Hrud

The Hrud are among the most elusive and dreaded of the galaxy's minor xenos, a shrouded and migratory people glimpsed only as hunched, cowled shapes wreathed in perpetual gloom. They dwell within warrens and forgotten under-spaces, and where their numbers gather, the very fabric of reality begins to fray. The Hrud radiate an entropic field so potent that stone crumbles, metal corrodes, and living flesh withers into aged ruin merely from proximity.

Imperial soldiers who have fought them tell of hair turning white and limbs growing brittle in moments, of veterans reduced to palsied wrecks by a foe they never clearly saw. This entropic aura is at once weapon, defence, and curse, for it makes the Hrud almost impossible to study or contain. They wield warpish fusil-weapons and slip through shadow with a boneless, fluid gait.

When a Hrud warren grows too vast, it undertakes a great migration, and whole worlds have withered in the path of these mass movements. Xenologists debate endlessly whether the Hrud are a single species or many, so seldom are they seen and so swiftly do they vanish. What is certain is that they carry decay in their wake as surely as a comet trails ice, and that time itself sours in their presence.