A Hemophage stands about as tall as a lean Human and is built like one gone gaunt. Its skin is pale and translucent as wet vellum, and beneath it the veins glow a dull red that brightens after it feeds, so that a hunting Hemophage at dusk is a lattice of embers in the shape of a body. Its eyes are wholly black or a deep wine red, without whites. It goes barefoot on the soft banks and wears little, sometimes strips of cloth dyed in the river.

It moves with sudden stillnesses and sudden rushes, like a heron. It speaks in whispers and hisses like a snake when roused. It smells of copper and wet earth, the river’s smell, and its breath is warm.

Hemophages live along the pulsing flow and its overgrown banks, in hollows among the swollen plants, and rarely more than a few strides from the water. A river holds a few of them or a few dozen. They do not wander from it: their deathlessness belongs to the river, and so do they.

They are intense, obsessive, and often violent. Everything that is not the river is food or fuel to them, and they say so. They serve the river as a priesthood serves a shrine, tending its banks, keeping drinkers from taking too much, and bringing it offerings, and the commonest offering is a traveller. They hunt in pairs or small groups, driving prey towards the water, where the river breaks down whatever falls in and grows by it.

They are not mindless. A Hemophage can bargain, and some will let a drinker take a sip in exchange for a death elsewhere, a beast, or a promise to return. Their bargains always end at the river.

A Hemophage cannot die while it stays near the river, and it regenerates from almost any wound: a severed hand regrows, and a spear wound closes while the spear is still being drawn out. The price is constant intake. It must drink the river’s water or draw lifeforce from a living being, and it does the second through a bite or a long grip on bare skin, leaving the victim cold and grey. A Hemophage kept from both weakens fast.

How the first Hemophages came to be is not known. Many are said to have been mortals once, drinkers who stayed and changed, though the river’s own transformed, the Bloated, become river rather than priest. Hemophages do not age while they keep near the water. When a river sinks back, as an ephemeral one does, what becomes of its priests is not recorded.

Nobody uses a Hemophage. Healers who need the river’s water for a dying patient sometimes treat with them, at a cost paid in other lives. They are deadly to anyone who comes alone, unwary, or wounded, because a bleeding traveller calls them as surely as the river calls the living.

Valley folk who have lost fields to a Blood River call the Hemophages the river’s mouths, and believe that killing one starves the river; it does not, since the river feeds on the land around it whatever they do. Others believe the Hemophages can be bought off with blood alone, and leave basins of animal blood at the bank, which the Hemophages drink and remain hungry. Those aligned with Aqua count them a warning of what lifeforce becomes without balance.

Beast-hunters paid to clear a Blood River’s banks go in daylight, in numbers, with fire, and the valley still mourns the hunting party that went in at dusk and was found in the shallows, emptied.