40k Lore: Lesser Xenos, the Hrud

Moving on with a new minor Xenos (this time in no particular order), let’s take a look at what we know about the Hrud.

The Hrud have been around for a long time, but very little is known about their culture.  This is because of one of the very few facts that IS known about their propensities and outlook; they are intensely secret.  Furthermore, their biology seems to be uniquely suited to their secretive culture.  Rather than a typically humanoid endo-skeletal structure they are supported by columns of vertebra like bones in powerfully muscular sheaths.  These have the curious effect of allowing them unparalleled flexibility, a trait that has earned them the nickname “bendies” among those of the common imperial citizenry who know of them.  Their outer tissue also exhibits some very interesting traits, their outer layers of flesh seem to degenerate at a prodigious rate, dying and rotting away rapidly to sheath then in a layer of near toxic biological filth which they themselves generate.  Indeed, so virulent are the toxins of this decaying material that wounds inflicted by a Hrud’s bear hands are likely to develop fatal infections.  This also has the side effect of making them all but impossible to study physically as their bodies apparently decompose at an even more accelerated rate when they expire, frequently leaving little more than mounds of decomposing putrescence wrapped in the grimy rags they are prone to wearing. 

In addition to these fairly mundane qualities, the Hrud exhibit two other very distinctive and more complex abilities.  The first is an inexplicable ability to warp light around themselves, drawing shadows about themselves, even in otherwise well lit areas, so effective is this concealment and the effects of their rapid decay that their true form has effectively never been seen.  The second is an entropic eminence that is extends about them and is seemingly intensified based on their numbers and proximity to each other.  This field causes things in the immediate area around them for any length of time to age, decay, and die.

Due to their intensive secrecy though, virtually nothing is known about their society.  This becomes particularly intriguing when one considers that their societies exist (and have existed) for eons alongside those of man and other races in the unwanted spaces, such as sewers the mechanical netherworld of the between deck spaces on starships.  Here these intensely clannish xenos tend to scavenge off the host society, collecting technology and material from the population center they inhabit (though their own technology, such as the Hrud Fusil, a warp based personal weapon, is by no means lacking).  Another particularly curious facet of their culture is a near compulsive regimen of recordkeeping, the Hrud meticulously record everything they observe unseen from the shadows, though the reason for this is unclear.  One of the few well recognized behaviors of the Hrud species are their “migrations.”  When a Hrud population reaches a critical mass it fractures as factions stow away in ships and shift to a new location somewhere in the galaxy.  When these infestations begin they can greatly effect their new home, and Imperial forces take immediate steps to halt them.  While seemingly fairly unobtrusive and non-aggressive as a whole, if left unchecked a Hrud infestation can have horrific effects, their entropic properties and toxic emanations compounding each other and causing greatly accelerated decay and degradation in the people and infrastructure of the world they infest.  Such was the case in the Infestation of Ursula Spinal, an agri-world that was reduced to a rotting wasteland, its population prematurely aged, the cleansing of this infestation reduced half the imperial forces dispatched to non-effective levels from their own premature aging.

The origins of the Hrud are unclear, they have no known homeworld but instead seem to have infested the dark places of the galaxy for longer than the Imperium (or even humanity) has existed.  What little is known of their legends suggests that they (like so many other races) were engineered in the dim past by the Ancients.  Indeed, their myth histories (as meticulously recorded as any of their records) suggest that one of the Ancients (codified as “He-Who-Lingers” to the Hrud) came late in the War in Heaven, and modified their species to be more adapt at concealment, tasking them with self-preservation in the face of the implacable C’Tan advances.  Beyond these fragments, virtually nothing else can be gleaned.

Despite their widespread population, and proximity to major infrastructures of other races, they have gone largely unrecognized by other species.  Whether they have goals of conquest, or are simply content to exist in the figurative and literal shadows of other civilizations is unclear.