Brumhuld

Folk living near ancient barrows tell of Brumhuld as less a single animal than a line of guardians; when a hill-fort's barrow is first consecrated, one of the local badgers grows and settles into the mound’s care until it dies and another takes its place. The Wardens of Kaegr, a rural brotherhood of gravekeepers, maintain shrines of milk and root beneath the cairns to appease Brumhuld and avoid its wrath. Scholars such as Archivist Lerrun of Hesk have proposed that the phenomenon is a geomantic effect — loam soaked with ancestral rites warps certain burrowers into larger, more single-minded forms. Raiding cults that dig into these barrows report an identical response: the great badger appears, maddened with scent and bone, and rips aside the whole intruding party rather than leaving its charge unmolested.

Envision a badger enlarged to the size of a two-wheeled cart: low-slung and barrel-chested, broad shoulders tapering to a flattened rump. Its fur is coarse and matted with soil and lichen, black and chalk-white stripes running from muzzle to neck broken by streaks of gray. The head is squat with a blunt, root-stained snout and yellow, almost humanlike eyes set deep beneath a ridged brow. Its forepaws are enormous, with thick curved claws darkened by rust and clay; sand and tiny bones cling to the pads. Scars—old gouges and healed punctures—pock the flanks, and tufts of moss sometimes sprout along its spine where the earth has bonded to its hide. Scale reference: roughly as tall as a cart axle (about 4–5 feet at the shoulder) and longer nose-to-tail than a human is tall; pose it half-turned, mid-guard, with a low hill barrow and a stone standing behind it.