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Ravenous Collector — Description
Wars are not cheap, as they require souls, blood and flesh. Each battle calls for lives sacrificed, and each victory is bought through loss and suffering. For a war that has run for centuries, the amount paid to the reaper is untold. With such immense losses and countless souls destroyed, one cannot afford to lose the war. What would all this sacrifice mean, if it all came to nothing? So the fighting must go on. The soldiers must be sent and the armies must march forward. Flesh and blood must be collected to feed the machine, so the creatures down below must hunt.

The Mantle Bearers require bodies and souls to fuel their work, and they need a lot of them. It is true that the battlefield shall be littered with corpses after a victory, but it is still not enough. Progress on their experiments and developments cannot be slowed, as that would give the advantage to the Rough Skins, who have their own methods. So the Collectors are sent out, slithering their way across the benthic depths to find prey. Their flexible maws are not meant to crush or slice, merely made to swallow whole. Those it finds are sucked into its throat, and trapped within its back pods. While dead prisoners put up no fight, the developments call for living flesh, so they must be spared. The choking network within its hollow body subdues its prey nicely. Constricting tendrils that burrow through skin and hide, so that they can properly care for their prisoners. Slow streams of nutrients are fed directly into the body, so that the prisoners stay alive between drop offs. The tendrils can also strike the nerves of the prey, in case they decide to act up. All who are collected are taken back to the abyssal halls and aphotic temples, so that the scholars and shapers may continue their ways.

As the war wages for longer and longer, the range of the Collectors expands farther and farther. More fuel is needed for the war, so the world of light above must provide.

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Another creature involved in the abyssal wars, this one based on a hooded nudibranch. Aren't they adorable?