They smell as bad as they look. A pungent scent of cat piss and spoiled milk is accompanied by the sound of rapid insect-like wing beats and a faint choked laughter. Their bodies are like squirrel skeletons, squatting low and caked in filth. A pair of tattered beetle wings jut from their back, twitching, as a mouth of teeth like yellow needles chitters in a silent maniacal motion.

They are hated by nearly every being that has ever crossed paths with them. Foul wretched jesters of some loathsome master they flit from spot to spot like carrion flies over a rotting corpse. Everywhere they go they are accompanied by the smell of rotting food and stagnant water, everything they touch spoiling like eggs in a summer heat. Even bodies of water are rendered filthy by their touch, risking dysentery if drunk from.

They enjoy their powers, reveling in the filth and hardship they create, especially with travellers’ precious food. To them, they are simply “ripening” the food, holding it in their hands until is is just barely a solid before messily choking it down their cavity-ridden mouths. They cackle as they do so, preferring the rightful owner to witness their desecration.

They live in large communal dens. Dug out from the soft earth they are almost indistinguishable from groundhog or vermin holes, save for the unbearable stench of decay. Sleeping only once every few days to digest a particularly rancid meal they consumed, they remain quite active all times a day. Occasionally, during a particularly sweltering summer, they will gather in great swarms to feast and breed. Like a plague of flies they will course out of their dens to despoil the surrounding landscape, ruining crops, soiling wells, all the while copulating in disgusting mid-air acrobatics.

They hate anything immune to their rotting touch. They grow frustrated with anything inorganic, attempting to “spoil” metals and stone to no effect. This quirk has birthes a general practice by hunters and travellers to try and trick them into using their powers on inorganic objects, keeping them busy for hours on end in order to avoid having their supplies compromised. This unfortunately risks their seething hatred if they are encountered again. Another way is to get them incredibly drunk, as hard liquor and pure alcohol seems mostly unaffected by their powers for some reason.

There is much speculation into where it is they come from. Some say they are the servants of some hateful filthy deity, working as servants of its will. Another theory puts them as the byproduct of fairies being exposed to the repeated tortuous exposure to some befouled landscape. The final theory suggests that, as wretched and despicable as they are, they are actually a part of the vicious cycle of rot and rebirth present in any ecosystem; far more potent to compensate with the nature of the Wilds.