. She has lived in the mansion for hundreds of years and was the one to give Laurence his telekinesis and ability to manipulate living matter, just to see what would happen. Armillaria typically stays out of sight and doesn't like to be seen by many people, but has no problem terrorising people who try to live in her mansion if it doesn't like them. Surprisingly however, she had taken a liking to Laurence and hung around him in the wake of his family's death until it was time for her to hibernate for 150 years. During this time of hibernation, Armillaria’s conscious returns to her true body that inhabits her domain in a giant gothic castle, while her earthly body sleeps. Her castle is not bound to the planet where the catfolk live, and can only be accessed when Armillaria’s earthly body sleeps. Some legends say that there is a ritual that can be completed in order to become an attendant in Armillaria’s castle in exchange for eternal preservation once you have died, although many brush it off as a simple wives tale from the olden days. Armillaria is not bound by morals and therefore does not tend to get involved with mortal affairs unless it's to cause a bit of chaos (as a treat) and watching as things play out. She does have a fascination for dead things and has a collection of skulls and bones in the secret mansion room where she typically resides. Armillaria has limb-shaped tendrils of flesh that it manipulates as such, but not always. It likes to practice necromancy and animates dead creatures and corpses as a form of entertainment, sometimes sending them to do her bidding. On full moons, she is able to actually communicate with the dead and bring them into the world of the living as zombies for a little while, so long as their bones exist. Armillaria initially had no name, it didn't see the point of them, but younger Laurence wanted to call her something so he named her after a species of mushroom that glows green with bioluminescence.

-