Nature: Creature
Type: Outsider
Class: Celestials
Subtypes: Native, Draconic

Alignment: Lawful Good
Size: Large
CR: 10 (and up)

Allegiance: Silver Flame (sort of)
World: Eberron, the Material Plane

First Encountered: 26.2 "Sins of the Father"


"This great serpent has magnificently multicolored, rainbow-feathered wings, and its eyes glimmer with intense awareness of everything in its surroundings. It seems to radiate confidence and holy power."

The couatl is legendary for its sheer beauty, vast magical powers, and unwavering virtue. Their intelligence and goodness have usually made them objects of reverence in any regions they've inhabited, which is why they almost always prefer to stay hidden and operate in secret.

A couatl is about 12 feet long, with a wingspan of about 15 feet. It weighs 1'800 pounds.

They seldom attack without provocation, though they always attack evildoers caught red-handed, and tend to use their innate mind-reading ability on any creature that arouses their suspicions. If more than one couatl is involved, they discuss their strategy before a battle, and as highly intelligent creatures they usually follow highly effective tactics that they've already planned out for any given encounter.

Normally, couatls know common, syranian, celestial and draconic, but all of them also ability to communicate telepathically out to a range of 100 feet.


Respected and admired for their wisdom and beauty, the couatls try to steer mortals onto the right path and use their powers to fight evil, particularly rakshasas, their ancient foes. They also focus on opposing particularly those fiends willing and able to shift between the planes under their own power, and who are thereby able to come to the mortal world without being called or summoned.


Some couatls are viewed as benevolent gods by isolated societies, and while all couatls cringe at the thought of pretending to be a god, some of them passively allow such misconceptions to continue since they allow the couatls to guide and coax these societies onto paths of peace and cooperation with their neighbors.

While angels and archons and azatas may be the "outsiders" who are born of heaven itself, and other "nice" dimensions, the couatls were the celestials (supposedly) born from Siberys, the Dragon Above, and so "belong" in the material world in ways that the other divine beings never will. They can be seen as the "angels of the mortal world", and are by some considered to be a sort of divine equivalent to the fiendish rakshas.

As native outsiders, couatls must eat. They prefer the same foods as true snakes, such as mammals and birds, though they have been known to eat evil humanoids. As they would rather spend their time promoting their agenda than hunting, couatls appreciate offers of food, particularly small boars and large game fowl.

Their bite is poisonous, weakening the muscles, and are ability to crush victims in their powerful coils in much the same way as a boa constrictor.

A couatl casts spells as a 9th-level sorcerer (at minimum), but can also choose spells from the cleric list in addition to those normally available to sorcerers, including spells from 2 of the following domains: Good, Law, Nobility & Air. These cleric spells are considered arcane spells when a couatl uses them with their sorcerer-casting ability.

Psi-like Abilities:
Constant: ●detect chaos, ●detect evil, ●detect good, ●detect law
At will: ●detect thoughts, ●invisibility, ●plane shift.

In addition, it has the supernatural ability to 'fly' between the physical world and the Ethereal Plane at will (as per "ethereal jaunt").



The couatls are an ancient race dating back to the dawn of Eberron, but today they are almost entirely extinct. Only a rare handful remain alive today (perhaps somewhere between 4 to 8 individuals or so).

In the beginning of the world, before the fiends rose up, the dragons’ only true match were the couatls, the feathered serpents of Sarlona. For all their power, dragons are mortal creatures. They reproduce, they grow old, and in time they die. The couatls stood outside the cycle of life; legends say that the couatls were formed from the pure blood of Siberys before it struck Eberron, and that, as a result, they were truly immortal. They were reborn only after death, so that their numbers remained constant. Though powerful, the couatls kept to Sarlona, leaving the dragons to explore the world

This continued for untold millennia, but then a new threat emerged. Khyber was bound in the depths of Eberron, but this did not eliminate the dark progenitor wyrm's power. In time, a host of horrors spawned in the depths: Fiends and other terrors emerged to lay claim to the world above. The greatest were the Rajahs, rakshasas with such power that they could almost be called gods. After the mighty forces of Khyber fiends consolidated their hold on the surface world, they ruled over a nightmare kingdom for hundreds of thousands of years. And so this was the Age of Demons.

And yet the couatls, along with the dragons, their cousins and allies, battled the rajahs and their hellish hordes. Working together over the course of thousands of years, these two races also studied the sky and stars, and compared their findings with mysterious patterns that appeared on the earth. They eventually became convinced that such study could reveal a map of the future, an outline of the myriad paths history might follow. Their most learned scholars believed it to be the wisdom of the Progenitor Wyrms, the very blueprint of reality. They named it the Draconic Prophecy, and with it they finally had the power to oppose the rajahs. They eventually managed to strike even into the depths of Khorvaire and Xen'drik where the hearts of the fiendish empires lay.

Despite this advantage, the war seemed hopeless. The rajahs were truly immortal. The defeat of a rajah was temporary at best, and no simple spell could bind them. Then the studies of the couatls uncovered a path to victory, but the cost was terrible. Ultimately, almost the entire race of couatls joined together and sacrificed their eternal lives in order to seal the rakshasas away in the depths of Khyber, bound within the combined souls of the martyred couatls themselves.

Scholars have theorized that this is the ultimate source of the force worshiped by the Church of the Silver Flame. The Church ministry is ambivalent about this theory, believing that it rather is the point in history where mortals first accessed the cosmic force of the Silver Flame, but also stating that regardless of how the Flame was first kindled, there is a place within the Flame for all noble souls.

The few couatls who remain on Eberron are devoted servants of the light. They are often found guarding the prisons of the ancient rakshasa rajahs, and when they cannot act directly to aid those heroes fighting the forces of darkness, they may lend their power to these champions using "divine channeling" (sometimes referred to as "angelic possession", or inaccurately called "reverse possession").
