New Avernite Titans

It has been anticipated for a while that Avernus would apply information from the Titanic Tyranid Fleets the same way it did with Grábakr, albeit over a longer period of time due to lacking an intact Norn Queen.

Nevertheless, with a sudden draft of new biological improvements and species it appears to have completed it to a certain degree of satisfaction.

**General Improvements**

**Improved Bio-Engineering:** A far less extensive reworking of its biological capabilities, due to existing knowledge from Grábakr, Avernus has nonetheless implemented a wide range of new techniques and structures that have once again increased the average physical lethality of its creatures quite significantly.

**Enhanced Existing Macro-Fauna and Flora:** Avernus already features a plethora of vast beasts. From the Krakens, to the numerous species of Dragon, Titan Scorpions and the Lizardmen’s monsters, the new generations of these creatures have found themselves augmented to a wild degree, reducing their reliance on psychic powers, boosting their physical attributes and allowing them to grow larger than ever before.

**Standardised Gigantism:** On average it seems now 1 in every 50 Avernite creatures will be born with the capacity for Gigantism, growing up to ten times larger than their average size, with a commensurate increase in power, both physical and psychic. The Nynye are very excited for the possibilities this presents for their Titants.

**Greater Psychic Projection:** Probably the thing Avernus is most interested in, the Titanic Tyranids have taught it numerous methods of increasing the efficiency of psychic Titans. A typical problem of such constructs is that the level of power they can display does not match the scale of their bodies, a problem we humans see with our psy-Knights. This is still the case to an extent for Avernus, but now to much less of one.

**Grander Titans:** More specific than improved bio engineering, many already large Avernite Species have seen new, significantly larger variants emerge, that while rarer are true titans. The Scorpions of Aridia are an obvious example, with this new variety reaching the size of Warhound Titans and even larger, though obviously they are rarer. This list shall not list every example of improved size (probably) but will note those that are especially impressive.

**Faster Titan Breeding:** While not as noticeable immediately, it was eventually figured out that Avernus has learned how to make titans more efficiently. The first sign humanity had of this was our various massive creatures breeding more effectively, and later the Lizardmen celebrating the birth of several new Thunder Lizards.

**Specific New Species**

**Centipeedal and Millipeedal:** Terrifying creatures at the best of times, both of these creatures are Myriapoda (many legged) arthropods, possessed of an incredibly thick carapace and far too many legs. One hundred in the former over a thousand in the latter.

The Centipeedals range between the length of a large Knight to a Reaver Titan and are the more aggressive of the species. They have an incredibly powerful bite which has been shown to shear through even high-grade adamantium, while spitting an immensely caustic acid for long range assaults. They are no less dangerous on their sides, as they have seemingly perfect awareness of their entire length and are able to strike outwards with their incredibly strong legs to skewer anything that is nearby and at the back a stinger. Unsurprisingly, they are powerful biomancers, but their ability seems to be a form of telekinesis combined with divination. The divination lets them detect attacks, and the telekinesis is used with their already great reflexes to let them dodge assaults that should be impossible for beings of their bulk.

It also seems to aid them in digging.

For the most part these beings are extremely aggressive new inhabitants of the Everglades, and require a significant amount of force to take down.

Millipeedals are far more peaceable. Their carapace is significantly tougher and they are much larger in size, ranging from Warhound to a midpoint between Warlord and Imperator in length. However they lack as many offensive options. Instead Millipeedals spend their lives mostly as scavengers and are capable of eating almost anything to survive.

That said they do not lack the ability to defend themselves should something come along that can breach their armour. Their bulk alone is a considerable deterrent, and they can release a cloud of toxic gas which can disperse for several kilometres before losing its potency.\*

\*This seems to be an altered variant of the Barking Toad’s gas. Less deadly, but also doing less collateral damage, instead seeming to concentrate on creatures that have hostile intent to the Millipeedal.

Should these options prove insufficient, the Millipeedal will instead roll itself up and begin to roll at its enemy. During this process, the Millipeedal generates much more momentum than it should, turning it into a ball of doom able to crush all in its path. Many new valleys and rivers in the Everglades are the result of a Millipeedal deploying its final weapon.

**Skywhales:** Vast flying leviathans that soar through the heavens as if it were water, suspended upon diaphanous wings and feeding upon cloud creatures. Probably one of the largest new creatures Avernus has unveiled, capable of easily out classing a Imperator Titan in width and several times over in length. Despite their mass, the whales are not particularly aggressive creatures. Usually large numbers of other flying wildlife will congregate around them, drawn by their song. This music has a calming effect on everything nearby it, but also induces numerous boosts to a creature’s power. Skywhales typically travel in pods, with the leviathans able to boost their song via choir, but even a single Whale can project their song for miles.

**Evergrowth Trees:** Redwood trees of remarkable structural integrity, these trees grow at an incredibly rapid rate. Their wood is of incredible durability, (easily as strong as steel), making the trees an easy source of strong building materials to the peoples, that can be easily enhanced through various means (the Nynye have created a relatively simple Alkahestral process to increase the durability of the wood several fold). The main drawback to the trees is that if left to their own devices they will eventually exceed their load bearing capacity and collapse on themselves. They are certainly something Avernus created for its peoples and their spontaneous generation close to their settlements only reinforces this.

**Ursa Morsine:** Avernus has some sort of affinity for bears and this new breed only reinforces that. It is a simple creature for the most part, a bear the size of a warhound titan with all the ferocity and fervour there in. What makes it more than “merely” a simple bear is an innate ability to appear behind its enemies. We do not know how the bear does this, only that it is able to always do it to devastating effect.

**Doomshed Moths:** Amongst the more placid titans, Doomshed Moths are rarely directly aggressive, instead their power comes from small particles that shed from them by flapping their wings. These particles are incredibly dangerous, disintegrating most things they touch instantly, and with such a massive creature it can release a vast amount of particles incredibly quickly.

**Nightmare Tarantulas:** Hairy, web-weaving and angry, Nightmare Tarantulas are not the *worst* thing an Avernite can imagine, but they are up there. Armed with incredibly potent venom these spiders are the same size as a reaver titan, and possess remarkable capacity in the area of Filukinesis and an even greater one in Metáxikinesis, the ability to manipulate thread and silk respectively. The Tarantulas produce even more silk than is normal for a spider of their kind\*, which is of remarkable strength and quality even before adding in psychic abilities. A tarantula will weave a web that covers a significant area then sit at its centre, projecting its awareness through it. If anything enters its web it will strike, seizing them with tendrils of near unbreakable silk, before storing them away to consume them later.

Their abilities are not limited to silk, it is simply the material with which it works best (silk a spider made being a near perfect conductor for their power) and elder variants have shown that they can project other powers through their webs, such as electric shocks, or induce sleeping.

\*Ironically this does make them very valuable, as their silk is a fantastic psy conductor for clothing, while being an incredibly durable material in practically all instances.

**Wyrms**: Likely the most powerful of the new titans yet discovered, Wyrms are not Dragons, save in the sense they are what Dragons are based on. Vast, serpentine creatures with scales like ship plating, fangs filling maws that breath the flame of the sun and a breath that causes the air to ripple with concentrated force of unreality. To the undiscerning eye they are simply miniature versions of the World Serpent, but upon closer inspection the differences become far more stark.

It is undoubtable that the Wyrms are based on the Serpent, in fact the Ancient One says that replicating its first protector has been one of the Planet’s longest running goals. A task it has had great trouble succeeding in due to the fact the Serpent is a masterwork of the Old Ones, a being that exists in defiance of the natural order of the universe whose presence destroys the concept of entropy. Even though they had intended to replicate it to spread this delay in heat death to the universe, the World is alone and lacks their billions of years of skill and resources, despite having their notes.

Even still the Wyrms are intended not to produce infinite power from nothing, instead they are meant to be connected directly to the Geomantic web and thus capable of channeling its vast power. The obvious issue with that is the Geomantic Web’s power is too great. Psykers need vast reserves of will to channel the force of the web for even a second and they are capable of shutting themselves off from it. For the Wyrms even if the mind was willing the inability to close themselves off meant that death via overload and then probable explosion was guaranteed.

So the World worked on the problem, edging ever closer to a solution but discovering that fundamentally to make it work requires a frame strong enough to endure seemingly endless amounts of magical force, which despite its best efforts it had been unable to develop. Until now that is.

The secrets lay with the Tyranids, whose bioengineering is almost without flaw, the secrets hidden within their flesh taken and combined with the planets existing work to finally give a form to its vision capable of withstanding the immense forces placed upon them by drawing on the endless well that is the geomantic web.

So now the Wyrms have been born, taring onto Avernus’s surface with unrestrained speed.

Some have settled on the earth, shedding voluminous wings to instead grow sharp claws for digging, settling within the earth, others migrated into the sea becoming a new apex predator that for now remains unbeatable, some have headed into the heavens where their bodies are sufficient to let them exit the World’s atmosphere entirely, and roar their defiance to the universe. It is rumoured a few have even left the materium entirely and now reside in the midst of the world’s endless battles within the warp.

No matter what the Wyrms are unmistakable as anything else, for although there are a great many serpents on Avernus, only the being they are based on surpasses them in terms of the aura of power that surrounds them in every moment, each breath of theirs releasing enough concentrated magic to warp existence around them.

It is not yet known *what* their powers are, merely that when it comes time for them to reveal them we hope it shall be enough.

**Sleepers**: Apparently a sign that Avernus is enjoying a new concept is a species that is intended not necessarily for maximum power, but just to experiment with a concept creating a “simple” and modular species to test its ideas. So it is with the Sleepers, cyclopean giants, who as the name suggests, spend most of their lives fast asleep, being distinguishable from hills by the rhythm of their breathing alone.

Sleepers are usually bipedal with skin the texture of leather but with the durability of significantly stronger materials and very impressive strength, but far from the greatest. Furthermore, while they have displayed creativity, such as picking up nearby objects to use as missiles against enemies, they are still not especially intelligent creatures. For the most part they are rather docile as Avernite creatures go, only being hostile when awoken from their slumber prematurely, whereupon they will rampage. Otherwise Avernite peoples who have been watching them more closely have found that for the most part they can be kept quiescent by ensuring they have a plentiful supply of food, as once satiated they will go back to sleep.

What makes them interesting isn’t a power, but instead the sheer variety of powers they can display. As stated already they are “simple” by the standards of Avernus at a base level, and are amongst its least intimidating creatures for their size. However, variants that can manipulate “elements” like fire, water, air and earth, have been observed, some that can fire titan scale las blasts from their eyeball, several capable of different means of flight, a handful that are just walking plants, another capable of producing extremely potent sonic waves by beating its stomach like a drum and finally one that when killed simply got back up as a reanimated skeleton as if nothing happened.

While they still have an obvious weakness (their one eye) the Sleepers are a curious example of Avernite weirdness.

**The Ooze!:** A towering pile of festering, acidic seepage, an Ooze is a grotesque thing to observe from a distance and even worse up close. Composed entirely of a jelly like substance which appears to be repurposed Tyranid digestive enzymes (the kind they use to devour planets) these blobs move slowly across the landscape consuming everything in their path.

Single minded in the extreme, they devour anything they encounter with the same focus as their Tyranic predecessors, as fascinatingly complex internal ecosystems of cells (comparable to nanomachines) reconfigure as much of the dissolved matter as is possible towards adding more mass to the Ooze. This is not the end of their digestive capacity, as their absorptive properties extend towards other forms of energy (such as heat) which they use to increase the pace of their incorporation.

It is extremely hard to hurt one of these creatures via material weapons, as the impact of projectiles is dissipated through their gelatinous bulk, and whatever object is used simply becomes more fuel for The Ooze’s growth. Instead optimally weapons which do not rely on a physical component should be used. While The Ooze can devour energy and the like, most weapon systems (such as las guns) are too intense and concentrated for one to do much before it has already done damage to its material.

As such the easiest way to fight one is to overwhelm it with non physical or psychic attacks.

In theory the simplest method to deal with one is to launch a telepathic assault, striking at the distributed consciousness which guides their actions. However, this is a fraught process as the consciousness may not be smart, but it *is* very large. In order to subvert the creature, the entire network must be taken. Should that happen (or it is put into a life threatening situation in another way) the Ooze has one final trick.

Ooze’s reproduce by splitting after they have reached a certain size, creating hundreds or even thousands of new instances. Should their network be compromised by a powerful telepath or sufficient damage, this process immediately starts, a single ooze turning into many different ones that all count as separate creatures. Should a new instance be subverted it will split again and again until it is unable to do harm to anything, preventing its subversion by the enemy.

Currently the largest populations of Oozes have been spotted near to the Remnant, where it seems the World is using them to try and test their creativity not only against overwhelming force, but an enemy that is an effective counter to many of the Troll’s preferred tactics while encouraging them to experiment more with energy weapons.

**Colossal Sand Shark**: The Sand Sharks of Aridia are known for swimming through the sand and are the origin of the (sometimes confusingly named) phase tanks created by the Dark Age Researchers. However, they were of little interest to humanity who tended to forget about them, until now. The World has introduced a new variant not only in Aridia, but also Duat, a Sand Shark the size of a reaver titan.

They do not look much like a normal marine shark, on their chin is a massive shovel-like protrusion of bone that is as useful for ramming as it is for flipping meals into their mouths or digging through the ground, their “faces” are somewhat square in shape, their maws filled with monomolecular teeth. Atop their body is a sail which they use to draw supplementary energy from the sun, as well as feel vibrations through the sand (a similar sail is present on their tail) and from their sides are a quartet of powerful legs, showing that even if forced from the sand they are still fast and dangerous. This is capped off with a whip-like tail.

Where normal Sand Sharks are content to “swim” through the sand via vibrations and liquefaction, Colossal Sand Sharks take it one step further through a form of small scale geomancy, transmuting solid substances near them into sand. This makes them much more effective predators, especially against humans, as tanks and power armour which lack runes are now almost completely useless against them. Making them more deadly is the fact they never hunt alone, only ever in packs of varying size.

**The Abyssal Kraken:** Known only through a warning given by the Turquoise Sea and Deep Sea Sirens, the Abyssal Kraken (as both called it) were ultimately revealed to be completely different creatures.

The Turquoise Sea’s Kraken is “simply” an upgraded version of the Kraken, a well known and impressively vicious Avernite macro-fauna, but one we have long since learned how to tame through cybernetic implants. The ones captured by Avernus humans several hundred years ago are even still alive and growing.

This new form of Kraken is between double and triple the size of the original (already one of the larger creatures known on Avernus given that they range from the size of a large escort to a cruiser) with tentacles long enough that their main bodies tend to sit tens of kilometres away from where they’re feeding, passing hundreds of tons of prey into their maws.

The Deep Sea’s Kraken are different. True creatures of the Cavern discovered by a party of some of their greatest delvers. The Solar Sea\* is a phenomenon already reported by Jacob, and Avernus got to see the Solar Kraken’s in action during the final stages of the Gilded Sky. In addition to the already expected “improved” version of the Solar Kraken, they found something else. Almost akin to a sun spot, until they realised they could not see the creature, rather only perceive its outline as it stole even the vision from their eyes.

\*Which generates numerous questions about whether life energy is involved in their creation.

They do not know if the World has found some way to create *more* blackhole creatures, but the description of unease the Delvers felt, ensured the Deep Seas felt the need to inform others. Their people do not get spooked easily.

**Regis Griffon, Rovos:** Griffons are an old legend of humanity, often known as the King of Beasts. Possessing the body and back legs of a lion and the head wings and front legs of an eagle, they were seen as the combination and apex of life to primitive humans. Of course, whether thry existed at all on old Terra, is known only to the Emperor now, but on Avernus it seems they are an old and tragic breed.

It seems the Planet has created numerous species of Griffon, each more impressive than the last that all tend to share in the same themes of pride, nobility and impressive strength. However, it is these same characteristics that have seen them destroyed by Chaos each and every time.

Whether animal or people, a Griffon will not back down from a challenge, so it tends to be that they will spend themselves quickly against Chaos and either fall totally in an incursion, or in its aftermath.

It seems there is some almost archetype-like power to them that means if the World alters this facet of their nature, they will not work, so it seems the World’s solution to the dilemma is to give them the ability to *win* these self imposed challenges.

Enter the Regis Griffon, the most impressive variant yet, by the Lizardmen’s records the 37th descendant species the World has made and by all accounts its greatest yet.

Fully grown, their main body is the same scale as a Warlord Titan with an even more impressive wingspan. However, they do not cease growing (instead it merely slows) once they reach maturity, so we are unsure if there is indeed an upper limit.

With their size is strength that is remarkable even for their size, feathers and fur that is near impenetrable to most man portable equipment with seemingly vorpal talons. Yet it is their voice box that tends to get the most notice from biologis, as they describe it as a wonder of bio-engineering the entire system allowing the Griffon to scream with such force that they can cause skin to rupture and metal to buckle, giving it the nickname “the blood shriek.”

Even this alone is already monumental, but they become even more so when their powers are added into the mixture.

First is the aura of awe. At first it was assumed this was taken from the Gloria Aquilla, but in actuality it was passed onto the Aquilla from a previous version of the Griffons, who have now reaquired it. Simply seeing a Griffon is enough to strike both intense terror and fascination into even the bravest heart, something they use to their great advantage.

Second, is command over the sky, for in their wake tornadoes roar and lightning strikes. Regis Griffons descend like thunderclaps, using incredibly potent fulmancy and aeromancy to overwhelm and disorient their foes, while augmenting their already extraordinary flight capacity to new extremes.

However, these two are old abilities held by previous versions of the Griffon. What is entirely new and makes them even more impressive is an attempt by the World to tap into the idea that they are the King of Beasts. It seems through study of the Kroot’s shaping, the World has replicated it (at least to an extent.) When a Griffon defeats another creature and sets about devouring it, the first thing it will always eat is its heart. Depending on the creature consumed, the Griffon will undergo a change, but it will never grow weaker, only ascending in potency.

This does seem to have its limits, for as a Griffon grows stronger, the ability to prompt a change becomes more limited. Seemingly greater feats are required in order for a change to occur, so a Griffon must hunt ever stronger prey to demonstrate their right to kingship and dominion.

In terms of temperament the Griffons are “prideful.” They believe greatly in their own superiority and power so are unwilling to back down from fights, even against unfavourable odds (rare as those may be). However, the unfortunate side of this is that they are expected to die once again in the coming incursion.

It is likely the World knows this and has designed them with that in mind, in hopes that they might help do their part to stem the tide. Their power is extraordinary, but not very sustainable (they certainly suffer from the same problems of age as the Therondy Dragons). It is likely they are one of numerous creations, spawned for strength against the coming cataclysm, but are not something that can be maintained as practical for longer.

Instead the World seems to be hoping that it can create one final species of Griffon, the 38th, to be the very last one.

**Kaboomatic Krocasaurs:** Large crocodilian beasts which have begun appearing in the Everglades. Despite their bulk, ranging in size from warhound to reaver, they are primarily ambush predators, who sink themselves deep into the soil or swamp, aiding themselves with natural camouflage until prey large enough for them to take notice comes near and they strike with incredibly strong jaws.

Strangely, these beings are almost a mishmash of various other Avernite crocodilian creatures. They are bipedal in a manner akin to the Kroxigor of the Lizardmen, have strength much more readily associated with the Dread Saurian than anything else, have the chameleonic abilities of the camocroc and possess something akin to a much more weakened form of animancy possessed by Duat's infamous Ammut crocodiles.

They have a form of animancy that allows them to sense souls and also rip those souls out of weaker bodies with a roar, along with a mild entropic field similar to the Hrud but only working on contact .

They're animalistic in intellect, but its theorized that they could be given weapons.