When the efreeti prince Jhavhul finally discovered the grave of one of Rovagug’s spawn, Xotani the Firebleeder, he knew that he would need a place to house his followers. He ordered the creation of a vast temple complex with several underground levels, and in an attempt to hide himself from his enemies, made those who built his temple the altar’s first sacrifices to Rovagug’s House of the Beast. From then on, only the ruling priest caste knew that their patron who dwelt in an even deeper complex far below Pale Mountain was not actually a direct servant of the Rough Beast, but merely an efreeti prince. Yet those whom Jhavhul’s priests selected from his followers to receive the “Blessings of the Beast” had little care for the true nature of their benefactor—nor did they mind the strange ritual of prayers and unusual requests to bring the “blood of fire into Our Lord Jhavhul,”since at the end of the ritual, each of these men was allowed to speak his greatest desire to the shadowy form they served and have that wish granted. Over the weeks and months to follow, the ranks of the House of the Beast’s followers grew, with each new addition stepping away from the temple a changed soul.
Of course, what was really happening was that Jhavhul was using his followers to fuel his own wishcraft to enable his transformation into a powerful monster—the new incarnation of Xotani the Firebleeder. Yet to force the transformation, he needed to expend the almost unimaginable power of 1,000 wishes. Unable to directly gain the advantage of his ability to grant wishes, Jhavhul was forced to rely upon the wishes of mortals. The “rituals and prayers” he required of them were designed to apply two of the efreeti’s three wishes per day to his own needs, while the third was left to the mortal as a reward for his services. Jhavhul made certain that no single minion ever gained more than one wish for two reasons. First, he knew that what he was doing would send ripples through reality that would alert other genies—enemies who would oppose his desires. By spreading out these “ripples” among dozens, he hoped to keep the ripples small, rather than building them all into one enormous crescendo focused on one being. Second, by preventing his followers from gaining more than one wish each, he kept their power in check. His minions would be granted one fondest desire, but only one—and in so doing, Jhavhul hoped to prevent any of them from growing so powerful that they might decide to oppose him directly.
Yet Jhavhul underestimated how closely his enemies were watching. As he continued to abuse reality, his wishes swiftly caught the attention of another master of wishcraft—the djinni Nefeshti. With the aid of a human lover named Andrathi, her five janni minions, and a small army of her own, these Templars of the Five Winds sought out Jhavhul and attacked his people. The resulting battles raged across the Pale Mountain region as Jhavhul desperately tried to hold out just long enough to finish his 1,000 wishes. But as fate would have it, he never made it. Andrathi sacrificed himself to capture Jhavhul and his army in a magical dimension held within the legendary Scroll of Kakishon, yet before Nefeshti could recover it, one of Jhavhul’s only minions to escape the shared doom, a gnoll priestess named Shirak, snatched up the Scroll of Kakishon and fled back to the House of the Beast, secreting the item in the deepest part of the temple beyond wards that would hide it from prying eyes for hundreds of years.
During those centuries, the House of the Beast served as a home for countless creatures, yet few have garnered as much notoriety as its current lord—an immense gnoll named Ghartok, known to his packs as the Carrion King. Even before he claimed the House of the Beast as his lair, Ghartok was a legend among the gnoll tribes of Pale Mountain. His disdain for the traditional gnoll goddess Lamashtu was well known—he had long told his packmates that there were better gods deep in the earth.
Gods who were not soft and fragile like pregnant bitches—gods that deserved only the strongest and most potent of what the gnoll race had to offer. The gnolls also held the ruins on the north face of Pale Mountain in supernatural fear, but when Ghartok led a group of hand-picked gnolls into the ruins and emerged alone, victorious, armed with a powerful magic axe and nearly twice the size physically as he had been when he’d entered the ruins, his power only grew. As did his fame.
As word spread about the new warlord—a gnoll who worshiped not Lamashtu but Rovagug, who had claimed the haunted House of the Beast as his home, who fought with a howling greataxe, who towered nearly twice the height of most of his kin—more and more tribes forsook tradition to come to Pale Mountain. They learned this new warlord called himself the Carrion King, and those who attempted to challenge him swiftly learned how powerful he was. As time passed and the Pale Mountain tribes grew in number, the Carrion King retired to the depths of the House of the Beast, attended only by his closest allies and slaves. Today, the legend of the Carrion King is known to every gnoll in the Pale Mountain region, and though many of the regional chieftains and leaders claim to be directly descended from their ferocious king, very few have actually seen the Carrion King in person. Ghartok had himself all but become a god in the eyes of his tribes, and the House of the Beast had become his throne.