Gloomspite Gitz

There is a second moon in the skies of the Mortal Realms, and it is wrong. The Bad Moon careens across the heavens with no orbit and no warning, a leering face of loonstone that answers to no god and keeps no schedule. Where its sickly light falls, fungus erupts through flagstones, sane minds curdle, and every cave, cellar and sewer begins to giggle. For the light carries the Gloomspite — a seed of purest malicious glee — and it takes root in the heads of grots. To the Gloomspite Gitz the Bad Moon is god, prophet and battle-plan in one, and wherever it wanders they follow in their cackling millions, utterly certain that this time everything beneath it belongs to them.

The Moon's congregation is a carnival of everything the deep places breed. Moonclan grots swarm up from their lightless fungus-farms in hooded thousands, herding squigs — bounding spheres of fang and appetite that are less livestock than weather. Troggoths lumber through the Moon's gloom like boulders that have learned to migrate, dim and regenerating and impossible to argue with. And in the web-strangled corners of the realms the Spiderfang stir, venom-blessed devotees of the Spider God who join the procession on eight legs. It is not an army so much as a pilgrimage, with a Loonshrine at its heart and lunacy for a liturgy.

It is easy to laugh at them, and that is precisely how cities die. One grot is a coward with a sharp stick; a hundred thousand are a flood that does not much mind how many of itself drowns. The Gitz do not besiege so much as infest — the gloom arrives first, then the mushrooms, then the giggling in the cellars, and by the time the garrison stops joking about it the streets are a forest of toadstools and the gates are open from the inside. Survivors of a Gloomspite invasion rarely describe battles. They describe waking to find the sky the wrong colour and the world already lost.

Beneath the squabbling and the squig-bites lies a faith of genuinely apocalyptic ambition. The Gitz believe a day is coming when the Bad Moon will swallow every sky at once, the realms will become one endless damp cavern lit by its grin, and everything that ever walked in daylight will learn what the bottom of the food chain feels like. The Moon itself promises nothing. It crushes its faithful beneath falling loonstone as cheerfully as it crushes their enemies, and the grots adore it anyway — for spite shared is spite doubled, and the Gloomspite Gitz have enough to bury the world.