Site-made title card, not a depiction. Artists: permitted fan art of Hrud is welcome through the Art Call.

Xenos Horribilis · Tunnel Dwellers · Galaxy-wide

Hrud

Cloaked, stinking, time-devouring scavengers whose very presence ages steel to rust and men to dust.

Type: Nomadic chronophagic xenos
Also called: Temporaferrox; to the Aeldari, Those Who Evade the Crone
Habitat: Tunnel-cities beneath hives and ruins
Signature: The Ssaak, an entropic field that ages everything nearby
Weapon: The fusil, a phasic warp-plasma gun
On death: Bodies liquefy within moments

Artwork coming soon: no permitted independent art of Hrud is on file yet. Art Call

At a glance

The Hrud are one of the strangest and most unsettling xenos races in the galaxy. They are nomadic creatures that live in the dark places beneath human cities: forgotten tunnels, collapsed sumps, the bowels of ancient hives. Few humans ever see one clearly. Those who do describe hunched, cloaked figures wrapped in rags of rotting filth, with long, spine-like limbs and a stench that clings to everything. Some accounts describe a rat-like tail. Many describe nothing at all, only a flickering shape that seemed to be in several places at once.

What makes the Hrud truly terrifying is the field of entropy that surrounds them. Wherever Hrud gather, time itself seems to rot. Metal rusts, stone crumbles, food spoils and living things age at unnatural speed. A soldier who gets too close to a large group of Hrud may age decades in moments. The Imperium calls them Temporaferrox. The Aeldari call them Those Who Evade the Crone, a name that hints at an ancient and uneasy relationship with death itself.

The Ssaak

The Hrud's entropic field is known as the Ssaak, which roughly translates as "see mist". It is not a weapon they switch on and off. It is part of what they are. They appear to feed on time, drawing it out of the matter around them, and the result is accelerated decay.

Effects of the field

Ageing: living things grow old within minutes. Hair whitens, skin wrinkles, bones weaken.
Decay: machinery rusts and seizes, stone cracks and powders, and crops turn to dust in the fields.
Distortion: the Hrud themselves flicker and blur, as if not quite in step with the present, making them very hard to target.
Deflection: shots aimed at a Hrud often veer away or fall short, as if they had lost their momentum to the field.

The Ssaak grows stronger as more Hrud gather together. A lone Hrud might rot the food in a pantry. A migrating host can age an entire district into ruin.

Society & migration

Hrud live in hidden underground settlements called Juuntak, tunnel-cities that can stretch beneath the foundations of hive cities for kilometres. They are scavengers, taking what they need from the cities above, and the people living above often never realise that a Hrud colony shares their world until it is too late.

They are also wanderers. Periodically, a Hrud population undertakes a mass migration called a Poh-ha. Thousands of Hrud move together through tunnels, across wastelands and even between worlds. The entropic field of so many Hrud together is devastating. Whole regions age and decay in the wake of a Poh-ha, and Imperial forces sent to stop one often find their own weapons rusting in their hands.

Despite their savage reputation, the Hrud are not simply animals. They keep records, and there are accounts of Hrud archives filled with knowledge that might be very old indeed. Some Imperial scholars suspect that the Hrud were once a much greater race, and that their current existence in the shadows is the remnant of a lost empire.

Weapons

The Hrud carry a weapon known as the fusil, a gun that fires blasts of phasic warp-plasma. It is a strange weapon, unlike Imperial plasma guns, and its shots seem to pass through cover and armour in ways that human weapons cannot. Hrud also use their field as a weapon, simply by advancing on their enemies and letting time do the rest.

Death

When a Hrud dies, its body quickly liquefies into a foul fluid. This makes them very hard to study, and the Magi Biologis have few complete specimens.

History of conflict

The Hrud have clashed with the Imperium many times, and their history is a catalogue of strange and terrible incidents.

The Sak'trada Deeps, late M30: during the Great Crusade, the Iron Warriors fought the Hrud in a brutal subterranean campaign. One Iron Warrior was reportedly aged to dust in less than a second, and an entire fortress was aged into ruin around its defenders.
The Hrud Rising, 980.M35: a major Hrud uprising, fought in part by the Dark Angels.
Haakonath, 101.M40: the Star Phantoms Space Marines lost a world to the Hrud.
Damhal: Deathwatch forces discovered eight of their own Dreadnoughts, rusted and empty, filled with dust where their occupants had been.
Ursula Spinal, 783.M41: six Valhallan regiments faced a Hrud migration. Half of their soldiers were prematurely aged.

Other well-known figures have encountered the Hrud. Ursarkar Creed of Cadia fought a Hrud migration. Eldrad Ulthran is said to have prevented a Hrud infestation of the craftworld of Saim-Hann. And Fabius Bile's servants are recorded as having slain one, perhaps for study.

Mysteries of the Hrud

Almost everything about the Hrud is uncertain. Their true appearance is debated, because the field around them distorts sight and their bodies dissolve on death. Their language is largely unknown, though a handful of their words have entered Imperial records. Even their numbers are a mystery, since a colony can live unseen for generations beneath a hive.

The Aeldari name for them is one of the most intriguing clues. "Those Who Evade the Crone" suggests that the Aeldari see the Hrud as creatures that somehow escape the natural end of life, or that cheat time in a way other beings cannot. The Aeldari are notoriously unwilling to explain such names, but their seers clearly take the Hrud seriously, and the story of Eldrad's intervention at Saim-Hann shows that a craftworld considers a Hrud infestation a disaster worth foreseeing.

Some Imperial scholars have suggested that the Hrud may once have been servants or creations of an older race, perhaps even a people involved in the War in Heaven, and that their entropic nature is a weapon that outlived its makers. Others believe they are simply a natural product of a strange world, and that their tunnels and migrations are the behaviour of a scavenging species that learned to live alongside more powerful neighbours. Neither theory has been proven, and the Inquisition files its Hrud reports under the heading of the unexplained.

The Imperial response

The Imperium treats the Hrud as a serious threat. Their ability to hide in plain sight beneath hive cities means that infestations can grow for years before they are discovered. When they are found, the usual response is a purge. Tunnels are flooded with fire and gas. Hive levels are collapsed. In the worst cases, entire hive cities have been abandoned.

Fighting Hrud is a war against time. Weapons fail. Armour corrodes. Rations rot. Vehicles seize. Soldiers lose years of life simply by standing near the enemy. The best tactics involve fighting from range, using flame, and never staying in contact for long.

Brutal Moments

Brutal moments

Dust in the armour

At Damhal, a Deathwatch kill-team broke into the lair where eight of their brothers' Dreadnoughts had been lost. They found the war machines standing in a ring, as though they had been fighting to the last. Their hulls were rusted through. Their weapons had seized in mid-fire. When a Techmarine forced open the first sarcophagus, it was full of fine grey dust, and nothing else. The ancient warriors inside had not been killed. They had simply been aged, in their armoured tombs, until there was nothing left of them.

The Iron Warrior

In the Sak'trada Deeps, an Iron Warrior advanced alone into a Hrud tunnel. His brothers watched through their auspex as his armour dulled, then pitted, then crumbled. His last steps were taken by a body that was already collapsing. His bolter fell apart in his hands, his helm sank in on itself, and within a second there was nothing left but a pile of dust and broken ceramite on the tunnel floor. The Iron Warriors responded the only way they knew how. They collapsed the tunnels and kept collapsing them until nothing moved below.

The regiment that grew old

On Ursula Spinal, a Valhallan regiment stood in the path of a Hrud migration. The front ranks fired volley after volley into the mist, and their shots seemed to vanish into it. Then the mist rolled over them. Young troopers dropped their lasguns as their hands became gnarled and weak. Their hair turned white in moments. Their teeth fell out. Some collapsed and died of old age before the Hrud had even reached them. The survivors who fell back carried old men in uniforms that had been issued to boys only the previous year.

The hab-block

A family in a lower hive level complained that their food rotted overnight. Their children grew sick and thin. Their walls cracked. When the Arbites investigated, they found a Hrud colony in the old tunnels beneath the block. By then, the eldest son, who had been a teenager when the complaints began, had grey hair and a stooped back. The Arbites purged the tunnels with flamers. The Hrud bodies they burned dissolved into stinking pools before they could be counted.