Bestiary & Horrors

The Living Land

Barsaive's wilderness is, for the most part, simply wilderness — dangerous the ordinary way a mountain pass or a flooded river is dangerous, not because anything malicious wants you dead. Wolves hunt in the Servos Jungle's undergrowth. Leopards, some snow-pale, some spotted gold and black, stalk the highland plains near the forest edge. Elephants work as beasts of burden in the south, and stranger native creatures — the horned, cat-quick kue that windling riders favor as mounts, the burrowing earth q'wril that erupts from beneath a traveler's feet with no more warning than a tremor in the soil — round out a wilderness that a trained Scout or Beastmaster can read, respect, and largely predict.

That predictability is worth naming, because it's precisely what stops the moment a person crosses into ground the Horrors actually touched.

Magical Creatures

Not every strange thing in Barsaive is a Horror. Magic runs through the world on its own terms, and some of what it has produced is wondrous rather than wrong:

• Unicorns — Unicorns were among Barsaive's most feared predators, hunting in packs with an intelligence and taste for Namegiver flesh that terrorized entire regions. Illumar has met no travelers in four hundred years to say whether that has changed, so treat every unicorn as the hunter the records describe, and do not mistake the beauty for gentleness. A unicorn's horn is said to be able to kill a Horror in a single blow, and reliably changes color at the touch of poison, making it one of the most sought-after materials among alchemists and worried nobles alike.
• Elementals — Spirits of air, fire, earth, and water that answer, sometimes, to an Elementalist's summons. No two are alike even within the same element: an air spirit born of a gentle breeze near a windling village bears little resemblance to one born of a mountain gale, and treating any elemental as a predictable type rather than an individual is a mistake experienced summoners still make, occasionally fatally.
• Invae — Insect-like astral beings, distant cousins to the Horrors in origin but not in appetite; they don't feed on suffering, only on crossing into the physical world to expand their own numbers. Illumar's records preserve the Invae Burnings, when a colony infiltrated an organization devoted to the Passion Chorrolis undetected long enough to cause a province-wide panic once discovered.
• Firebirds — Native to the shores of Death's Sea, these avian creatures can turn their feathers dull black to drink in the sea's heat, radiating a burning aura hot enough to ignite anything flammable nearby. Their feathers, eggs, and hatchlings fetch high prices from magicians looking to work with elemental fire.
• Gargoyles — Creatures of living earth and stone, said to be the result of a magical experiment gone wrong long before the Scourge, found scattered across Barsaive in loose, pride-like groupings. Their exact origin has been lost, though their kinship with the obsidimen — two peoples of stone, walking very different paths — is impossible for either to fully ignore.
• Ally spirits and ghosts — Not every spirit a Nethermancer calls up is Horror-touched. Ally spirits bind themselves to a Namegiver community's own nature, reflecting something true about the people who shaped them, while ghosts — spirits that answer to a deceased person's Name and, by most accounts, carry some genuine trace of who that person was — remain one of the province's most debated mysteries: whether they are truly the dead lingering, or something else entirely wearing a familiar face.

The Nature of Horrors

Everything here was gathered before the doors closed. It comes from the scholars of the old world, from Kearos Navarim's warnings and the sages of Throal who built on them, from the first reports of the first survivors, and from the accounts of adepts who fought Horrors in the early years. Illumar's archivists copied it into the Hall of Memory, and every Warden learns it. It was the best anyone knew then, and the people of Illumar have not been able to test it against anything since.

The scholars who studied the Horrors admitted, with a kind of exhausted honesty, that almost nothing true could be said about all of them at once. They did not share a shape. They did not share a diet. Some fed on flesh the way any predator does; others sustained themselves on stone, on metal, on things that were never alive to begin with. The most powerful among them did not consume matter at all. They consumed feeling, drawing sustenance directly from fear, from grief, from the particular flavor of despair that comes from watching something you love become something you don't recognize.

What tied them together was not appetite but the shape of that appetite: every Horror the scholars could name fed on the world's darker emotions and never its brighter ones. No account existed of a Horror driven off by love, by hope, by joy. Those feelings simply were not food to something built the way a Horror is built. Whether that said something hopeful about the nature of the Namegiver spirit, or something far grimmer about how easily that spirit tips toward its worst instincts when given the chance, was a question the finest minds of the old world never managed to settle.

This was the deeper reason Horrors read as wrong rather than simply evil. A wolf that kills to eat is participating in something the world understands, even if the moment is brutal. A Horror's cruelty served no purpose the world recognized at all. The most patient among them would spend years cultivating a single victim's despair the way a gardener tends a slow-blooming plant, extending suffering not from any need but because the extension itself was the point. There was no natural analog for that. It did not fit anywhere in how living things are supposed to relate to each other, and that absence of fit is what made standing near one feel like standing near a held breath that never releases.

What They Leave Behind

A place a Horror has lingered rarely looks ordinary again, even after the Horror itself is gone. The taint left behind is unique to whatever caused it, but certain signs recur enough that seasoned travelers learn to read them the way a sailor reads weather: animals grown hostile and strange, sometimes fused with traits that shouldn't belong to them; stone that develops edges sharp enough to cut, as if the rock itself had learned to resent being stepped on; plants that lash out, weep newly-discovered poisons, or simply stop growing the way plants are supposed to grow. Astral space itself, in places touched deeply enough, stops looking like a reflection of the world at all — travelers who've glimpsed a truly corrupted region describe it the way you'd describe a painting someone tried to smear apart with a bloody hand while the paint was still wet.

The most feared sign, though, has nothing to do with plants or stone. People touched by long exposure to Horror influence lose something that's hard to name and unmistakable to witness: an inability to create. Not merely a change in mood or temperament — an actual failure of the impulse toward beauty, toward art, toward making anything new at all. Horrors, so far as anyone has determined, cannot create. They can only imitate, twist, and despoil what already exists. Enough exposure seems to leave the same mark on a person, and there are few things Barsaivians find more quietly frightening than meeting someone who has simply, permanently, stopped being able to make something beautiful.

A Few of the Shapes They Wear

Gnashers are the simplest and most numerous of the Horrors, and in some ways the most disturbing precisely because there's nothing subtle about them at all. Dog-sized to horse-sized, varying wildly in silhouette from one to the next — reptilian, mammalian, or belonging to no category anyone recognizes — a gnasher exists to consume, indiscriminately and without pause, whatever is in front of it: flesh, stone, wood, doesn't matter. They show no pleasure in the harm they cause, no cunning, no retreat instinct even facing certain destruction. Scholars who've examined their remains suspect a gnasher doesn't metabolize what it eats so much as convert it directly into astral pollution, meaning that every gnasher pack that ever tore through a settlement left a wound in the world's fabric that outlasted the killing itself.

Gharmek live buried, emerging only to strike, and prefer conversation to combat when given the choice — provided the conversation dwells on decay, on rot, on the particular textures of a body coming apart, because disgust and horror are precisely what a gharmek feeds on. They are, by Horror standards, cowardly: willing to bargain, willing to promise, and reliably willing to break any promise the instant it stops serving them. Their signature cruelty is reanimating the recently dead, not for any use the corpse serves them, but for what it does to the living person who has to look at a dead friend's face moving again.

Black mantises, nine-foot insectile constructs with barbed, spearing limbs, are a Horror's work: grown, most scholars believe, from an already-predatory native species twisted into something new by whatever built them. They hunt in near silence and climb almost anything, which is precisely what makes finding one in a supposedly cleared place such an unwelcome surprise.

Falsemen — waxmen, strawmen, and their kin — are older than the Scourge itself: constructs built by pre-Scourge magicians for menial labor, meant to answer only to a controlling token and otherwise possess no mind of their own. Where a Horror finds one, it grants the thing a crude, borrowed awareness shaped entirely around whatever cruelty it prefers. Some show flashes of something almost like independent thought, which unsettles the scholars who study them more than simple mindless violence ever did, because it raises the question of what, exactly, is looking back.

None of these are the whole picture, and no honest account of the Horrors ever claims to be. Every ruin, every sealed kaer still waiting to be opened, every stretch of tainted ground on the edge of a map holds the possibility of something that doesn't match any prior description at all — which is, in the end, the only truly reliable thing anyone has ever said about them.