Worldscar · Bestiary
The harvest soured into sickness. The Plague Field festers under a low sky, its scarecrows crowned and its furrows boiling with rot.
21 creatures catalogued
The furrow twitches, and then it is on your boot.
Fist-sized and covered in barbs that come away in the wound, it crosses the dead rows faster than anything that low has a right to. Fire is the field's oldest answer to spiders.
One of the crows is watching too closely.
A ragged handful of black feathers with something worse inside it, hanging over the field and flinging its own quills. Frost fouls the wings; once it is down, one blow is enough.
She has been patient all season.
She strings the barn beams and the hedgerows and drops the moment the thread goes tight. Burn the web and you have won most of the fight already.
Dry, light, and still moving.
What the blight left of a farmhand, hollowed out and crawling the rows on too many joints. Rot and shadow are its element — fire takes the husk in one, and the arcane ends whatever is steering it.
It came down off the pole by itself.
Sacking and river-clay packed onto a cross of old wood, still doing the job it was made for, only far more thoroughly. Blades pass through the straw; fire finds it eager, and a hex takes the pole's memory away.
You hear the mandibles before you see it.
Chitin the colour of rusted iron and a pair of cutting jaws that go through stalk and shin alike. It has one weakness and the field has always known it: flame.
Fattened on something that was never feed.
Enormous, swaying and rank, she puts her head down and comes through the fence rather than round it. Sidestep the charge, then set light to the bristles.
Stitched shut, and still speaking.
A sackcloth figure that mutters the field's sickness at you and turns every hex you answer with. She has no armour worth the name — walk in and end it by hand.
The flock does what he tells it.
He stands in the middle of the rows with the birds settling on him like a coat, and hurls their hunger at whatever crosses the field. Steel finds only feathers; the arcane and the dark find him.
It carries a coal on its back, and it is not warm to the touch.
A slow, heavy climber whose carapace glows dull red along the spine, dropping from the rafters onto whatever passes beneath. The glow is a bluff — real fire goes through it like anything else with legs.
Assembled out of the tools that worked this land.
Blade, tine and flail bolted onto a body of bound sheaves, swinging with the rhythm of a job it never finished. Steel rings off the ironwork and rot is no use — burn the sheaves, or unbind them with a hex.
Its web is frost, and it does not melt.
Pale and glassy, it spins ice across the barn doors and waits for something to stick fast. It is a spider under all that winter, and it burns like one.
It smells you long before you see it.
Half its flank is gone to the blight and it has stopped caring, coming through the stubble at a flat run with its tusks down. Get out of the line, then put fire into it.
It is never where you left it.
A sackcloth face on a body of shadow that keeps to the edge of the field and closes the distance while you are looking elsewhere. Blades go through the straw and out again; only a hex, or the dark, catches it.
It weaves with something you do not want on you.
A bloated crawler that strings the rows with strands of its own bile and spits a line of it at anything that touches the web. Stay off the threads and burn it from where you stand.
Crowned by the flock, and it takes the crown seriously.
He holds the middle of the field with a hundred birds at his shoulders and turns hexes aside without breaking the chant. Cut through the flock and finish it at arm's length — that is the one thing his wards never learned.
Something was sealed in with the grain, and it kept.
It comes out of the silo dust-caked and unhurried, wearing the shape of whoever went in last. Rot and shadow are wasted on a thing already made of both — fire and the arcane are what put it down.
The harvest's grief, heaped into a giant.
Every rotted stalk and drowned beast of the Plague Field seems gathered into this lurching mountain of mulch and bone. Blades vanish into its sodden bulk without effect — only a hex spoken into the rot makes the colossus come apart.
The horse is thin. So is everything behind it.
It rides the dead acres at a walk, and the ground gives up whatever it had left as the pair go by. A blade passes through rider and mount alike without slowing either — bring the arcane, and the shadow that follows it.
It gathers the field, and the field is you.
Crowned in bone and dragging a blade the length of a cart, it works the rows with the patience of a thing that has all season. Rot and darkness are its own tools and cannot be turned against it — only fire and the arcane will end the harvest.
It was set to guard the field. Now it rules it.
Straw and sackcloth and a crown of crows, the Scarecrow King stalks the dead acres on stilted legs, lord of a kingdom of rot. Steel only scatters its stuffing — but the arcane and the shadow unbind the dark that holds it upright.