Barbaris

Background
The Barbaris System consists of three planets with only one being habitable in any way, shape or form. The furthermost planet is a large gas giant many times the size of Terra's Jupiter, surrounded by a cluster of moons that orbits the gas giant with such force that they are perpetually locked in calamitous seismic destruction. Similarly is the closest planet to the system's baleful sun inhospitable to human life - a world of molten stone and acidic rain. The very land-masses themselves that swims within the corrosive seas are mercurial and formless in nature. However, within the system's habitable zone, sits the planet Barbaris Secundae, a seemingly barren rock of shifting black sand deserts and worn, stony peaks. Upon the surface of the planet, there is naught to suggest any life exists whatsoever upon its dark surface, but looks are often deceiving, and there is an obvious marker of human contact. A crashed wreck of an Imperial cruiser upon the slopes of a sand worn mountain. Geothermic scans reveal a molten core, and the planet's mass and density is of a much lower quantity than the planet's size initially leads one to believe.

Barbaris is a hostile world at best, and certain doom at worse. Battered year round by violent winds exceeding over three hundred kilometres an hour, to be caught on the surface during such a gale is certain death, for along with the winds come the whipping storms of deadly black sand. So violent is this barrage of crystalline fragments, that is is akin to the fiercest of fragmentation explosions. Terminator armour and even Tank chassis proffers little protection from its remorseless onslaught, even if the gale wouldn't blow the unfortunate vehicle away like a tumbleweed. Nothing lives upon the surface of Salvaxes. Nothing ever could.

The world below is a very different story.

The half natural, half excavated tunnels that burrow beneath the surface of Barbaris are a hive of life, much of it as inimical to human life as the billowing winds above. Great ground boring wyrms writhe through the earth, boring as many new tunnels as they do destroy old ones as their great bodies crash through walls and bring down the ceilings of massive caverns. Bio-luminescent flora fill the otherwise lightless caves and caverns, their pale light often the only means by which to see in the pitch black tunnels. Feeding upon such plant life are any myriad of large insectoid creatures, resembling anything from oversized beetles and ants, to creatures from some sort of nightmare. Arthropodic beasts many meters long crawl through the darkness, wicked barbed stings or powerful, chitinous jaws dripping with toxins arming their large, dangerous and highly aggressive frames. Worse still are those creatures above them in the food chain, those beasts within the depths that actually hunt and feed upon the flesh of the tunnels inhabitants.

Tunnel Louse
To off-worlders, the name would be construed as misleading, alluding to perhaps a parasite common to the dark tunnels and caverns, that some unfortunate passer-by may contract and suffer irritation from. The truth is less so irritating and mildly more horrifying. Tunnel Louse is a catch all term for the foot long beetle like aliens that live within the tunnel systems, eating the bio-luminescent plant matter that grows periodically along the tunnel walls. Although small by Barbaris standards, the Tunnel Louse are no less a threat to passers by. While the beetles are only aggressive if provoked, they possess a pair of powerful, chitinous claws akin to a crustacean of ancient Terra. While primarily used for grasping and and scraping plant matter off walls, the claws make for strong defensive weapons, added to by the creatures thick chitinous plating. Despite these dangers however, the beast is a staple food amongst the people of Barbaris, as for all its protection, it is still the least dangerous creature in the tunnels, and its flesh, while no exactly delicious, is packed with high volumes of nutrients and minerals, as well as the standard protein.

Shivverback
Shivverbacks are again a catch all term for the various species of larger herbivores that inhabit the tunnels. Larger than Tunnel Louse by a significant degree, and far more aggressive, the Shivverbacks are avoided whenever possible, for unlike the Louse, their meat is not only unpalatable, but toxic, to humans at least. Armed with large rending jaws, the Shivverbacks get their name from the unsettling, quivering way in which they move their bodies, the long, segmented back plates rippling with every wave of their many legged steps. While a single bite is more than enough to tear open a mans chest, they have evolved to protect themselves from the larger predators of the tunnels, and produce a neurotoxin that, although will only slow down and make sluggish the mighty barbarosi predators, will paralyse a man in minutes from even a small bite, and without medical treatment, stop his heart.

Granite Men
The Granite men, or simply Granites, are tall, bulky insectoids with large, powerful shoulders and armoured backs. Possessed of four large arms and a half dozen stout legs, they appear as bizarre arthropodic centaurs, and act in much the same way. Herd animals by nature, they form family groups of a half dozen females and a single, larger Male, identifiable by the large spines that protrude from their back armour. These herds will migrate habitually, and will simply crush and consume those creatures that get in their way. They breed and spread by laying eggs in a location and then moving on, so as not to contaminate the genepool with inbreeding. As many as a dozen eggs per female will be laid, but few will survive to adulthood. Juvenile Granites are highly aggressive to even their own kind, and spend much of their young lives fighting one another, whether they are male or female, driving them apart from one another in an effort to survive. As they reach maturity, changes in their bio-chemistry alter their behaviour somewhat. Females will become drawn to other mature males thanks to pheromones released during this coming of age. Similarly will the males cease to be aggressive to females and protect them as part of their "brood". Rival males however, will still fight on sight for the right to a hunting ground and any females the two have amassed, with the winner of the fight to the death claiming the defeated foes females as his own.

Shriekers
Shriekers are large, spider like creatures that are perhaps the most horrific of all Barbaris' predators, for they are known to keep their victims alive for days, weeks, or even months at a time. Their large chitinous lower bodies are possessed of a good dozen long, powerful segmented legs, each ending in a large bony point. These legs are used for transportation, combat and moulding the mucous like slime that they produce and build their homes from. This however is only half of the horror that is a Shrieker, for while their lower bodies are very much bestial, their upper halves are all too humanoid. Their upper bodies mimicking the shape of a human, but much larger, they possess two humanoid arms that end in nimble, clawed hands, and a half dozen other appendages similar to their legs, that sprout from their upper bodies "back". Their heads and faces are a freakish combination of insect and humanoid skull, with large, bony jaws and a pair of beady, black eyes, large chitinous crests sitting above them, giving them a regal, if horrific appearance.

They are viciously intelligent and can formulate plans and hunting tactics that bely their terrifying appearance, and are adept at picking apart hunting parties one by one, stealing away a living victim into the darkness and paralysing it with a numbing agent, before returning for more prey. The origin of their name lies in their disturbing and uncanny ability to mimic the sounds of other Barbaris creatures, often cries of pain or distress in order to lure their prey into a carefully laid trap. It has adapted to the human settlers, and learnt to mimic human screams and pleas, making the Shrieker the most chilling and terrible of all the Barbaris predators. Taking its victims alive, the Shrieker will carry its prizes back to its den, a cave or chamber filled with hardened mucous walls and the remains of its previous, and still living prey. Precisely why the Shriekers keep their prey alive for such extended periods is not well understood, however, the anomaly is well documented.

The Shrieker will incarcerate its new acquisition within the mucous wall with a fresh layer of swiftly hardening goo, which will bind even a space marine to the wall of the creatures den. Once secured, the Shrieker will tend to its guests needs, forcing the remains of previous meals down the unfortunate victims throats and force feeding it a cloudy, oil like serum from a specialized organ/gland located in the creatures skull, delivered by an extendible oral tube. Exactly what this substance is, is not well known, but it would appear to be a powerful aphrodisiac, hallucinogenic and mutagen. Victims subjected to prolonged exposure lose not only the will to escape the Shriekers possession, but become willingly dependant upon it for survival and happiness. They become addicted to the strange serum and violently desperate for its effects, to the point where those rare individuals saved from such a fate, more often than not escape their rescuers to return to the Shrieker. Should their host have been killed in the rescue, they will go maniacally searching for another, desperate for the serums effects.

The mutagen aspect to the substance take its shape in changes to bodily chemistry and biology. One of the first effects is the secretion of a mucous similar to the creatures own from the eyes, fusing them shut, leaving the unfortunate victim blind to their ongoing horror. It will too send its victims glands into overdrive, producing an extreme excess of hormones and chemicals, even at the bodies own expense. Only once the victim is little more than a husk of liquid hormones and atrophied flesh, begging wordlessly for serum and the Shriekers attentions, will the beast release them from their existence, draining the potent cocktail of hormones and chemicals from the victim and finally allowing them to die. What is left of the victims body is then fed again to new victims, and cycle begins anew.

Stone Wurm
Stone Wurms are by far the largest of Barbaris subterranean fauna, measuring sometimes up to two kilometres in length, they dwarf all others and sit easily at the top of the food chain. Extremely territorial, they lay claim to vast swathes of ground, and battles between rivals can be titanic and apocalyptic for the inhabitants of the caves. Blind and deaf, they navigate by keen smell and earth vibrations, tunnelling through the earth at great speed, literally chewing their way through the crust, generating new tunnels and collapsing old ones with equal ease. While technically not a predator, they invariably end up consuming all manner of creature down their enormous gullet as they seek out potential threats, meaning other Stone Wurms. Stupid to the point of obliviousness, the Wurm will take any large ground movement or disturbance as a challenge to its territory, and in search of said opponent, will wreck and destroy anything in its path, invariably consuming anything it smells in an attempt to rid itself of the trespasser.