#gruesome

Yes, it's a jar with Arthur's body parts/head preserved.

Yes, he talks to it.

Name: Gruesome

Classification: Troll Scavengers | Anthropoid Muddy Entities / Category: Vir-Lutulentus

Diet: Strictly necrophagous

Danger: Indirect but extreme

Habitat: Battlefields, deep tunnels

Gruesomes are attracted to death like flies to carrion. Except that the flesh, in our case, is living stone. They don't hunt. They wait.

A Gruesome has no fixed form. From a distance, it vaguely resembles a humanoid:

• two arms

• two legs

• a roughly shaped head

But everything about it is soft, slimy, and unstable. Their bodies are composed of a dense slime, often gray, greenish, or dark brown, sometimes streaked with solid pieces: fragments of stone, shards of troll bone, or the encrusted remains of their previous meals.

They can:

• stretch their limbs

• flatten themselves

• compress themselves

• reform

Their surface is cold and damp. I know. Unfortunately

Gruesomes are opportunistic scavengers. At the first sign of war, they appear, gather, observe, wait...

They never participate in the fighting. They keep their distance, motionless. Then, when the carnage is over...

They feed exclusively on troll corpses. On broken living stone. On what remains after the battle.

I've seen them fight over an arm like dogs fight over a bone.

Gruesomes don't speak. But they can mimic speech. They don't understand what they're saying. They repeat it because it's appealing.

I heard one whisper, "Help me..." It was terrifying!

Thanks to their malleable bodies, Gruesomes are invulnerable to conventional physical attacks. They cannot be slashed, crushed, or pierced. Weapons pass right through them. They simply close themselves off.

They can also squeeze through tiny cracks, crawl through narrow tunnels, emerge from the ground or walls, and temporarily split apart.

Luckily, they have weaknesses.

1: Dwärkstones: They make them explode all over. But it's only a temporary reprieve since they reform afterward.

2: Flour: Yes. Flour. I learned that the hard way. Thanks to Gol. Flour absorbs the moisture from their bodies, throws them off balance, makes them unstable. A Gruesome covered in flour becomes slow, sluggish, confused (often drying out enough to break and thus be killed). Gol laughed. I didn't.

3: Salt: Salt is their worst enemy. It hardens their bodies, crystallizes their slime, makes them brittle. A salty Gruesome can be broken. Permanently. I recommend carrying some with you. Always. That and flour. They basically have the same effect, actually.

Repulsive as they are, the Gruesomes have a purpose. They clean the battlefields. They prevent the troll remains from corrupting.

But that doesn't make them sympathetic. Just... necessary.