Female Ixonid in heat, shedding her dense fur to allow the sexually parasitic males to attach themselves
Introduction
A seemingly primitive and devolved species of barely intelligent parasites, living in rickety, ramshackle howdah-cities built atop the backs of the immense megafauna they feed upon. They were once considered an artificial, uplifted species, given that they somehow inhabit several terraformed worlds spread across a volume of space lightyears across. But as various clients discovered, both ruthless aggressors that tried to exterminate them and humanitarians who only hoped to alter their abhorrent customs, the Ixonid are in fact an extremely advanced spacefaring civilisation, an A2 on the Owners' scale at the least. The true extent of their technology is unknown, but would-be colonisers and exploiters have found to their dismay that vast caches of advanced particle weaponry lie disassembled and buried just beneath the surface of their worlds, ready to be dug up in times of need. Bizarrely, inexplicably, Ixonid seem to travel across the interstellar gulf only to abandon their technology once they arrive, choosing the lives of stone age savages instead. Some kind of philosophical primitivism or nature worship is often theorised as an explanation. Others posit some kind of ecological catastrophe in their distant past, which left the Ixonid with an immutable aversion to advanced civilisation that has persisted even lightyears apart. Whatever the case, it remains a mystery, for the Ixonid are introverted creatures that desire little else than to perpetuate their static, ritualised culture. They have no wonder or awe for aliens, seem to think they have little to gain from them, and only rarely can be goaded into communication. Cultural exchange is all that seems to interest them, and very little appeals to Ixonid sensibilities, and why what does does, is always inscrutable.
Physiology
The Ixonid is a fat, furry sac of lumpen flesh, its waxy skin constantly exuding a sticky slime that coats its dense hair and allows it to cling to any surface. For the most part it is blind and sessile, latched on to its host by the powerful suction of the funnel-like mouth on its 'tail-end', which when it is mobile lies enclosed by a sphincter-like covering.
The other end terminates in a trio of clenched flaps, hardened and protective, which bloom like a grotesque flower to unleash a web of prehensile tentacles. These are used either to fend off predators that stray too close to its sessile form, or to escape if they cannot. These 'tentacles' are in fact the larval form of the creature, sheltered within its body for their safety, and once they grow too large to fit inside the mother's enclosure they bud off and become free-living. Only the eye-stalks are part of the body proper.
Beyond this the body is little more than an oversized stomach, capable of bloating with blood to almost twice the Ixonid's natural size, and a brain-analogue, a ring of neural tissue at the wider, flap-end of the creature, where it is relatively protected by overlapping folds of calloused skin.
The heavily dimorphic male is little more than a buzzing sac of genitals with wings, which exists to attach itself to the female, feed off her blood and produce an endless stream of fertilising gametes. Younger, more virile males will eventually rip them out and take their place.
