| “ | The worm that walks has come for us all... | „ |
| ~ A reference to the Slaugth carved into a bulkhead by an unknown victim |
The Slaugth are minor recurring antagonists in the Warhammer 40,000 franchise. They are an enigmatic, ancient, corpse-eating xeno species that terrorized the Calixis Sector long before the rise of humanity, turning human worlds against themselves to give them an opening to invade.
Slaugth were notably featured in the Dark Heresy RPG series, detailed across its rulebooks and related publications.
Biology[]
Slaugth are tall, immortal humanoid beings, reaching up to 3 meters in height, each appearing to be made of hundreds of maggot-like creatures fused into a single being and covered in necrotic mucus. Whether these are all connected physically or separate entities in some sort of collective hivemind is unclear, but Slaugth can rearrange the maggots that comprise their bodies in order to stretch, reform, and regenerate their bodies at will, rendering them impervious to all but the most extreme forms of damage. Additionally, Slaugth can generate and secrete molecular acids and flesh-eating bacteria to liquefy organic victims or melt through metal.
Slaugth are carrion-eaters, and in spite of possessing an addictive hunger for the corpses of sapient life, they are extremely intelligent beings, their minds being immune to the prying eyes of psykers. They are able to absorb memories of victims by eating their brains, the brains of the recently deceased being the most ideal for this task, and eating brain matter gives Slaugth a rush of narcotic pleasure.
History[]
The Slaugth, presumably native to the Hazeroth Abyss of the Calixis Sector of the Milky Way, have blighted that region for an unknown amount of time, long before the Imperium of Man. Believed to be impossibly ancient, they seem to have been in conflict with humanity since the Age of Strife, when humanity's golden age was shattered by a series of galactic cataclysms that led to the later formation of the Imperium.
As humans became the most abundant species in the galaxy, the Slaugth turned to humans as their primary prey, for the Slaugth had an insatiable appetite for the corpses of sapient life, an obsession that their alien minds could manage without overriding their terrifying intellect. The Slaugth would enter the fringes of human space with mysterious black vessels, slaughtering the personnel of isolated outposts or lost shipping vessels, leaving behind either no bodies or horrifically mutilated remains. The Slaugth also displayed a biotechnological capability and mastery of physics that surpassed humanity, and even other advanced species like the Eldar, enabling the Slaugth to create biomechanical military constructs and weapons that could instantly disintegrate tanks and men alike, along with crafts that could cross space without using the Warp. Their destructive power combined with their unnerving appearance made humans suspect them to be daemonic creatures of some sort, always vanishing back to the abyss as quickly as they arrived.
In the late 30th millennium, the Imperium of Man had launched the Great Crusade across the stars to reclaim the lost human worlds and recreate humanity's golden age. During this expansion, the Imperium fought three waves of Rangda, who appeared to have been an agent or creation of the Slaugth- Rangda were described as possessing "Slaugth murder-minds", and Slaugth were sometimes sighted in the wake of Rangdan assaults, feasting on the dead humans left behind. However, the Slaugth survived the presumed destruction of the Rangda, simply retreating back to the Calixis Sector after the Third Rangdan Xenocide. Slaugth were noted to possess at least three distinct societal groups: Principals, the apparent rulers of the species; Destructors, Slaugth soldiers capable of taking on human forms for infiltration; and Intendents, who are equivalent to field officers for Slaugth forces.
Over the next 10,000 years, as the Imperium broke down into an authoritarian theocracy following the great betrayal of the Horus Heresy, the Slaugth invaded frontier worlds across the Segmentum Obscurus. Using their shapeshifting and technology, Slaugth would infiltrate human worlds and work over generations, inciting civil wars on planets to leave the worlds open to invasion, where they would consume everyone they found. While the greater Imperium dismissed some of these stories as tall tales spun by Rogue Traders, the Inquisition knew the truth of the Slaugth, although they could not discern what the true final goal of the Slaugth was, whether it was simply getting food or something far more sinister. However, the Slaugth never risked full-scale war against the Imperium, knowing that while their bodies and weapons were superior to what humanity possessed, the sheer amount of Imperial forces would surely crush them in a direct conflict, making the Slaugth stick to their tactics of long-term infiltration and sabotage, always working in the shadows through networks of agents and deceit, manipulating their victims into orchestrating their own downfall.
During the Cleansing of Vigil, Slaugth were forced into open confrontation with Astartes, better known as Space Marines, of the Storm Wardens Chapter, where the Slaugth managed to provoke the Space Marines out of cover by taking advantage of the jagged, tightly-packed terrain, using their heavy weapons and warrior biotech constructs to vaporize the power armor and bio-engineered body of the Astartes, but despite great losses, the Storm Wardens were able to clear the Slaugth threat from Vigil.
Elsewhere, the Slaugth plotted to one day sweep through the Calixis Sector and consume all life within, sparking civil wars and anarchy among the humans in the sector through means as simple as trading their advanced technology to humans, allowing human greed to tear apart once-cohesive political organizations and trade syndicates in a mad dash to secure the alien technologies. The Slaugth continued to work over centuries, willing to remain patient and work their way up to toppling the major Imperial institutions in the Calixis Sector, such as the Ecclesiarchy and Adeptus Administratum presence. However, at some point, a Slaugth Intendent known as Recusant succumbed to his hunger and broke away from the other Slaugth, forming his own cabal of biotech constructs and human collaborators from the Slaugth-manipulated Amarantine Syndicate to pursue his own nefarious goals.
