snakegay:

more info on “king worms”

they are parasites that lay their eggs in water and infect humans and other apes. unlike many other parasites, the human body is not a food source and is instead protection and a tool for the worms. the young use a zombified body as a shelter while they grow and molt, while the adults fully integrate the body into their anatomy. all vital organs are stored in the human’s ribcage, and the only certain way to kill the king worm is to destroy its ribcage (otherwise they can regenerate basically their whole body to some extent)

the females are aggressive, active hunters, often colorful for display purposes. they will both hunt and scavenge. the males are slow, shy creatures that live in deep bodies of water and typically scavenge for food. while the human component of the female’s body remains very much apparent for its entire lifespan, in the males the body is absorbed almost entirely, the bones of the limbs providing sturdy structures it uses to walk along the bottoms of lakes and rivers. 

while the females have been widely known and hunted for centuries as the “king worm”, no connection was made to the little known, evasive and docile scavenger often known as the “muckwinder”. while the ovaries of the female could easily be found in dissection, for centuries it was assumed due to the apparent lack of male specimens that they also possessed sperm organs and were a single sex species. it was only discovered that the muckwinder was the male king worm when a young one, human body still plainly visible, got caught up in a mill and basically ruined everybody’s day.

due to the ghastly nature of how they parasitize and their specialization of humans and primates, they have been hunted to near extinction. the female’s wings were long considered near vestigial display features (as they can only provide very short bursts of flight) but centuries of hunting have unwittingly selected for smaller, faster, and much more flight capable females. they can live for around 70 years, and travel great distances to stay away from humans until they need to reproduce. these factors have helped the species persist in spite of their near-destruction