Tertia Edaxis Esuriens

“I keep a Maw for one purpose only: waste disposal. Organic waste, that is. Witnesses, liabilities, inconvenient collaborators—anything with a pulse. They’re wonderfully thorough. Leave one in a room for six seconds and you’ll spend a week convincing Helicon that the missing persons reports are just clerical errors.”

— Madame Soki Noles, Notes on Evidence Management for the Discerning Practitioner

Description

Maws are bloated, shroud-white Tertia aligned with Gluttony, embodying consumption as a blind, instinctive imperative. They resemble immense worms wrapped in tight burial cloth, with two hunched bulges suggesting shoulders beneath the constricting flesh. Their true horror lies in the “face”: where a human scalp would be, they split open into a wet, circular pit of teeth arranged like a meat-grinder turned inside out. They do not discriminate prey—anything organic is swallowed, crushed, dissolved, and churned into sustenance.

Wild Maws are among the most common—and feared—subspace predators. They appear during subspace forays like pale torpedoes, bursting from shadow-mist to engulf anything living. They are not subtle. They do not stalk. They consume. Even higher intelligences treat them as cleanup crews rather than companions.

When feeding on Subspace Shadows, the Maw manifests as compulsive hunger in its host: binge-eating, compulsive chewing, self-loathing cycles, escalating cravings for fats, sugars, or even inedible Materials. Long-term parasitism often spirals into full-blown eating disorders or catastrophic self-neglect.

A Maw’s aftermath is eerily clean. They slurp their kill-sites spotless. Abandoned ships, empty outposts, silent asteroids—all have been “cleaned” by Maws, leaving investigators baffled. When a Maw is slain, it ruptures into a spreading mold that accelerates local subspace contamination, seeding future incursions.

Prophylactic

Maws can be deterred or repelled by:

• Fire and high heat — their bodies blister and unravel
• Strong self-discipline — starves them if attached to a shadow
• Fasting protocols — paradoxically weaken them
• Hunger-blocking drugs (Mars-manufactured)
• Environmental sterilization — removes organic targets

Kthoniker training emphasizes one rule:
Never summon a Maw unless you are absolutely certain you can keep it fed.

Utility

Maws serve a single, brutal function: destruction and erasure.

They are used by:

• Kthonikers — to eliminate bodies, evidence, or contaminated biomass
• Higher RAIs — as tunnel-clearers, shock troops, and vacuum cleaners
• Subspace smugglers — to “dispose” of tracking devices or witnesses
• Cultists — as ritual purifiers (often fatally literal)

Their corpse-mold is also used to intentionally grow Redspace contamination in environments slated for sabotage.

Maw Disposal

Area

You open a controlled tear into subspace through which your Maw lurks. For six seconds, anything organic placed—or pushed—into the rift is sucked inside and devoured.

Duration: 6 seconds

Cost: 8

Prerequisite: Any two Gluttony-aligned spells

Special: Counts as evidence destruction, which is a crime in most jurisdictions.

Maw Invocation

Regular

The Maw is summoned fully into realspace. It remains for the agreed-upon duration unless killed. If it runs out of enemies, it immediately turns on allies, including the caller.

Duration: 30 seconds

Cost: 10 to cast; cannot be maintained

Prerequisite: Maw Disposal

Side Effect: If the Maw is slain, it bursts into contaminant mold, immediately raising local subspace contamination by one level.

Maw Vomit

Jet; Resisted by Dodge

Forcing your Maw to disgorge its last several meals, you unleash a cone of extradimensional digestive slurry. Targets take corrosive damage. The area becomes tainted with intense subspace contamination.

Damage: 2d corrosion; armor protects normally

Cone: 3 yards

Cost: 7

Prerequisite: Maw Invocation

Note: Maws hate doing this; repeated uses may cause rebellion.