Flesh-Hosts

Overview

The Flesh-Hosts are what the Bloom of Qzoth, the Becoming, makes of living things. Qzoth is a Beyonder for whom form is a lie, and its hosts are bodies that have stopped being one kind of thing. No two are alike and none stays the same from one hour to the next. Some keep shreds of the person they were; some are pure appetite. All of them share one drive, to grow, and they grow by taking in whatever lives.

Appearance

A Flesh-Host may be the height of a barn or the breadth of a cart-track puddle. One is a tower of arms and mouths, swaying on a root-mass of legs; another a slick sheet of thinking protoplasm that slides over the ground; a third almost the old person still, except for translucent skin under which the organs can be seen shifting, swapping places, budding. Flesh, bone, chitin, scale, and feather come and go on all of them. Eyes open on a shoulder, look about, and melt; a second mouth seals over.

Colours are those of the inside of a body: wet pinks and purples, bruise-yellow, the grey-white of bone. They move by whatever they have at the moment, crawling, lurching, rolling, often several ways at once. Under every other sound comes the noise of their bodies working: cracking bone, slapping flesh, fluid gurgling through organs that have no right shape, and many hearts beating out of step. They smell warm and raw, like a butcher's yard in summer.

Habitat and Range

Their home is the Bloom: ground gone warm and fleshy, trees with eyes, rivers turned to veins. On Caeldon the Bloom came once, in the Qzoth Incursion (c. 4,000-c. 3,500 BR), and was burned back. Flesh-Hosts now rise only where the burned ground of the Wrongwood is broken and its spores wake, in a village struck by a rash and fever that does not stop. In a running Incursion the Great Mutation would turn whole battlefields into masses of chimeric soldiers and beasts, with no sides left, only surfaces.

Behaviour and Temperament

A Flesh-Host takes in living matter: grass, cattle, people, its own fellows. It feels pain only as a spur to the next change. Those that keep a shred of self are the worst to meet. Such a host may know its own children, call their names, weep, and hug them close while its body absorbs them. Those that keep nothing simply engulf what they touch and grow.

They do not plan, ally, or flee, though a large host may split, and its parts go their own ways.

Abilities

A Flesh-Host's touch takes living matter into it, flesh and plant alike. It sheds protean spores that infect on contact, beginning with a rash, a fever, or an extra joint; within hours the infected is unrecognizable, and within days may no longer be one organism. It cannot be wounded in the ordinary sense, since a cut becomes a new mouth and a severed limb crawls off on its own. Inside the Bloom, the life, magic, and thought that need a stable form all falter (see what every Incursion shares).

It cannot enter a pocket of perfect form. A flawless diamond, a fine timepiece, or a written oath holds it off, and so does fire, which cauterizes the Bloom.

Life Cycle

Flesh-Hosts are never born and never finished. A Cult of the Thousand Thousand would mostly dissolve into the Bloom, and a few of its members would go on as Flesh-Hosts, still changing. A host can bud others, and spores make more from the living. It does not die of age; it dies only by burning, or by spreading so thin it becomes part of the ground of the Bloom. What remains is a stinking, bubbling slough that must be burned too.

Uses and Dangers

The Flesh-Hosts are the most feared of plague-bearers, because the plague is them. A single infected traveller can bring the Bloom to a market town. Communities below the Wrongwood burn the dead and the sick, seal wells, and cast out anyone with an extra joint, rightly and sometimes wrongly. Their only use would be a cult's, whose members would seek them out as teachers.

Lore and Belief

The peoples mostly take the hosts for a disease, a curse, or the dead of a pestilence walking, and the first two are close to the truth. Some believe a Flesh-Host can be talked back into its old form by its true name, since names fix a self, and a host holding a shred of self may indeed pause at it; none has ever been changed back. Physicians quarrel about whether it is mercy or murder to burn a host that still weeps.

In a fever year the valleys hire sellswords with torches to burn out a host-haunted farm, and the companies still drink to the one that went in thirty strong and came out eleven, and burned its own wounded on the road home.

Where It Appears

• Qzoth, the Becoming
• The Wrongwood