Burrowworms
by OneEyedZealHraathkhild trolls may be both vigorous and cunning, but their gem-imbued intelligence is of a sort that doesn’t blend well at all with structured plans, rote work or repetition. Given any choice at all, a Hraathkhild troll will almost always choose to innovate, act on impulse or shake things up–which is not great for the large projects and repetitive chores that go into building and maintaining a civilization. It’s no surprise that the Hraathkhildr have investigated many different alternatives to simply doing the boring rote work themselves. One of the most successful was the breeding and cultivation of the monstrous insects known as ‘burrowworms’.
Despite the name, ‘burrowworm’ can refer to any of several types of creature–annelids, but also enormous beetles, locusts, centipedes, wasps, and more. Each has its own preferred usage, whether helping to dig new tunnels, till and fertilize soil in fungus farms, lift and transport raw materials, provide muscle power to simple engines, or guard key locations and deter trespassers. They are ‘tame’ only to the extent that their extremely limited intelligences allow for; the typical burrowworm handler delights in some degree of disobedience from their charges, and in correcting it with unsubtle force.
Many different strains of burrowworm have been bred over the centuries, not all of them as successful as the others. Some of the rejects were released into abandoned tunnels, on the assumption that they’d crawl into an isolated cavern and starve to death; this has not always proven correct. There are also unproven rumors that some strains of burrowworm have been bred that were all too successful; the adult specimens culled by their creators at great cost, but not before salvaging pupae that were preserved in magical stasis, as a doomsday weapon to unleash against an outside enemy or to turn the tide in a civil war. Any such pupae would be very carefully hidden, and even more carefully guarded.
One of the most valued products of burrowworms is ‘burrowworm silk’, spun from the cocoons of doommoth larvae. It has exactly the sort of properties one might expect of a kind of silk made by an insect whose diet is not mulberry pulp but instead granite sands: it is dense, drab, scratchy, brittle, and very very tough. The cultivation of burrowworm silk is not especially common in the Hraathreach, as doommoth larvae are not especially easy to raise, and adult doommoths are extraordinarily dangerous ambush hunters. Currently, only four families are approved by the Hra’ath to produce burrowworm silk, and all of them do so under conditions of fiendishly paranoid security, lest they be sabotaged by their rivals.