The Worm Spawn

The Worm Spawn of the Limbo Stalker (usually shortened to just The Worm Spawn or The Worms) are the worm-like larvae of The Limbo Stalker, an Outer God from another dimension. The Disciples of the Worm are dedicated to understanding them and their abilities.

Description
They most closely resemble a terrestrial hagfish, covered with armored and horn-covered chitinous plates. Despite being larvae, these creatures are able to reproduce asexually before they reach their mature form. As larvae, the worms require a suitable host in which to mature. In their native dimension, their hosts would be any number of immense creatures that float through the ether. In these hosts they are no more troublesome than ticks or fleas.

Here, in our dimension, these larvae rarely reach maturity because they usually kill their host. By reproducing asexually, and practically at will, they starve the host to death by over-taxing its ability to take in nutrients. However, their presence will not rupture the host’s G.I. tract and cause death, because the worms’ excretions provide the hosts with the ability to survive the traumatic injury caused by their presence. Instead of death, the result of too many worms in one host is the abomination known to the Disciples as “The Worm Mother.”

Life Cycle of The Worm
The worm prefers to inhabit the upper gastro-intestinal tract of its hosts, most often in the small intestine. Once it latches on using the barbed hooks along its length and surrounding its mouth, the worm consumes about four thousand calories a day from the nutrients in the host’s digestive tract. This requires the host to consume about twice the normal caloric intake just to maintain their body weight. Consequently, many hosts are quite thin.

Since the worm is roughly the size of an adult hagfish and covered with hooks, its presence in the host is about as comfortable as having a belly full of hot buckshot. Because of the terrible pain, hosts require vast quantities of pain-killers in order to be able to function in the most minimal of ways. Hosts quickly become narcotic addicts under these conditions. However, being the host for one of the worms has its advantages. The worm’s waste excretions are an anagathic; a compound that arrests the aging process.

Since the worms are hermaphroditic, they can reproduce spontaneously. If a host doesn’t eat a steady diet of hormone-suppressing herbs and perform a certain daily ritual the worm starts reproducing and the host swells up like a balloon as more and more worms begin to grow inside them. Very soon the unfortunate host is unable to do anything except eat, scream, and birth out more worms.

Among the Disciples of the Worm, these hosts become the queen, or Worm Mother, the one worm in the cult allowed to breed. A constant supply of new worms is critical for the cult. Individual worms don’t live much more than a couple of years, so in order to keep from aging, the Disciples have to replace the old worms when they die. The hosts are therefore forced to endure the reintroduction of a new worm into their body as often as once a year.