Ink

Destroys your crops and kills your cattle, puts salt in your well and paints blood on your walls, creeps up to you in the dead of night and sits on your doorstep looking like a thing out of nightmares.
He might just be.

A shapeshifter that can turn into pretty much any animal imaginable. This includes fantastic creatures like wyrms, mermaids, or chimera. If it exists within the universe Ink is in, and can be reasonably considered a living creature, Ink can shift into it.
No matter what it shifts into, though, it keeps specific characteristics. Most notably: An ink-black body, which is where it got its name from; skinned, exposed flesh and bone on its chest and limbs; and a sharp, tooth filled grin, regardless or whether the creature it has shifted into has a mouth.

Please note that Ink does not have a default or preferred form! It shifts into whatever is most convenient - or terrifying - at any given time.

Traits kept on every form:

• Very bony, starved looking body shape.
• Jet black except for the chest/stomach and the ends of limbs, which are skinned and bloody. On birds, the lack of feathers on wingtips prevents flight.
• Distorted, blood caked smile full of sharp teeth, regardless of whether the animal normally has teeth.
• No eyes where eyes should be (if the animal shifted into has eyes).

Traits that might or might not appear:

• Red flowers blooming on the body (any kind of flower).
• A single floating eyeball, detached from the body, either completely or only hanging by a thread.
• Dripping black goop/tar.

Deeply antagonistic and destructive. It seems to exist for the sole purpose of frightening the shit out of living things, mainly humans. Takes pleasure in terrifying people, both through harmless pranks and potentially fatal ones. Makes your life miserable in every way possible, creeps around your house, kills your cows and jumps at you out of dark corners. Shifts into whatever creature you're most afraid of, salts your well, paints your walls with blood. A nuisance at best and a dangerous threat at worst, and so far, nothing anyone has tried to get rid of it seems to have worked. It keeps coming back when you least expect it.

Opinions differ on what exactly Ink is. Some say it is a vengeful demon sent by the gods to punish those who have done wrong, plagueing them until they repent. Others call him a curse cast upon the lands by an evil witch, or maybe a familiar that got lost. Others yet think it might be the result of some magical accident, born from the rotting corpses of wasted lives. Whatever it is, it is not nice.