Draug — Drones

Initiate the oral histories…

The Norse folk tell legends of the draug, both as ghosts haunting the graves of Vikings and as the reanimated corpses of mariners who died at sea. Denied a proper burial and eternal rest, the soggy wretches haunted the shores. Their flesh is said to be hel-blár or nár-fölr — that is, “death-blue” or “corpse-pale”. In folklegend, they were harbingers of death to whoever was unlucky enough to see them.

SCANNING… New England.

The Draug of Kingsmouth are very real, very corporeal. When the fogs came, the townsfolk walked into the sea to drown, rising again from the waters, driven forward by pale humanoids. Clad in the seaweed of the Sargasso, these pallid creatures sported shells and all manner of aquatic growths. Their bloated bodies crawled with marine carrion-eaters and parasites, becoming walking nests of the crustaceans that served their will in symbioses. Adapted to life in the ocean, they look deceptively awkward on land. Their presence is betrayed by the putrid stink rot that they carry from the bottom of the ocean. Their decaying, undead brains carry no mercy or empathy.

The malignancy of the draug manifests in manifold forms. There are several common types. We see them, sweetling, haunting Kingsmouth.

We see the Maulers and Spikers. They are the warriors among the waterlogged. Large coral growths form weapons. Their dead skin and sinew blunt the blades that strike them. Their wounds and abscesses may make them appear fragile, but their bodies are formed from the inside pushing out, as they constantly mutate new muscle structures.

We see the Seawitches. These transformed shaman have uniquely retained some sense of individuality, if not their past lives. They are forever locked in their trance-state — where once they heard the will of the spirits, now they only hear the whispers of the Dreaming Ones. They wail songs of madness. We see the Seacallers — the fog, this airborne Filth, responds to their voice and the water churns to their will. We see the Broodwitches — slimy tentacles reach out from their chests, impregnating the walking corpses with eldritch seed.

We see the Incubators. The draug round up the drowned zombies. A terrible embryo is placed inside each rotting corpse, where it gestates until it is large enough to be removed from the body and placed in the shallow water to grow into an egg pod. Do you see the pods, sweetling, dotting the shores? Walking corpses carry them about. The weird cycle continues.

Initiate the Secret Histories…

The Norse who fought in the Darkness War paid a great price for their victory. Some boats did not return, they were lost with Excalibur in the Sargasso Sea. There would be no glorious death and the pyre for them, but only the cold sea and no death at all.

Some boats did return, but those Vikings did not come home unchanged. They had travelled through roiling fog banks and an ocean of alien weeds, a graveyard that was a sea. Something got into them, gathered under their fingernails like soot, catching in their throats like smoke, dripping into their nightmares. The Filth sifted through their minds and darkest dreams, and there it found the passed-down tales of the draug. It bubbled and delighted at this inspiration.

By the time they returned to their coastal villages, the Vikings had fallen sick. The pestilence spread despite the administering of their dreamspeakers. Not even the Seiðr, the elite female shaman, could cure the sickness. Weeks later, outsiders would find the villages abandoned, rows of footprints leading to the sea. We saw the poor souls changing. Drowned but not dead, they shed their skins in the brine to grow tougher, colder flesh. The matter they sloughed off in the primordial deep joined with the Filth weed, coalescing into new forms, colonies and pods that supported their new, unnatural cycle.