World: Black Wastes
Diet: Microscopic creatures in their ice
Height: Individual worms 2’1″, overall length depends on number of segments
Lifespan: 760 years
Habitat: Deep trenches, Erebus
Activity Cycle: Nocturnal
With the sun shrouded in a red haze, the Black Wastes have a deep and permanent chill, one that grows deeper in the great canyons that split the great salt flats. Even in the warmest parts of the world, these canyons glitter with ice, all the way down to Erebus below. It is these regions of permeant ice that the netherwurms crawl. It is hard to say whether a netherwurm is the singular individual, a fat blue worm inhabiting a rancid green chunk of ice, or the colony as a whole, ranging from 5-20 worms and their homes all chained together into a mobile creature. Seemingly driven by their will, the colony can climb sheer walls of ice, emerging onto the surface for unknown purposes after the sun sets.
Their ice is not ice as we know it, but some rotten, stinking substance, colder than any regular ice and even strangely flammable. The creature forms gas pockets within its ice that can be sparked to launch sharp shards and heavy chunks of ice at threats. Thankfully, they are usually docile and only attack when threatened, although they seem to universally see any source of fire as a threat and have surprising precision, capable of striking a torch directly out of a traveler’s hand (which usually causes a fatal explosion as the rotten ice catches fire).
Cool! What I’m curious about is, do they find and inhabit this weirdo ice or do they burrow into regular ice and make it weird sticky flammable ice somehow?
The ice they inhabit is methane ice! It only forms under colder conditions than we usually see on the surface. They’re based on methane worms, which feed on bacteria living in methane ice at the bottom of the ocean.
Oh, I don’t think i heard of that before. You learn something new every day!