Out of all the creations of the Blood Naga the Krasarb Haruspex – the Gut Eaters, the Faces of Disgrace, the Plague Revenants - is perhaps their most infamous and most revolting, bearing an appearance so visceral it forever scars the minds of mortal onlookers and drives the weak-willed to retching deaths.
The Krasarb’s basic form is a large floating vaguely human or elven head, trailing mutated appendages of exposed organs and offal that ooze with slime and pus, with some terminating in writhing serpents. Its jaw is distended and its mouth is filled with huge incisors that drip with gore. Long, slime-matted dark hair drifts in the air as if the creature is underwater. A large elongated toothy feeding proboscis, like a mutated tongue in the shape of a lamprey, emerges from its yawning maw. It is able to use its appendages like hideous tentacles to grasp and manipulate objects and other beings, and many are covered with further mutations that produce barbs, scales, spines, eyes, more jaws and strange filaments that secrete a cloud of gas that obscures their forms. What seem like gaudy ornaments attached to the Krasarb Haruspex's heads are the control apparatuses of the Naga that keep their actions in check during the heat of battle.
In the wilds of the Hinterlands the Krasarb is an active nocturnal carnivore often found around the swamps, graves and wastes of the Hinterlands. It glides on the currents of the Winds of Magic as its keen sense of smell draws it to battlefields, slaughterhouses and settlements with wounded soldiers or new childbirths. A severely gluttonous creature, it will fearlessly attack flesh and blood monsters that stumble into its path in an attempt to feed on their blood and entrails. Each meal disturbingly adds to its mass, with the older individuals growing to the size of Giants. At night the Krasarb becomes luminescent; its body giving off a lambent glow of sickly green and ochre as it reflects the light of Morrslieb.
While in motion the Krasarb’s exposed organs - typically consisting of the heart, liver and lungs - all pulsate with sorcerous power. When only a certain organ beats, the Krasarb is able to remotely induce arterial ruptures, strangulation or sadistically regenerate the injuries of its victims to perpetuate their suffering on those within close proximity. Witnesses who have merely seen the body of the Krasarb at a distance experience visions of antediluvian horror and portents of doom in their dreams.
The Krasarb’s deadliest aspect however is its ability to exude illness and rapid decomposition. Believed to bear the Plague God’s curse, wind blowing through the abomination’s dangling appendages turn into necrotic vapours. The Krasarb can direct this gale at enemies as a billowing miasma that sickens other lifeforms or dissolves flesh, rots wood and corrodes metal. Mundane weapons tend to crumble as warriors try to bring them to bear against these monsters. Youth and vigour are sapped with the merest brush of their entrails as they float through the fighting mass like ghastly sea jellies among a school of small fish. When the Winds of Magic swirl through Khuresh, the Krasarb spread the Snake Eater Plague through their miasma, warping the entrails of those warm-blooded creatures caught in the clouds into swarms of snakes that excruciatingly erupt from their bodies.
The Krasarb were not originally devised as such by the Naga Queens, rather they came from Naga that had their entire bodies and minds irrevocably altered by an experiment gone astray. During the pact with the Ruinous Powers the Snake Men defiled the sacred barays of the Lost City of the Old Ones previously used by the Slann, turning many of them into dark reservoirs of organic soup from which the brood-sects carried out terrible experiments. A brood of Naga submerged themselves in these fluids and enacted a secret ritual, beseeching the Dark Gods for forbidden knowledge that would place them ascendant over all others of their kind.
Perhaps as the result of sabotage by one of the other Naga or some capricious whim of the Chaos Gods, these Naga were savaged by sorcerous infection and their innate hunger was magnified tenfold. They tore at their own bodies and their features metamorphosed into the likeness of the younger races which they so despised, emerging as the precursors of the Krasarb. Their considerable intellect had wasted away, leaving a formidable cursed monster of instinct and predator cunning. The Blood Naga Queens found that the Krasarb could also transmit this curse to other Naga if they consumed their putrid saliva or the severed flesh of their appendages. Worried of what they could potentially do to the entire Snake Men civilization, the ruling Blood Naga joined forces to destroy most of the original batch and found a way to bend the will of the remainder and their progeny through sacrificial rites. Now the Krasarb plague Khuresh and the surrounding lands at the pleasure of the Queens, with new specimens created out of younger Naga who have betrayed their matriarchs or transgressed against the tenets of their brood-sects.
Brought forth into the millennia of wars against the enemies of the serpent-Naga, the Krasarb Haruspex have developed a particular taste for Ogres. Many a Maneater have found themselves devoured by these monsters, as the Krasarb corrode their gut-plates with rotting curse-winds and feast on the bountiful innards underneath.
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