Chromopods
Introduction
“They change and flicker just before the screaming starts.”
When the stars vanished and the sky was left without stories to tell, in the hush that followed the Cataclysm’s dust, the world began to twist into something new. In the poisoned cracks of reality where the old laws of magic cracked against the world’s frame, new life began to emerge.
Not evolved.
Awakened.
One of the strangest of these beings is known as the chromopod; a name thrown like a net over these ever-shifting blobs to anchor them in language. A crude attempt to reason with the unexplained. They hold no fixed shape. They have no true form. Their bodies endure a ceaseless metamorphosis, not to mimic life, but to reflect it.
Their flesh is a mirror warped by emotion. They do not speak, but they answer, in color and spasm. Pulsing reds, bruised greens, convulsions that echo hunger, grief, awe, or betrayal.
A consience flayed and flickering in gradients.
Despite their grotesque forms, some communities keep them close. Their feeding purifies water. Their shifting hues serve as warnings, alarms, or omens. Some say they are prophets. Others, call them parasites.
And a few - too few - believe they observe with purpose.
That they are watching and learning.
Forms of the Formless
Morphology & Reproduction
Chromopods have no stable form. Their flesh is a shifting canvas, an endless dance of shape and color that twists with the currents of emotion and environment. No two moments are the same; no two chromopods alike. They stretch and coil like living ink, tendrils extending and retracting with intent, or something very similar to it. Some grow bulbous masses that pulse with inner light. Others knot into dense, trembling clusters, as if trying to contain something within.
Reproduction is no act of will, but a resonance. When pushed beyond their limits - by emotion, overcrowding, or environmental upheaval - they split or shed fragments that crawl away, each a seed of new chromopod. Some say this process is tied to the very emotions they reflect; grief in particular, seeding new life in sorrow’s wake.
Whispers warn of aberrant growths: chromopods swollen to monstrous size, capable of swallowing whole settlements beneath their ever-shifting flesh. They say that in this state, chromopods seem to gain a flicker of sentience. Some stories speak of enormous things that moved beneath the sand, beneath the ruins, inside the walls of old settlements: vast, hungry and thinking.
Estimated Lifespan
No chromopod has yet been observed dying of old age. The oldest known specimens -less than thirty years of age - continue to grow, change, and shed with undiminished intensity. Some Relic Hunters claim these early chromopods now grow hidden, pulsing just below the surface.
Shamans of the Verdant Chorus suggest a lifespan measured not in years, but in transformations. That once a chromopod has undergone too many emotional states it collapses inward, eventually turning into a permanent, dormant Null Form (see below).
Examples of Metamorphosis
Chromopods & Survivors
Despite their alien nature - or perhaps because of it - chromopods have found a place within several survivor enclaves. Not as pets. Not as tools. But as something stranger: living systems folded into the twisted logic of survival.
In places where water runs foul with rust and rot, a single chromopod can cleanse an entire cistern. It doesn’t drink the water, only the corruption within it. Settlements have learned to build pod-wells, cool and dark, where a specimen is fed a steady diet of decay, leaving the water clean and sweet to the tongue.
At the same time, their chromatic pulses - though often misunderstood - have saved lives more than once. Some mages claim that chromopods shift and flicker just before a Wyld Surge. Others insist their morphing forms can sense a threat long before it arrives. There are even those who believe chromopods react to undeath the way animals flinch from a coming storm.
Some Scavengers carry tiny chromopods in jars, watching their color changes for signs of danger or deceit. Reavers tend to avoid them, seeing in their shifting skin something too soft and unknowable, to trust. In the quiet hours, Relic Hunters attempt to communicate; reading the bleeding hues like scripture. In more than a few communities, a new kind of shaman has begun to rise: not one of spirits or gods, but of color and response.
But no one truly owns a chromopod.
Some swear they lure predators, not warn of them. That they’re drawn to grief, and pulse brightest where tragedy waits to bloom. Others whisper that if you stay near one too long, it begins to learn you - your moods, your guilt, your losses - and starts to show them back to you.
There was one… very long ago.
I found it at the edge of a scorched field. Half-buried, like a blister in the mud. It was just… a paddle of color. Pretty. Like watching oil in water under candlelight. It didn’t move much. I threw it a bone once. It moved slowly and engulfed it. I think it was grateful.
A week later I started dreaming in reds.
Not nightmares exactly. But… vivid. Threading through my sleep, always that same shade of red. Like dried blood on wool. Felt warm. Felt like it knew me. Then I woke up one morning and it had changed. Took on a shape: twisted, tall. It looked like a scarecrow woven from nerve and light. I thought I was still dreaming.
I sat with it. Every night. For hours. I said nothing. Neither did it. But I swear to whatever gods still crawl in the dirt, it was listening.
It comforted me.
One night it spoke. Not with words. It remembered for me. The moment I tossed it the bone. The way I watched it. The quiet between us. The second I opened my mind to its dreams.
I don’t know what it meant by that. But I know it remembered.
I know it understood.
Maybe it loves me.
I know I do.
And I still dream in red.
The Null Form
Among the endless, shifting shapes of a chromopod, there exists one that defies all understanding. This form appears without warning, usually in older chromopods - those that have lived long, reproduced, or grown too vast to contain themselves. In a sense, it is not a transformation at all, but the absence of form.
“I felt it weep as it blackened. I think it used my tears.”
During this unsettling change, the chromopod’s ever-shifting flesh folds inward and collapses into a dense, matte spiral - a black wound bleeding into the fabric of the world. It drains all color, all movement, until nothing remains but a still, formless void.
No emotion matches it. No environment triggers it. It simply happens.
This event can occur multiple times over a chromopod’s lifespan, but it is also observed as a final stage: a dormant shape in which the creature seems to vanish into itself. But make no mistake: dormant does not mean dead. Though motionless, the Null Form continues to exert its presence. The air thickens unnaturally, shadows deepen without light, and the area becomes a place where life flees and cold whispers. Animals flee. Even the wind seems to hush. Some say they feel a sentient cold grip their lungs, as though something behind the world is feeding.
Worse still, as some chromopods gain flickers of intellect, usually after they have assumed the Null Form once or more, they begin to mimic humanoid shapes: faces half-formed in translucent flesh, limbs stretching with deliberate purpose. These grotesque approximations are never whole, never still. They flicker between shape and collapse, like a terrible echo of humanity viewed through broken glass.
There were three of us. Then the pod collapsed into itself, turned black.
We looked at each other as the air turned cold and still.
We were still three.
But I don’t think the others were the same ones.
Yet, these shapes are not mere mimicry. They are a bizarre echo of hunger, draped in a frayed costume of flesh.
An appetite without a mouth to feed it. Vast enough to swallow villages. Unfolding not just across flesh and bone, but through memory, light, and time.
Some say the Null Form is a sentient chromopod's prayer; a final message sent across the Veil to something even greater. An endless void that watches and learns before it devours.
The Last Pulse
“They are the last pulse of the world’s dying heart.”
They are the first taste of the world's final end.
Heralds of an unsated hunger without a mouth.
In the deep shadow where reality thins, the Chromopods pulse like the heartbeat of a dying world: fragile, fleeting, yet relentless.
To live alongside them is to glimpse a fate unspoken, painted in hues that whisper of oblivion. Their ever-changing forms beckon not just to the eyes, but to the soul, a silent promise that all that breathes will one day be consumed, folded into a darkness without end.
Watch their colors fade and flare. Listen for the stillness between their pulses.
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Oh thats terrifying
But why? They are so cute little blobs XD Thanks for the comment!