Ichneumen

Vespiform demons who cloak themselves in human shape. Cultured, perverse and deeply cruel. Masters of deception who manipulate minds with delicate pheromones.

In its natural form, the ichneumon has a humanoid body and a wasp's head. Few will ever see this form, which is constantly cloaked in illusion. This is not a magical glamour nor a distortion of light. It is caused by a pheromone that operates beyond the perceptual level; no matter what you really see, the pheromone says human and your mind fills in the gaps.

The ichneumen have other scents as well. They know far more about human neurochemistry than humans know themselves. They can drive a mind into abject rage or wrap it in a blanket of pure maternal love. They use these powers to enthrall victims, scapegoat enemies, or escape when cornered.

Being parasites they have no world-sense of their own, and so take on human culture with affected irony. They like to think of humans as cattle, but at the same time they are perversely obsessed with us. Their lairs are shrines to obscure human traditions, decadent art, dead religions.

They breed by laying eggs in the human psyche. The larval stage of the ichneumon is a notional being waiting to grow into physical form. It begins as a tiny sting on the back of your neck. The next day you won't even remember it. Then, growing over weeks and months, you have intrusive thoughts about wasps. You cannot stop picturing them - it is both pleasant and painful. Slowly the thoughts spread to every part of your brain - memories, self-image, visual processing. At last you die from an encephalic fever that ends with the wasp-child bursting from your forehead. It eats your corpse and wears your identity.

How can the ichneumen be detected, let alone stopped? Their worst foe is simply a human with a defective sense of smell. Such people are unaffected by the ichneumon's pheromones and sees them as they truly are. Ichneumen go to great lengths to eliminate such people from the population.

Mammals are just as susceptible to the ichneumen's powers as humans, but other orders of life see through their guise and abhor them. Birds, insects and reptiles will flee or sometimes attack the ichneumon. Demon hunters often carry small snakes in jars for this purpose.