Excerpt from “Taxonomic Deviations and Funereal Symbioses of the Barrow-Kin”
Archivist-Researcher Yun Brabaan of Verulia

Tydan’s Folly — often referred to among pestilential scholars as The Roommate’s Lament or The Burrowman’s Testament — stands as one of the more vivid and tragic documents produced during the early crypt-naturalist surveys of Su’Aldrith.

The work consists primarily of Sothal Tydan’s field notes, detailing his cautious but meticulous observations of the Barrow-Wights — those massive blind gravecrickets whose subterranean ecology has since passed into extinction.

Tydan’s surviving notes record with clinical precision the grim process by which these creatures seized living hosts: paralyzing them with injected fluids, pinning them within soil hollows, and implanting clusters of sterile eggs within their still-living flesh.

Notably, Tydan was observing these behaviors in another victim, believed to have been a fellow surveyor, whose identity remains unconfirmed.

Tragically, before Tydan could properly withdraw from the region, he himself fell prey to the very same fate.

When finally discovered some weeks later, Tydan was found in an advanced state of decay: pinned beneath the carcass of a collapsed Barrow-Wight, his body riddled with the necrotic remains of nonviable eggs. His condition — conscious but irretrievably rotted — necessitated a swift mercy killing by the recovery party.

Tydan’s Folly, as preserved, therefore comprises not only his initial field observations, but also a formal autopsy report appended after his death, documenting the gravecricket’s failed viviculture attempts upon his remains.

The document remains of singular interest to Verulian scholars: both for its early taxonomy of the Barrow-Wight life cycle, and for the rare glimpse it provides into the biological collapse of a dying parasite species — one that, in its desperation, sacrificed both itself and its hosts to a doomed and sterile future.