#iceworm

Another prompt of the ‘Oh dear, how the hell do I make this Lovecraft-themed?’ brand! XD We searched around haphazardly for quite a while until Subway to Sally's ‘SOS’ spontaneously gave me the idea of playing out the ‘being trapped’ aspect alla The Thing. So ‘I am stuck somewhere in an ice hell with a scary monster". The right creature was quickly found. Rlim Shaikorth - The White Worm. You could assume that it is related to the sandworms from Arakis - except that this monster crawls through the eternal ice. At this point, the horror becomes even more beautiful for me when we leave it open whether Rlim crawls towards the transmitter station to devour it, or whether he stays there, doesn't care about the station at all and just slowly but surely freezes it with his icy, snowstorm-like breath....

Creeptober-Promptlist by @creep-tober

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Ancardia's Unusual Animals--The Great Iceworm

Classification: Beast (mollusc)

Habitat: Arctic and Anctarctic seas, concentrated under consistent areas of sea ice.

            The Great Iceworm is a gargantuan species of seaworm which until recent Ages was scarcely researched due to its difficult and remote habitat. The second largest of all of Ancardia’s invertebrates, the great iceworm spends its entire lifecycle in the icy waters of the two polar zones of Ancardia’s seas, depending upon the rich biomass of the oceans below and close to permanent sea ice. It is known to be particularly common in the very southernmost ranges of Sostuniland, where many tens of thousands of square miles of sea ice remain throughout the summer and the density of large calved icebergs remains high throughout the year, but they do also occur in significant populations under the northern ice cap to the far north of Tvearban’s coasts. Like many of the ocean’s largest creatures, it is docile to most other creatures, only feeding on the smallest of lifeforms in its environment. The majority of a great iceworm’s diet is krill mixed with larval crabs and fishes, supplemented by various somewhat larger invertebrates such as basket stars, polychaete worms, and sea spiders. Several species of large amphipods have evolved seemingly to live only on the dead tissue and parasites that afflict the great iceworm, and so you will seldom find one of these huge creatures swimming without an entourage of several dozen to several hundred palm-size red and gold primitive crustaceans.

            While the worm itself is not particularly aggressive, it is possible to startle it which brings on the danger of such a huge animal responding by a defensive thrashing. Its mouthparts are relatively small, but still large enough for bites to be injurious to humanoids, and if directly attacked it will not hesitate to retaliate. Most of the danger from great iceworms comes from their boreholes in the sea ice layer in order to periodically breathe air, which are as wide as the worm’s body itself (usually 2 to 3 meters in diameter) and have been known to very lightly freeze over or have loose snow blow into them, creating a brittle thin area that is not immediately obvious as an environmental hazard. Dropping several meters into below-freezing water in such situations is almost always fatal even with assistance in escaping the frigid water, and so Sostunians living and working around sea ice often are careful to bring walking poles to test the areas along their route for hollow sounding ice and unusually-placed deep, loose snow.

Hey, a progress sketch, who would have thought? Yeah um, so I am really excited for Below Zero to be fully released and played through part of it again. Came across the Ice Worm corpse, and well, we never know how it died- but one can see it was a violent death.