Cegilune

Cegilune was the patron goddess and supposed mother of the hags, as well as the goddess of similar fell folk and the moon. Still boiling with spite over an ancient crime, the dark lunar deity was driven by vindictiveness, clinging to her divinity only to exact bitter vengeance on those she believed betrayed her.

Description
Cegilune appeared as a filthy, tall hag with mottled, yellow-brown skin, iron-hard claws and a balding scalp from which patches of lank hair flaked off. However, her power to disguise herself meant she could take on a myriad of forms, her usual choice being that of a young human or elven female, a homely crone, or, very rarely, a scruffy goblinoid. She could be recognized when in disguise by the small iron pot she always carried with her.

Personality
Cegilune was a truly wretched being of malevolent will, deep hatred and sadistic desire. The suspicious and avaricious hag mistress was filled with resentment and planned to enact bitter revenge against a world that left her behind ages ago.

Powers
Cegilune's avatars had some of the dangerous qualities of ordinary hags; they had enough power behind their teeth and talons to rend flesh and could change self at will. They were immune to illusions, enchantments, poisons and death magic, couldn't be harmed without greatly enchanted magical weapons and were barely harmed by acid or cold-based attacks, although oddly they were vulnerable to petrification. They could create forcecages four times each day, kill instantly with their gaze twice a day and unleash a banshee-like wail once each week.

As one might expect from a lunar goddess, Cegilune's power waxed and waned with the phases of the moon of the world she was on. In the case where a world had multiple moons, her power was tied to the one specifically associated with evil, and failing that the one with the shortest lunar cycle. At the start of the lunar cycle, The days before, during, and after a new moon, she was weaker, unable to use her death gaze and with diminished magical resistance. At the end of the cycle however, before, during and after a full moon, both her spells and magical resistance were super charged and on the specific night of the full moon itself she could cast a lunacy-inducing moonbeam spell.

Possessions
Cegilune had her own great iron cauldron within her lair that she often fed souls and stolen magical treasures to bring forth horrible evils. Her avatars carried their own small pots, each capable of producing four different magical effects once per day. Each could create somewhere between 9-16 poisonous snakes, project a magical screen, throw up a web in diameter, and produce a vial of incredibly dangerous, strength-sapping venom that the avatar could coat their claws in, although it took a few minutes to kick in and wore off the talons after only a few claw swipes.

Her avatars also had small, beaded bags containing somewhere between 2-20 hag eyes, the shriveled eyes of the hag's former victims magically treated to let he see through them at will from up to away. Like typical hag eyes, creating them was dangerous since their destruction would damage their creator, so they were carefully concealed around the perimeter of their activities. Relatedly, Cegilune had a number of soul gems buried in secret places, each enchanted with powerful chain contingency spells, rendering her virtually indestructible under ordinary circumstances.

Realm
Cegilune's realm was in the Gray Wastes of Hades, a dreary domain of endless misery. Ironically, the Wastes were without a moon or any other celestial bodies: it was simply a featureless gray expanse, a land of never-ending twilight offering neither the closure of dusk or the new hope of dawn. The wastes the embittered hag goddess called home drained out the emotions and vibrancy from all that entered, the only known protection against the apathy being to hide and internalize one's emotions deep within the mind. Cegilune's lair was located in Pluton, the lowest layer of the Wastes, in a desolate pit known as Hag's End, halfway up a vast mountain of black, dead rock. From inside her filthy, bone-strewn cave crypt Cegilune stirred her vile brews under a small, glowing, hovering replica of the full moon.

Activities
In order to bring about her day of reckoning, Cegilune had to conserve and foster what was left of her reduced power. Her primary method of doing so was to collect soul larvae, a basic unit of power and currency in the lower planes, that she used for a variety of wicked purposes. She made use of their profane power to empower her hag servitors, expended them in dark rituals to create abominations to infest the Material Plane and traded them with liches and tanar'ri. The purpose of the latter arrangement was that she required magical aid in order to sustain herself, as much as she resented having to do so.

Despite sending her night hags to collect larva, Cegilune didn't trust her psychopathic underlings and enjoyed watching creatures die, so she frequently sent avatars to the Material Plane to personally capture evil souls for transformation into larva. Cegilune also went to the Material Plane to visit a small number of stone circles and standing stones in order to conduct enigmatic magical rituals. She kept her activities at these sacred sites incredibly confidential, placing hag's eyes around the area and having somewhere between 1-4 night hags prowling the surroundings.

The rituals typically took place during the night of the full moon and were sometimes preceded by hunts where the avatar captured and rendered helpless a suitable sacrifice, such as a ranger, druid, fey creature or swanmay. Relatedly, swanmays were her favorite food, although a male human of formidable fighting prowess that she captured herself was also a delightful meal. She sometimes had a feast of flesh with a hag coven she was visiting to extract treasure or information from.

Relationships
Among the sylvan pantheon and sylvan beings in general, Cegilune was reviled, seen as a fearsome predator of faerie creatures that lurked in the darkness.

Though he once tried to take control of the larva trade from the night hags with an army of undead wizards, Cegilune's contingencies prevented even the great Lich-Lord Mellifleur from daring to attack her.

Cegilune had no real allies, only dealings with liches, demons and some of the evil gods of giantkind. Supposedly she once coupled with Grolantor, contributing to his interbred stock of degenerate and runt giant breeds. She also had a herald in the form of a gigantic larva she called Ambrosial, a mindless, gargantuan maggot with a fat humanoid face buried under rolls of corpulence that she bred only for the purpose of expressing her wrath.