The Whisperer (Lihash) is a psionic Dreadhar, one of the Darukin that are now most commonly found spilling through the Nexus Fractures. It belongs to the Nousshars, the brood of Adaàr'Kabat, the Shatterer of Minds, who turns their spawns against thought and memory. Among the psionic Darukin, it is the smallest and least dangerous.
Much of what I set down came to me secondhand, from Riftbreakers who kept their own grim ledgers of what they encountered, from the half-trustable muddled memories left by survivors, and from the old accounts of the Second Apocalypse, where these small entities earned their own share of a grim status. I have more than hearsay to draw on, however, for I rode out on several Riftbreaker interventions myself, and on two of those I watched Whisperers at their work, once with the doubt turned on my own mind. The rest I had from a short and guarded study of a lone specimen that a Riftbreaker company had cornered and penned, and I have set what I saw there against everything I was told.
A Whisperer has no legs, and it carries itself on the knot of tendrils that hangs beneath its body, hauling its small bulk over any surface that offers a hold. The body is a small, bulbous knot of packed lobes and folds, flushed pale magenta and soft to the look, no larger across than a curled child. Its whole surface is studded with eyes of uneven size, one broad eye set near the front and a scatter of lesser ones crowded around it, each holding a narrow slit for a pupil. Low on the front of the mass sits a small bare face of bone, a lipless, toothed mouth set in a permanent grin that has nothing to do with mirth.
Those tendrils are its limbs, and they take it where heavier things cannot follow. A Whisperer will creep along a floor, climb a sheer wall, and hang from a ceiling with its body inverted and its eyes turned down on the room below, holding to each at the same slow and deliberate crawl. The limbs are made for gripping and creeping, and they hold no force for a blow, so little about the creature is built to fight. The flesh is thin and the body is fragile, and a Whisperer that is cornered and seen has very little left to defend itself, which tells you at once that its strength was never meant to live in its body.
The Many Eyes
The eyes are the creature’s most useful feature, and the reason other Darukin send it on missions. Since they point in every direction at once, a Whisperer can watch an entire room without ever turning its body, and very little that moves around it goes unseen. Survivors have told me that they felt watched well before they spotted the creature itself, and that uneasy sense of being looked at is usually the earliest warning anyone gets that a Whisperer is near.
Disguise and Doubt
A Whisperer is good at two things: hiding itself and unsettling the minds of those around it. It can disguise its small body as something dull and unremarkable, a crate left in a corner, a low animal, a heap of rubble it likes to shelter in, and it will hold that disguise steady while it watches and listens. The illusion is convincing, though it is never perfect, and anyone who looks at it carefully and with suspicion will notice that something is off, some small wrongness in how the false object sits, or a shadow that does not fall where it should.
The second thing it does is what gave the creature its common name. A Whisperer gives off a faint psychic murmur that does no harm to the body and instead eats away at a person's certainty. Anyone who stays near one for a while begins to doubt what they have plainly seen, to distrust their own memory of a place, and to fall into petty arguments with their companions over details that should be obvious to everyone. This is a smaller, weaker form of what the whole Nousshar brood does to the mind, and even at the Whisperer’s scale, it is enough to leave a scouting party so tangled in confusion that it stalls completely before any real threat has even shown itself.
The accounts of the Second Apocalypse that I drew on show what a few of them can manage when their murmur is used with purpose. Being small and disguised, they could slip in among the Elegorian ranks engaged in open battle without being noticed, and there, they would settle their attention on a single soldier and quickly press doubt onto that one mind until it gave way. The soldier eventually faltered and came to a halt, lost in confusion, while the rest of the line carried on without noticing the gap that had opened. That was the moment the heavier Dreadhars waited for, and they poured into the opening to finish the kill. A single Whisperer is perfectly capable of sowing that doubt in one mind on its own, and the teams of two or three seen during the Second Apocalypse pressed a single soldier together only for the sake of speed, since a battle line in motion gives no time to wait on one slow mind.
The Scout of the Brood
Every Darukin is connected to the hive mind that runs down from the Daru'umai into all of their spawn, and the Whisperer is no exception, low as it sits. Its role in that shared mind is simply to go on ahead and observe. It moves at the front of a Nousshar advance, disguised and silent, and whatever its many eyes take in is passed back to the brood with no sound, no gesture, and no signal that an onlooker could ever detect. The Sentinel researchers confirmed this during the long wars, when they kept captured low Dreadhars separated in sealed chambers and still found them acting in perfect coordination, each one reacting to what the others encountered even though nothing measurable passed between them.
Within the psionic brood, the Whisperer is the most expendable one, sent out freely where a more valuable spawn would be wasted. The doubt it spreads serves the same purpose, since a place already full of confusion and mistrust is a place half-prepared for the heavier Nousshars that come after it.
Where It Appears
You will only come across a Whisperer where the Darukin have broken through, at an open Nexus Fracture or when Darukin platoons swarm in from the Nexus Points, and almost never by itself. It arrives ahead of a Nousshar incursion, scouting out a settlement, a holdfast, or a Riftbreaker line before the real attack begins. Once a Fracture has been sealed and its brood scattered or killed, the Whisperers do not stay around, since a lone one with no swarm to feed it and no progenitor behind it is a small and helpless thing that is soon tracked down and destroyed.
How to Deal With One
Trust your instruments, your companions, and your written notes before you trust whatever feels certain to you in the moment, because that certainty is exactly what a Whisperer sets out to ruin. If two of you agree on what you saw but some third detail keeps shifting around, or if a nagging doubt settles over a search for no reason you can identify, you should suspect that one of them is watching you. Examine carefully the things you would normally overlook, the spare crate, the animal that has not moved, the heap of stone that sits slightly wrong, and search the walls and the ceiling with the same care you give the floor, since a Whisperer clings to them without any trouble. The longer and more distrustfully you look, the more the disguise begins to fall apart.
Once you have found it, a Whisperer is no real test in a fight, since a single solid blow is usually enough to kill a creature so frail. The difficulty is always in finding it, and the greater danger by far is the brood it scouts for, which will never be far behind.