Larva

Larvae, also called soul larvae, were what remained of the souls of mortals corrupted by evil that were unclaimed by fiends via contract or otherwise. They were trapped in the Shadowfell or Hades to be captured by predators such as night hags, rakshasas or liches in order to be consumed or sold.

Living mortals could also be transformed into larvae by prolonged exposure to the plane of Hades.

Description
Soul larvae were long, yellow, worm-like monsters whose squirming bodies appeared both sickly and fat. They oozed an odorous, viscous slime from their bodies that coated the ground they wriggled across like a slug's trail, producing a noise like a vomiting dog as they moved. The actual body of a soul larva was fluid, almost liquid in texture, and the foul stench of their sticky secretions never seemed to fade. Rather than the head of a worm, soul larva had a much more disturbing feature, a grotesquely disformed head with facial features reminiscent of their former mortal form.

Behavior
Soul larvae were wretched, miserable creatures stripped of the intelligence and personality they had in life apart from faint, leftover recollections. Despite their greatly reduced mental faculties they could still understand the languages they knew in life, and scholars that studied them believed them to possess their own crude but indecipherable language of instinctual body motions.

Those in the Gray Wastes were generally lacking in ambition, typically lying down in the emotionless wasteland in massive piles, barely moving, if not at all, unless provoked somehow. In their practically motionless hordes, some occasionally wormed their way to the top while others sank to the bottom, sometimes biting each other or those bothering them. Larvae from other planes were known to struggle more in an effort to survive, such as ones from the Shadowfell that attempted to escape.

Abilities
Although pitifully weak, the fangs of soul larvae were still dangerous and caused those bitten by them to bleed profusely. They also harbored a deadly, degenerative disease that could result in painful skin rotting for those bitten. Three weeks into the illness, a victim would need to lie completely still to avoid further health risks but death would still come after a month with only cure disease magic as a viable cure.

Combat
Only when compelled to by a more powerful entity would larva of the Gray Wastes swarm their assigned foes. Otherwise, they generally left others alone even when a mortal was in their midst, although it was possible to drown in a sea of the wriggling worms when they were packed closely enough together, an experience that often proved extremely traumatizing.