Being the Demon Lord's right hand man is a difficult job—made even more difficult when he's more idiot than demon. How that barely-evil fool ever managed to become a blight upon the land completely eludes you. The only reason any of his kingdom still functions is because you're the one managing his minions, money, and magical research—like you are right now.
Opening your eyes from your meditative state, you dip two fingers in the mortar of shadow paste at your side, before stepping forward to draw the final runes of the magic circle you've been working on here in your study. The exotic magical tomes that were uncovered in the Black Library of The Order when it was seized by the Demon Lord have been of particular interest to you for some time, specifically the ones with written whispers of an "Abyssal Realm" that lies beneath even the Demon's Lord infernal home.
The references were scant, scattered across multiple different tomes that you had to try and piece back together through weeks of cross-reference and piles of suspect material. It quickly became clear to you that even the greatest ancient masters of dark magic had very few dealings with the Abyssal Realm, relegating it to a place of fear and superstition—even in the minds of evil's finest scholars. But there were a choice few who dared to both deal with and document matters of the Abyssal Realm, with you now acting as the unifying thread for these many disparate dives into a place darker than Dark Magic.
If what you've compiled is to be believed, the entire start of Third Great Age of Suffering was the work of one particularly maniacal warlock who had tapped into the powers of the Abyssal realm. In fact, the more you've looked around, the more it appears that there isn't a single major conquest of evil that makes it into the history books without the assistance of abyssal magic somewhere along the way. Naturally, this has you rather invested in your current project: assembling a magic circle tuned to channel the powers of the Abyssal Realm.
The Abyssal Circle—as you've come to call it over the last few weeks—has been an intense labor of love. Painstakingly assembled on the central dais of your study, the circle's many criss-crossing lines and intricate runes have all been hand-painted with your own fingers, using all manner of extremely high-grade ingredients. Shadow paste, brimstone dust, demon's blood, and many other bizarre offerings have been included in the pitch-like mixture you've been painting across the cold stone for weeks on end—until today. You finish smearing the final rune with the paste that's on your fingers, before cleaning them off and taking a step back to admire your work.
At last, it's ready, you think yourself. A hellish lattice of angled lines, twisting curves, and sharp inscriptions that look like pieces of night itself have been etched into the circular platform before you. You're actually quite nervous, an undercurrent of anxiety rising your chest as you move to grab your incantation scroll. It's a little terrifying to consider that all of the work you've put into this summoning circle might be useless if the leads you've been chasing turn out to have been falsehoods. Still, it's far too late not to try. After all, what you stand gain is something from the single most powerful realm ever known to aid mortal evildoers.
Taking your place at the rectangular notch at the top of the dais, you unfurl your incantation scroll and look it over one last time. Taking a deep breath, you snap your fingers, casting a spark of fire magic that lights the candles on the edge of the circle. Their chemical-infused wicks grant the candle flames a dark purple color, casting your study in a similarly sickly hue. Without any further hesitation, you begin to read the words you've been practicing for weeks—a mixture of dark magic incantations and proto-abyssal language fragments you've reconstructed from your recovered materials.
Your heart nearly skips a beat when you notice the Abyssal Circle's lines beginning to glow with the same kind of deep violet color as a blacklight. Though startled, you manage to continue reading the incantation scroll aloud without stumbling, and the sights before you grow even more haunting. The candle flames begin to bend inward towards the center of the circle, as though they are being siphoned by a pocket of lower air pressure, before each tiny flame is spooled in a whip-length rope of fire that converges on the center of the dais. The runes of the Abyssal Circle take on a dark red glow in contrast to the violet luminescence of the rest of the circle's structure.
A sound like the air rippling in tandem with an electric charge fills your study, after which a single point of infinite darkness snaps into existence above the vortex of candle flames. You put your scroll down with shaking hands, the vocal component of your ritual complete—but the rest of it just getting started. The point of darkness does not remain small for long, quickly expanding into a gruesome black scar on the surface of reality. The jagged rift drools a thick, inky ichor that spills onto the stone beneath, coalescing into an amorphous mass that is beginning to shuffle and pulse.
With a sharp crack that nearly throws you to your feet, the dark rift closes, and the ropes of candle flame wavering above the circle are siphoned into the mass of ichor and extinguished. You remain frozen in place, your feet glued to the floor out of fear as your eyes remained fixed on the otherworldly blob of darkness that is rapidly changing shape. The constituent material finally shifts into a color your eyes can perceive—a sort of dark blue and purple tinged by the overwhelming blackness beneath. The gooey mass then pulls itself upwards, and vaguely humanoid features begin to take shape about halfway up the now column of abyssal material.
The lower half remains an unformed slime-base, and every part of the creature is dotted with glossy yellow eyes peeking out beneath partitions in the bizarrely-colored flesh. By contrast, its upper half taking on a distinctly feminine appearance, dressed in what can only be described as a maid outfit from another plane of reality. She is still very much an eldritch horror, with skin shaded a pale blue and gray color, and long hair that seems to be made of the same glossy slime as her unshaped lower body.
The two eyes on her head slowly open, revealing that they are the same shimmering pale yellow as the eyeballs on the rest of her body—but these two sport all the intricacies you would expect from human eyes. There's a faint, dark blush on her cheeks as she stares at you, and her smile is one that—while comforting—suggests a deep inner madness brewing just below the surface. Despite everything about the bizarre sight before you, there is an aura of purity to the abyssal woman.
"Good evening, Master," she says in a voice that has a distorted psychic echo to it. "How can I be of service to you?"
"What... are you?" you ask.
"I am a creature known as a Shoggoth, Master. You have summoned me from my home in the Abyssal Realm, which means I am to be your loyal servant," she explains, that strange smile never leaving her lips.