The Vrukhari - Furry Piranha

THE VRUKHARI — THE THINGS THAT GUARD
Ask any Japanese soldier who has served a season at Sath'Koral on the Haarkuuni jungle continent of Tharuun what he fears on that continent, and he will not name the crystal blades of the Ssulith. He will lower his voice and speak of the Shag-Devils. Barely three feet at the shoulder, barrel-bodied and near neckless, they come cone-shaped and low to the ground on four clawed digits, with a jaw that hinges wide enough to bite clean through a man. A pack numbers a dozen or a score or more. The pack does not roar as it comes. It screams from every quarter at once until a man turns outward and stops moving - and then it goes utterly silent, and the silence is the last thing he hears.
Fire will hold them; formed volleys will hold them; broken ground and a stationary column will not. But the deeper unease belongs to the surveyors, not the soldiers. The Vrukhari do not merely inhabit the deep interior - they hold it, the same tangled gorges, generation upon generation, with the fixed and patient jealousy of a sentry who has forgotten what he was set to guard. Territorial is an understatement. The Ssulith, who have hunted and been hunted by them across their whole tenure on that continent, call them Kuurathi - “that which was here before us." They are not wrong.
What is mysterious though is that what was assumed to be a semi-intelligent species native to Tharuun has been found in remote location on several other worlds - and typically in proximity to Great Ones ruins.
Whatever the Vrukhari are, they were keeping their posts in the ruins long before any thinking creature now living arrived to be watched by them. One wonders, in the small hours at Sath'Koral, exactly what it is they are still waiting for.

Sculptor: Thanh Cong Ngyuen