Rachnyx

The most ancient of Diaemus' dominant sapients are the Rachnyx, giant spider-like creaturess that dwell not on the surface but in the hollow cavities sprinkled throughout the crust. They are the smallest of the three major races, standing scarcely a meter high when pulled to full height. Nonetheless, they are among the most dangerous of them all.

A Rachnyx stands on four thick legs, using its foremost pair to feel the path in front of it and the intermediate pair as multi-fingered manipulatory appendages. The hands have four main digits and two extras in opposition to the primary digits as well as each other. The wrists are often bloated with nerve ganglions that make the fine weaving of silk webs an almost purely mechanical process.

As a general rule the Rachnyx have a poor sense of sight, as evidenced by the front pair of feelers, but the Rachnyx are arguably Diaemus' most innately variable race. Their earliest ancestors have been traced back four million years, and there are many subspecies that have come about since them. All have evolved for millennia in symbiosis with colonies of lumuoles spread throughout the abdoment, giving the Rachnyx access to the most streamlined, efficient magic systems on Diaemus. Common abilities include the production of silk with radically improved tensile strength and venom with heightened potency, but ESP and even dramatic powers of elemental control are well within the limits of Rachnyx parabiology.

Originally, the Rachnyx and all their subspecies appeared to be solitary predators with no language, culture, or civilization, dwelling entirely in the vibrant caverns deep underneath the surface. Their opposable digits appear to have evolved for weaving huge and mindbogglingly complex web systems throughout the caves. Their minds developed to enhance the efficiency of their labors, and seem especially geared towards memorizing the movements of hundreds of individual prey animals and calculating long-range statistics. Rachnyx at this stage in their development would usually eat any others that entered their territories, even if those others were their own offspring.

The details of the modern Rachnyx's evolution are sketchy, but it appears that a period of geologic instability roughly ten thousand years ago caused enormous ecological damage in the subterranean caverns. Thousands of Rachnyx starved, and the survivors were forced to conglomerate into loosely bound societies in order to cooperatively hunt what prey remained. The social systems they came up with either ended with one enormous, very well fed Rachnyx sitting among the remains of the others, or in successful constructs that are still around today.

Nowadays there are Rachnyx living in almost every way imaginable. Some live in eusocial colonies akin to ant nests or bee hives. Some have built sprawling underground cities. Some have even taken to slowly colonizing the surface world.

A pregnant mother Rachnyx gives birth to thousands of live young, each about as large as a common house spider. Parental care was once non-existent, and close individual care like in human and Dromean socities is impossible, but some Rachnyx colonies have taken to feeding prey animals and foreigners to swarms of their young offspring.

The Rachnyx are everywhere, just under your feet. Some are no more malevolent than the worms in the soil. Some are as sage and learned as the wisest scholar. Some are hordes of violent conquerors that could convert entire cities into tightly crammed slaughterhouses. They are not vertebrates, and they seldom follow the rules of conduct that vertebrates take for granted. They are so innately magical that the conventional laws of physics might as well not apply to them. If you have reason to meet with Rachnyx, expect the unexpectable.