The Vexlings are the reason Gorath's western frontier is a river and not a horizon. They are the apex predators of the Moon Wilds, and for most of the empire's three centuries the legions took them for animals: abundant, lethal, and stupid. That reading held until about ten years ago, when the things in the jungle began setting the kind of ambushes a tactician would recognize. The Gorathi name describes the effect they have on a soldier, not the creature itself. What a Vexling actually is, no one outside the Wilds can say.
They are not evil, whatever the men who fight them believe. Left alone, a Vexling brood holds its ground and ignores you. Provoked, it becomes one of the most efficient killing things on the continent. The empire walked three legions into their territory and called what came back a massacre. The Vexlings would call it an answer, if they called it anything.
The body
A Vexling stands three to four feet on six jointed legs, with a pair of smaller manipulator limbs folded near the head for handling what it catches. Coarse dark hair covers it and breaks up its shape in shadow, which is most of the Wilds most of the time. At a glance it reads as a goblin and a spider that grew into one another and kept the worst of both.
The eyes are what soldiers remember. Six of them, set in two uneven rows, each a different size and each tracking on its own, so the creature seems to look at everything and nothing at once. In the dark they hold a pale silver light. That light is usually a man's first warning of a Vexling and, often enough, his last. Below the eyes a set of mandibles works without stopping, even when the rest of the body has gone perfectly still.
They move without sound when they choose to. A Vexling is as comfortable hanging inverted from a branch as standing on the ground, and a brood can cross a canopy overhead without dropping a leaf.
The silver gaze
What makes a Vexling worse than a large predator is its gaze. Hold eye contact with one, all six eyes at once, and a hypnotic torpor takes you. Soldiers call it falling into silver. The victim stops moving, stops shouting, stops doing anything but watching while the creature closes the distance.
It is not instant. The trance needs several unbroken seconds to set, and in open ground a disciplined man can look away in time. The Wilds do not offer open ground. A Vexling drops out of the canopy or rises from the leaf litter a body-length away, and those seconds are already spent. Veterans of the Myublin garrisons learn to fight with their eyes off the target, working by edge of vision, and they lose half their effectiveness doing it.
The trance breaks the moment the gaze does. A shove from a comrade, the Vexling glancing aside, a man wrenching his own head away by force of will. The last is rare. Most who fall report no fear at all, only a deep welcome, a sense of being expected. Those who are not pulled back simply rise and follow. The brood leads them off into the dark. Where the tranced go afterward is the oldest question the Wilds keep, and the answer the empire least wants is that a few of them are still alive.
He stopped calling for help. That was the worst of it. One moment Tervo's screaming for a spear and the next he's quiet and smiling, and he gets up, and he walks toward the eyes like a man going home. We held his belt. We held it as long as we could. — a survivor of the Drauso campaign, recorded at a Myublin watchtower
The blood
A Vexling bleeds a silver-white ichor that is catastrophically corrosive. A single drop raises a deep chemical burn. A splash eats through boiled leather in seconds. Take a dying Vexling's spray full in the face and you do not keep the face. This makes killing one nearly as dangerous as fighting it, and the garrisons have paid for the lesson in hands and eyes. The standing doctrine is spears and polearms, distance on every strike, and never, under any circumstance, the killing blow with a blade in close.
The ichor stays live for about an hour after it leaves the body, then settles into a harmless silvery grit. Alchemists in the Poison Hills have spent fortunes trying to bottle it inside that window. The results have been uniformly catastrophic, and the trade now treats fresh Vexling blood as a way to lose a workshop.
How they hunt
For most of living memory the Vexlings hunted as scattered things. They do not now. The broods coordinate, with individuals holding roles through a fight: scouts that find the column, flankers that close the line of retreat, gaze-bearers that work the trance, strikers that finish what the gaze begins. They take the officers and the battle-mages first. They break contact when a fight turns against them, fade into the green, and come back in better order an hour later. They are, in the phrase that has spread through the marches, moving with something like a plan.
Something organizes them. The men who face them stopped asking what it was once they learned the answer changed nothing.
The Argent Mother
The answer, as far as anyone in Gorath has pieced it together, is that the hive has a head. Somewhere in the deep Wilds a single Vexling has become something the others orient on, a coordinating will that turned a country full of separate predators into one army with one tempo. The handful of scouts who have seen her and lived call her the Argent Mother. The Vexlings' own chittering name for the thing she is, as nearly as the one man who might render it can, is Ssvayri.
She is better understood as an office than an individual. The hive fills the role; the creature in it is only the current occupant. This distinction is not academic, and the empire has not grasped it.
General Drauso has. The man the Wilds campaign unmade has staked the largest bounty in Gorath's history on the Argent Mother's death and argued it to the throne as the blow that breaks the hive for good. The marches tell a colder story. Kill the Argent Mother and the broods do not scatter. Within a season another has risen to the role, by a process no one has watched and survived to explain. What is certain is the aftermath. A hive that was territorial becomes a hive that hunts, and it carries the grudge to the river and across it. Drauso's bounty will not solve the Moon Wilds. It is the surest way yet devised to turn a border the empire can hold into a war it cannot. He does not believe this. The throne has not been told.
The mercy-brood
Set every rule of the Vexlings down and there is one brood in the western Wilds that breaks all of them. It does not kill on sight. It shelters the people who wander into its range rather than running them down, and refugees who have come through that stretch of jungle describe being watched, escorted, and let go.
At the brood's center is a tranced man the Vexlings took years ago and never consumed, a Gorathi war-chaplain named Olivar. Around him the brood's behavior bent out of true. Whatever a hostage like him is to the hive, his brood treats the lost and the fleeing the way the others treat prey, and the difference has kept a thin road open through the deadliest ground on the continent.
It costs them. The hive treats the mercy-brood as a thing gone wrong, and other broods hunt it. The aberration is real, it is rare, and it is dying by degrees. It is also the only evidence anyone has that a Vexling can choose to be something other than the worst thing in the dark.
Game mechanics
Encounter notes. The gaze is the primary threat: an opposed contest each round a character meets a Vexling's eyes, several rounds of failure inducing the follow-the-brood trance; broken instantly by physical interruption or loss of line of sight. Fighting eyes-averted imposes a steep penalty to hit. Corrosive blood: any melee kill in close splatters the attacker (severe acid damage) unless made with reach weapons; ichor is live for roughly one hour then inert. Broods fight with assigned roles and target spellcasters and officers first; they disengage when losing and re-engage in better position.