[hider=Slugs?]

[b]Waste Bearers:[/b] Species (animal, semi-sentient).

[b]Lifespan:[/b] 60-70 years.

[b]Description:[/b] Where grey shriekers are a relatively subtle weapon in Osveril's hands, eliminating specific threats to the crawler swarms and gradually unbalancing the biosphere by wiping out vulnerable segments, waste bearers are an unapologetically blunt instrument of destruction. These lumbering monstrosities freely roam the land, devouring, trampling and flattening anything they come across, with little regard for whether they are stepping over a forest or a fortified city. While they have no paths or hunting patterns to guide them, their creator correctly predicted that the phenomenal appetite spawned by the need to sustain their fearsome bulk would lead them to seek out the places most dense with prey or fodder, thus crushing the most heinous concentrations of impure mass. At the same time, this hunger, combined with their strength and aggression, makes them predators to creatures whose size allowed them to multiply without fear of natural competition.

Waste bearers combine the imposing stature of brush beasts with the voracity of slugs or stunted larvae and the cunning of a proto-hainoid neural system. Unusually for the grey spawn of Osveril, they have more developed mental abilities - though still not quite reaching true sentience - than simple reactive instincts, allowing them to learn from experience and improvise different hunting strategies by their own initiative. Perhaps as a consequence of this, they have a strong preference for independent action, avoiding others of their kind. On occasion, young specimens will band together to attack an adult brush beast, a large settlement or an urtelem herd, but such cases are the exception rather than the rule. The presence of crawlers or shriekers is tolerated, though the bearers usually range beyond the front of the advancing swarms, disliking competition for food sources.

While omnivorous, the colossi greatly prefer to pursue animal prey, going so far as to disdain and wantonly destroy more easily accessible plant life. They seem to derive particular enjoyment from savagely victimising intelligent beings, even when, as in the case of urtelem, decayed undead or Sculptors mutated to the point of being inedible, they would stand nothing to gain from attacking them. Likewise, they oddly share their creator's distaste for artificial constructs, going out of their way to raze buildings and scatter their contents whenever they can.

Similarly to dust crawlers, waste bearers can only reproduce by a gemmation-like process, in a manner that wards against unexpected genetic mutations. Unlike crawlers, however, they do not carry their eggs during gestation. The clutches - rarely containing more than one or two at a time - must be embedded in a suitable incubator. The latter usually is the body of a sufficiently large creature, though inventive bearers can heap many smaller carcasses together when failing to find a better alternative. If warmed, the eggs hatch remarkably quickly, never remaining closed longer than it takes for the incubator to fully decay. Bearers being precocial, their young are almost fully physically developed and quite fearsome from their first moments, albeit inexperienced and far smaller than adults. Full growth is in most cases reached at the age of ten to fifteen years, though the occasional individual may continue to grow larger for as long as half of their lifespan. The reproductive cycle typically occurs once every two years, not counting Osveril's artificial inseminations.

[b]Appearance:[/b] While even fully grown waste bearers cannot match the height of an adult brush beast, they nonetheless tower over any other natural being, surmounting all but the most ancient of trees and utterly dwarfing the most imposing of mortals. Most of this size lies in their bulk rather than their limbs: their six clawed legs, though proportionately long, are bent at sharp angles from their body, relying on their spacing, flexibility and redundant skeletal structures to spread out the weight they carry. The mass resting over them is shaped roughly like a slug or bloated worm, its thick elastic hide preventing the rear end from dragging along the ground. Since, uniquely among the grey spawn, bearers have an internal osseous framework, they lack a fully articulate segmented exoskeleton; the large, loose plates of carapace that cover them serve an exclusively defensive purpose. The only clearly distinct part of their anatomy is the head, an appropriately large, angular blocky protrusion. Its only visible features are six large, dark eyes, evenly spread on the sides, whose gaze is unsettlingly similar to that of a hain, albeit bestial and distorted. The underside is formed by two flexible membranes, split along a central line; when the behemoth feeds, they are withdrawn to reveal a powerful bony beak, wider than that of a cephalopod, surrounded by several elongable tentacles which the beast uses to bring food to its orifice. 

[/hider]