The Gaunt Summoner

There are nine Gaunt Summoners, and each is a nightmare of the same shape: a spindle-limbed daemon wizard with a fan of eyes across its face, every eye watching a different possible future. Each Summoner rules a Silver Tower, a labyrinth-palace that drifts between the realms, baiting heroes inside with prophecies of exactly the prize they cannot refuse. Those who survive the Tower's trials leave changed in ways that serve its master; most simply become part of the architecture.

In war, a Gaunt Summoner is less a combatant than a door. The grimoire chained at its waist holds the true names of daemons beyond counting and the secret ways between places, and with a whispered syllable it can fold a legion of Horrors through a rent in the air into a fortress's heart. Sieges that should have lasted years have ended in a single carnival night, with the defenders' watch-fires still burning and no one left to tend them.

Yet the Nine are themselves bound. Archaon the Everchosen pried their true names from places even daemons thought safe, and with those names he leashed all nine to the Varanspire. The Summoners serve him flawlessly and hate him perfectly, and each pursues the same private great work: to steal back the syllables of itself, one letter at a time. Whether Tzeentch permitted the binding as a move in some larger game is a question the Summoners have learned not to ask out loud.