The Beast Fears Fire - Hulder

Hulder [Violence 3]
Impulse - To Share their Pain.

When a human impresses the Huldra and she finds them worthy, she'll often take them as a lover. Wise folks know to respectfully rebuff her advances, but some people take her up on the offer. The Huldra always conceives from any pairing she's involved in (regardless of details like whether it's a fertile pairing), and leaves her lover very shortly after. The Huldra passes pregnancy in the form of a tree - a period that lasts from conception to the winter solstice, however long or short that is. On the night of the winter solstice the tree that was the Huldra cracks open and a hulder is born. The Huldra usually appears sometime later, usually in a different area of her territory.

Hulder are skinny figures, sickly and sallow looking with a single horn growing on the left or right side of their head, tiny irises around pinhole pupils, cattle hooves for feet. They are either bald or possess extremely lank hair the grows on the top of their head, away from the side of their head where the horn is. Their teeth are tiny, triangular and extremely numerous. Hulder are ashamed of their forms and seek out means of covering themselves, completely swaddling themselves in cloth and anything else, if they can.

Hulder are constantly in a state of agonized violent frenzy, spewing curses and savagely destroying anything in arm's reach.

Harm - 2 Beating, biting and stomping. Some hulder pick up bludgeons as they go, but tend to break them pretty quickly. As combatants, they are dangerous due to their recklessness and aggression, but would be nothing special, if not for one thing. Aggression and violence cause hulder to reproduce through a grisly sort of budding. Once a certain threshold of violent action is met, a hulder's skin will simply split open, releasing two new hulder. It can be difficult, when fighting hulder to kill one fast enough to prevent it from splitting this way.

Impromptu Crowd Control
When you physically fight hulder, face Violence.
On a Hit, you are able to kill of the newborn hulder as the old one splits, but the remaining one is still about.
On a Hard Hit, you manage to kill hulder clean without them splitting.
On a Miss, you swing away, but more keep coming. Suffer harm as stated and now there are more of them.

It's worth noting that using magic or trickery and terrain or indirect violence (e.g. drop rocks on them) doesn't seem to provoke this reaction.

I'm gonna leave my body. I'm gonna lose my mind.
Hulder can appear male or female, and the sex of a parent doesn't seem to have any bearing on the sex of the children. Hulder can quickly become a regional disaster if no one is able to deal with them decisively. Fortunately, there are some factors that work against their becoming a true threat. First is that there is a limit on the number of generations a hulder can produce, this is variable, and uncomfortably geometric, but it seems that the frequency of splitting seems to cut down on the number of times total a hulder can split. Terminal generation hulder simply burst, which is messy and upsetting, but less messy and upsetting than a pair of new hulder. The second is that they seem to have a geographic range beyond which they do not willingly go. The last is that almost all hulder die at the vernal equinox. Those who remain are still relentlessly unpleasant and nearly always in frenzy, but not always, and they cannot split. It's very rare that a hulder who lives to see the spring will make it another season, let alone another year, but year-old hulder do not start up with splitting in the following winter.

Hulder take special care to destroy any and all dead trees in the area, and will choose these above anything else as targets.