The Beast Fears Fire - Thark

Thark [Violence 2/3 Gang]
Impulse - To Punish Transgressions

The prophets claim that the world was once perfect, ordered, unchanging, and the Mother-who-is-Earth was the only thing that lived on it. Then came Father-who-is-Water, a churning chaos that is never one thing for more than the briefest of moments, and he laid down on top of the Mother, and from this was born the green growing things, the Daughter, who desires the Mother and the Father to be a single being, a dynamic whole who is the Daughter. Or something like that. The point is the sandrisas, their prophets and bunyp and all that rules the mountaintops fear Water and hate Wood, and while they have limited success dealing with the one, they did manage to make a being that has a lot of people quite worried, something that has appeared before in different parts of the continent, causing awful destruction and barely being contained or destroyed.

Thark are similar to spirits. They have no physical form of their own and cannot embody. Those capable of seeing them outside of a host report that they have a long, segmented body with tiny, finlike appendages along their length. In order to interact with the physical world, they have to inhabit and possess a nonsentient (well, non-communicative) animal. Thark are apparent when inside a host through a manifestation of shadowy pits in place of the eyes and mouth of the host in question, sometimes rimmed in red or orange light. A dark, ashen substance continually leaks from these orifices, matting and staining the fur, feathers or scales of the host. Thark are eager, if sadistic and, like the bunyp, too focused on causing pain and terror to be able to focus on the long or medium terms of their masters' plans, servants of the sandrisas.

Harm - Variable Thark are endlessly petty and vengeful and will do anything and everything, however big or small, to hurt those they have been permitted to target. They will use their host up as a matter of practice, bringing any and all natural abilities of the host they took to bear against their targets. Thark are capable of manifesting a spirit body in the shape of their host only larger, if their host is particularly small. The maximum size they can achieve by "growing" their host is around 40 kilograms, but a 40 kilogram mountain horsefly is still pretty intimidating, and lets not get started on the wasps. Tharks are able to possess larger animals, like Lahesian cave bears, a species on the knife-edge of extinction for that very reason.

Once bonded with a host, thark cannot be affected by magical or psychic attacks that do not have material or physiological effects. They also cannot be exorcised or harmed directly by unmanifested spirits. They can be violently dislodged from their hosts through attacks on their shadow orifices and along the spine of the host, though they do their best to make this difficult on their foes and, if not dislodged, are perfectly capable of keeping their host going despite massive, lethal trauma. Disembodied thark are very susceptible to spiritual and magical attack and are easy to dispatch. Thark are able to communicate with others of their kind over fairly long distances, and though this takes some time and effort, they will usually attempt to do so when they face off against enemies to draw more Thark into the fight.

Shake It Off
When you face a Thark in a host, face Violence
On a Hit, chose one (Save the Animal, Kill the Thark, Suffer no Harm, No Thark Reinforcements).
On a Hard Hit, choose two.
On a Miss, suffer Harm as stated and another Thark in host arrives.

And it's hard to dance with the devil on your back
Thark were a major problem in Gulyban, a sister nation of Crickton's to the north, along the eastern edge of the Surlycrow. They have also appeared in Savel and in the west. In all these cases, they would cycle through as many animals as they could, killing them and causing as much damage elsewhere as possible until they were beaten down and hunted out. The fact that the prophets claim the sandrisas are responsible for their creation is new information, and a lot of Gulybans are quite interested in Lahey as a cause. Thark ash has proven useful to coat garments that protect their wearers from magic, and used on cloth masks, can sometimes allow a person to pass by Tharks themselves unnoticed. Lahesian rebels make heavy use of these masks.

There are reports of thark holding onto a host for long enough that the entire head gets lost in the gaping shadow orifice, and some capable to changing the shape of their host to something approximating human shape. There are a lot of rumors about the capabilities of these particular thark, but very little of it is substantiated. On suspects that a thark with the ability to concentrate on one host long enough to effect these changes is already dangerous enough. The process of a thark abandoning their host kills it, only being forced out offers the host animal any chance of surviving the experience.