In the festering heart of the Punishment Fields, where caged prisoners moaned into the sinking mud and carrion crows gorged on fresh suffering, a lone centipede fed not on meat—but on death’s leftovers. It slithered through ribcages and jawbones, drinking the essence of rot, hatred, and despair that oozed from the bones of the tortured.

Like many cursed creatures spawned from that blighted place, it changed.

Its segments thickened with bile-hardened shell.

Its mandibles dripped venom brewed from marrow and misery.

Soon, it was no longer a mere insect—it stood the size of a man.

But the Punishment Fields already had a master.

The Corpse Crow, swollen with the resentment of the damned and bloated by the flesh of its own kind, ruled the skies and the dead alike. Its flocks blanketed the air in a storm of talons and shrieks. It had seen the centipede's rise—and saw it as competition.

What followed was not a battle of beasts, but of dominance and despair.

The Earthshaker Centipede tried to carve out a burrow, to claim its share of the field's corpses. But each attempt was met with a storm of crows—flocks tearing at its eyes, beaks hammering into its flesh, and undead talons dragging it into open air. The Corpse Crow mocked it, sending wave after wave of enslaved dead to swarm and bleed it.

Wounded and outnumbered, the centipede fled, burrowing deep into the loam, leaving behind the grave-soaked field it once called home. But the Corpse Crow did not pursue. It had proven its rule. The centipede was banished.

That should have been the end.

But exile became evolution.

Driven by starvation and hatred, the centipede tunneled far from the fields and into wild places: cadaver-dense battlefields, rotting beast carcasses, and eventually into regions untouched by the Corpse Crow’s shadow. There, it fed not on corpses—but on the living.

First came cadell, the malformed cattle of cursed lowlands. Their twisted bones cracked like branches between its jaws.

Then it moved on to beasts of the wild—dire wolves, bog-trolls, and wandering hill giants.

But still, the hunger remained.

Until it stumbled into the ancient southern wetlands—where the world had forgotten that dinosaurs still ruled.

The centipede did not hesitate. It sank venomous fangs into thunder-lizards, coiled around towering longnecks, and devoured nests of razor-beaked young. With each kill, it grew. With each molt, it shed more of what it once was.

Now, it no longer fears the Corpse Crow.

It does not hide from the sky.

It shakes the earth when it moves.

And though it rarely returns to the Punishment Fields, some say it still remembers the crow's shadow.

And one day, when it is large enough…

It will return.