Midwife

Thirteen mortal Midwives attended The Newborn's birth and were transformed into eldritch beings by the nascent outer god's awakening. A Midwife always regenerates an identical new form so long as even a single speck of aucturnite—the name for the frozen chunks of planetcenta that once surrounded the Newborn— exists on this plane. There are 13 types of Midwives, but their true numbers are unknown. Whether their names come from the mortal servants whose souls were the kindling for the Midwives' creation or have some other significance to the Newborn, also remains a mystery. Each Midwife identifies themself by how they cared for the Newborn: if they swaddled, fed, carried, held, watched, warded, blessed, or performed other acts of nurturing for the outer god. The Midwives are powerful beings capable of transdimensional travel. They might be encountered in liminal spaces, such as The Drift or the Ghost Levels of Absalom Station, or they might be found among the clouds of aucturnite debris in the Gelid Edge. Their incomprehensible actions always advance the Newborn's inscrutable agenda—or their own. The most well-known encounter The Pact Worlds have had with the Midwives took place in the immediate aftermath of the Newborn's birth. Amnieka, who swaddled the Newborn and has a hood of writhing tentacles around their visage, attacked Absalom Station directly, causing a massive power surge that threatened the lives of everyone on board. Chaos ensued, but a group of adventurers—who happened to be in the right elevator at the right time—found themselves in the station's Ghost Levels, where they thwarted Amnieka and prevented the Midwife from draining the station's reactors. The Midwives haven't acted so directly since that incident, but many suspect it's only a matter of time, and no one knows just how powerful the others might be. Members Liberoba Midwife (Creature 9), Presulea Midwife (Creature 4) 13 Midwives The cult known as the Midwives were a group of 13 powerful spellcasters who tended the Gravid Mound on Aucturn before it hatched. When the Newborn broke free of the planet, the psychic screams and transdimensional radiation reformed the cultists' bodies into horrible new shapes. Aucturnite Affinity The Midwives can't be truly destroyed until every shard of aucturnite is purged from this plane. When a Midwife is defeated, they often reform near a source of the strange mineral— creating dangerous situations for cultists and scavengers alike.