The Hungry Ones

Where anything is good, where anything is beautiful, where anything is wise, the Hungry Ones (maighiren) seek to devour.

just a lil guy with sharp teeth by Zoe Bellerive

They began as wild scavengers in the wilderness of the Terazed and have aspects of earth elemental about them. Over time, the fiend kings saw their usefulness and bred into them an intense hatred of all speaking peoples. The maighira will seek out and destroy any creature that possesses mind and will, or drive them to destroy one another by poisoning the air into a stinking miasma of fear.

Any large-scale destruction of the living or their works calls to the maighiren like a siren song. Their favorite thing is a fresh battlefield. Their second favorite thing is a city rife with plague or famine. All manner of catastrophe will draw them like a delicious smell: bloody riots, hangings, war crimes.

Solitary maighiren kill humans (and other speaking kindreds) for sport, preferring to slash them, follow them through the wilderness until they succumb to fever, and then play with their guts (or commit the acts of necrophilia by which they reproduce). Their teeth and claws are poisonous, and a wound inflicted by a maighira is certain to fester.

They are fierce pack fighters if they unite against an outpost, estate, or city. They can tunnel into the earth with razor claws or lay patient siege, surrounding a place with a choking atmosphere of terror.

They love to inhabit abandoned human dwellings once they or some other catastrophe has gotten rid of the humans. Houses, neighborhoods, cities--they will squat there, playing an eerie game of house, using their muscular tails to imitate bipedal walking.

But perhaps the most disturbing thing about them is that no one knows what they eat.

Not what they eat to sustain themselves, anyway. They enjoy eating perfumed oils and precious incenses and pigments as a treat, and will go looking for these within a human-occupied place. If you go home and your room has been ransacked but everything is still there, except that your perfume jars are licked clean, get out now.

But they do not consume any of these things in life-sustaining quantities. They will eat one or two select organs from humans they kill (preferably heart or eyes) but generally leave the rest alone. It is likely they remain deep down what they always were: opportunistic scavengers who will eat any type of carrion--preferably large animals without the gift of speech, as these are less fun to play with.