Ore-Worms

Overview

Ore-Worms are the one thing that eats the bones of the Iron Backbone. They bore into the plane from its edges and feed on the metal in its seams, and the stone they leave behind is hollow and weak. The Cornerstones, who let nothing breach the plane's boundary, hunt them.

Appearance

An Ore-Worm is as long as a man's arm and as thick as a wrist, ringed, iron-grey, and heavy, with a sheen of the metal it last ate: copper-red, silver, a dull gold. Its head is a blunt cone ringed with small, hard, grinding plates. It has no eyes. It moves through stone as a worm moves through earth, with a slow, rasping grind that can be felt in the rock from a long way off; the plane's deep hum carries it. A tunnel it has left smells of hot metal and wet stone.

Habitat and Range

They live in the strata near the plane's edges, where its structure meets the Veil, and bore inwards along the veins of metal. Most never get far. Where the boundary is weak, or a Cornerstone has been drawn away, they come in numbers.

Behaviour and Temperament

Ore-Worms eat metal and nothing else, following a vein through the rock and leaving a narrow tunnel behind them, its walls stripped of every trace of ore. They do not attack the living. They do not turn aside for a Stonewright or a traveller, and they bore through anything metal in their way, a tool, a bolt, a buckle.

Abilities

They can eat what the plane holds unbreakable. Stone and metal of the Backbone resist almost all harm and the plane repairs what harm they take, but an Ore-Worm's tunnel is repaired only slowly, and where many worms feed the stone around their tunnels grows brittle faster than it can mend. A floating island riddled by worms is the one thing on the plane that can crack.

Life Cycle

They lay eggs in the walls of their tunnels, and the young are threads of grey that eat flecks of ore. They grow slowly and live long, and a dead worm turns to a rod of rough metal in the stone.

Uses and Dangers

The Stonewrights fill worm tunnels with new stone and the Foundations bear the weight that worm-eaten stone cannot. Travellers who come to the Backbone for unbreakable stone learn to tap a block before they take it: worm-eaten stone rings hollow. The rods of metal left by dead worms are said to be pure, and smiths value them.

Lore and Belief

Miners on the Material Plane tell of "ore-worms" that eat a seam out before the miners reach it, and blame them for a vein that runs out; the plane's worms are not known to come through Stone-Gates, and a vein that runs out is only a vein that ran out. The Stonewrights, it is said, count the worms the only true enemy the Backbone has.

Prospectors who lose a vein still blame them, and sometimes blame a rival instead; more than one mining feud on the Headwater began with a worm-eaten seam.

Where It Appears

• Overview: Natives of the Planes