Tusiboash

Body

Thirty feet, random in colour, the hair coming away in patches and the whole form reeking under the sugar. Slow at first, but "with an extension and re-extension of their form, can travel forty feet every fifteen seconds." Constantly moaning, and "with their lame brains, cannot stop once they are fixated on what they wish to devour."

The moaning is the only part of them anybody has ever pitied. The Sweet Rot is made nowhere in particular and everywhere at once, so the body is dissolving itself continuously and the sound is what that feels like, hour after hour, for a life that can run two centuries. They also cannot abandon a fouled Nest the way the rest of the species does, and so the sleeve-worm that lives in discarded Tusiva organs eats them alive without pause, which contributes to the smell.

Country

The Tusiboash Pit: "Pits located within bogs where Tusiboashes, the rotting corpses that they are, lurk and wait for food to come by. If anything smells nicer than death, they will hunt it." A Pit is not a Nest. Nothing is carved, nothing is inherited, and nothing about it is kept.

Ssemmeleth of the Rotted Field is the largest anyone has measured, forty feet of rot in a bog that three baronies have agreed not to drain.

Life

The Crimson explains the breeding. Second-hand mutation through the bog ash broke whatever restraint the rest of the species keeps, and a Tusiboash lays into any corpse of its own kind it can find, consented or not, which means the Tusiboash produce Wastes by the dozen. The world calls them mass rotted breeders and the name is earned.

Everywhere else in the species a clutch must be argued for over decades and laid into an elder the layer has consumed itself. The Tusiboash do none of it, which is why there are so many of them and why no other Tusiva will hold a Telling with one.

Harvest

Their venom is the Sweet Rot. It changes the biological make-up of the body and melts it from within until the whole of it is bile. It is the fastest of the four and the only one with no use to anybody but the killer.

It is made nowhere in particular, which is the horror of it: the Crimson-spoiled tissue produces it continuously, everywhere, weeping out through the bulbous pores, and it is digesting the serpent that makes it at the same rate it would digest anybody else. A Tusiboash must eat constantly to stay ahead of its own body, and the fixation, the moaning and the lame brain are all one thing. The Sweet Rot is traded, it is illegal everywhere, and it is bought by armies.

The Crimson in them

Thirty feet of cavernous rot, which "reek like rotting meat with a sweet sugar scent." The largest bodies this class produces, and the ones that can be smelled from a valley away.

Cavernous is literal. At that mass the blight hollows the host and uses the space, and a Tusiboash is walking architecture with a colony inside it. Past a certain point a body stops being a body and begins to be structure, and a host that has gone to architecture is where the hive puts its rooms; the Tusiboash is the only case where those rooms get up and move.

The smell is diagnostic and it is the same smell the first stage gives. Seeding is painless and shows nothing for eight to twenty days, and the first sign is the breath going sweet over rotten. A Tusiboash is that sign at thirty feet, carried on the wind, and it is the only warning a valley gets.