Overview
The Kviðkyn, known in the common tongue as The Broods, are an ancient corruption of life itself: a plague of false fertility that warps wombs and flesh into obscene engines of reproduction. They are not a people but a process, an infestation that spreads where the earth is deepest and darkest.
Most tales place them beneath Vornheim’s mountains, haunting the hollowed ruins of Dawi estates and the borderlands near the Duskari. They appear wherever stone has been carved and abandoned, wherever the light of fire has faded and silence takes root.
Names Across Cultures
- Vornheim: Kviðkyn (“Womb-born”), Modrsótt (“Mother’s Sickness”)
Dawi: Grothmal (“Deep-Filth”), Hargbrokk (“Cursed Spawn”)
Duskari: Shaelith (“Flesh That Sings”), Uthraal (“Unending Womb”)
Brood-Mothers
At the heart of every infestation lies a brood-mother.
Once a human, Veyari, Dawi, or beast, she is taken alive, broken, body and soul. Her captors force upon her the most obscene violation: she is raped and seeded with parasite-flesh, her body turned into a vessel not of her choosing. Bellies are drowned with black water, veins filled with writhing larvae, her mind shattered by endless lullabies whispered in the dark.
Her limbs wither, her eyes glaze, her features collapse into folds of slack flesh, until she is little more than a mound of breathing meat. Only her womb endures — vast, pulsing, unending.
A brood-mother never dies by natural means. Her offspring rip her open, gnaw at her from within, and yet her body seals around the wound, knitting anew only to split again. Her moans are said to drive hardened warriors to madness — not for their volume, but for their dreadful resemblance to prayer.
Brood-mothers are not slain; they are ended, burned and salted until nothing living remains. Even then, veterans say they still hear the mewling of unborn mouths in the smoke.
Offspring
The spawn of the Kviðkyn are never uniform, but all share the same unholy traits:
- Voracity: they devour flesh at birth.
Multiplicity: a brood-mother can birth dozens in a single night.
Degeneration: most collapse within weeks, their forms unable to endure. The survivors grow stronger, more cunning, less human.
Some spawn crawl like worms, others stagger on twisted limbs, and a few grow into quadrupedal hunters that stalk tunnels for new wombs to seed.
Haunts of Horror
The Hollow of Drenn-Thûl: Once a proud Dawi hold, now sealed with molten stone after the halls filled with birthing screams.
The Black Crypts of Haaldmere: A Vornish settlement where every child was born lifeless for a generation — until one winter they rose again, crawling from the earth.
The Shadow Warrens (Duskari border): Here, it is said, the Duskari herd brood-mothers as cattle, feeding them captives and harvesting their spawn.
Dangers
Brood-Sickness: Survivors of capture return swollen, their veins writhing as if filled with worms. Within weeks, their bodies split.
The Lullaby: A chorus of infant cries and half-sung lullabies echoes in infested tunnels, luring wanderers into darkness.
The Second Birth: Some victims do not carry spawn in their wombs but in their organs — livers, lungs, even skulls. The things claw free, leaving only husks.
Cultural Fear
- Vornheim: The Kviðkyn are taboo, yet every saga speaks of them. To the Vornish, they are hell itself.
Dawi: Deal with them in silence and fire — collapse, salt, burn, and kill survivors. Always.
Duskari: Twisted cults revere them, calling their mothers sacred. It is whispered they even nurse from them.
Adralla & Leadan: Long dismissed them as superstition, until expeditions vanished whole in northern tunnels, their banners found sodden with afterbirth.
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