Ill-Hatched

Overview

The Ill-Hatched are what comes out of a chrysalis that failed. The chrysalis of Imago encloses a being so that it can be changed deeply, healed or remade; if the being was not ready, or the rite was done badly, the change goes wrong. Sometimes the chrysalis never opens. Sometimes it opens on something that is not the person who went in, nor anyone: a living thing, unfinished, that has no self to speak of. The Ill-Hatched are not persons, and those who know them say so plainly.

Appearance

No two are alike, but all look interrupted. The body of the person who went in is there in part, a hand, a jaw, a length of spine, run into something else half-formed: wet, wing-like folds that never dried, a second skin hardening in plates, limbs too many or too long, a face smoothed over where the features should be. Many are larger than the person was. They come out wet and pale and darken in the air. They move in lurches and crawls, as if trying out a body, and make thin, unformed sounds, never words. They smell of the chrysalis, sweet and rotten at once, like split fruit.

Habitat and Range

They are made wherever the rite is done, which is wherever Imago's chrysalis is sought: at shrines of change, in the sickrooms where a last remedy is tried, and in the households of those who seek a new self. Those that are not put down flee to rough ground, woods, and ruins near where they were made. They are rare everywhere, because the rite is rare and its keepers careful.

Behaviour and Temperament

An Ill-Hatched has no purpose but what its body pushes it to: to feed, to hide, to get away from light and noise. It does not know the people who loved the person it came from, and it does not learn. Frightened, it lashes out with a strength the person never had, and it is frightened by almost everything.

Abilities

Some keep a scrap of what the rite was meant to give: a hide that heals over any cut within the hour, eyes that see in darkness, a reach far beyond a person's. None of it is used with any judgement.

Life Cycle

They do not grow up and do not breed. Most die within a few seasons of hatching, their bodies failing as unevenly as they were made; a few live on for years in the wild.

Uses and Dangers

They give nothing. The danger is to whoever tends them and to the country around: an Ill-Hatched loose near a village takes stock and attacks anyone who corners it. The house that performed the rite is held answerable for it, and must either put it down or keep it close; which is right is argued at every shrine of change, and families who refuse both have been driven out of their villages.

Lore and Belief

Many believe the person is still inside, trapped unfinished, and that a second chrysalis would let them out; a second rite on an Ill-Hatched has never been known to make anything but a worse one. Keepers of the rite say the person was spent in the change, and that what hatched is a beast made of their remains, to be pitied and not mourned as them. Some tell of an Ill-Hatched that lived among people and was cared for to the end, which is held up as mercy by some and as cruelty by others.

Villages that have had one loose hire beast-hunters, and the hunters ask for double; they tell of a hunter who tracked an Ill-Hatched into the hills, found it sleeping curled like a child, and came home without the bounty.

Where It Appears

• Imago Prime