Gumiho

Content note. This entry describes feeding by eating living creatures, including the deepest form of it, which consumes a soul and always kills. It is confined to The taking.

Overview

Gumiho are fox shapeshifters whose range grows by what they eat.

They shift natively between fox, human and every point between, the same way kitsune and jorōgumo do. All of it is genuine shifting, and no one of those shapes is truer than the rest. What belongs to the gumiho alone is that the range keeps growing: a gumiho who eats a living creature can wear its shape afterwards, and how much of it they ate settles how much they come away with.

They were born on this plane, and like the other magical species that originated here they now live within the Veil.

Gender is individual, not a species trait. The tradition’s near-universal she does not carry over.

Physical traits

The native body is vulpine, and it runs the whole distance from fox to human with every point between available and equally settled. Build, size and colouring vary as widely as they do in any other people.

Tail count belongs to the individual and measures nothing. A gumiho may carry one tail, or nine, or any number in between, and where a kitsune’s count is a reading of their power, a gumiho’s is simply how many tails they have.

The taking

A gumiho takes form and power by eating, and there are three depths to it. What they come away with follows directly from how much of the creature they consumed.

A little buys the shape. A few mouthfuls of flesh will do, comfortably survivable for whoever provided them, and afterwards the gumiho can wear that creature’s form at will. The abilities that went with it stay behind, and the form itself wears off in time — how much time depends on how much was taken and on the gumiho holding it.

A great deal more brings the abilities along with the shape. This is survivable too, and it is a serious thing to survive. Whatever the creature could do, the gumiho can do while they hold the form. Both fade the way the shape alone fades, on a longer clock.

All of it — much of the flesh and the whole of the soul — makes the two permanent. The form and its abilities enter their range for good and never leave it again. This kills, every time, and there is no careful version of it.

Everything taken at the deepest level accumulates. A gumiho’s permanent range is the record of what they have consumed entirely, and they move through it at will, holding any part of it for as long as they like.

The likeness is theirs to choose. They can wear the exact face, voice and markings of the individual the form came from, closely enough to pass with people who knew them, or wear the kind rather than the person — the species and its abilities, built and coloured as their own. Which of the two they wear is decided fresh each time.

Feeding

Gumiho have to feed this way to live, and the depths a creature walks away from meet the need in full. A gumiho who has never taken anything permanently has been eating the whole time.

The permanent taking sits on top of a need already answered. It is a decision, and what any gumiho makes of it is entirely their own.

Magic

The species fixes the native shifting and the taking, and the two are one thing — a single extra force, older and stranger than the ordinary structure of magic, in the way kitsune shifting and soul-stealing are.

Everything else is individual. Whatever a gumiho is tied to magically beyond the taking belongs to them alone.

Ageing

Both native forms grow and then settle. The human form runs to roughly the human age of twenty-five and stops there; the fox form grows into adulthood and stops as well.

After that a gumiho simply keeps going. They do not die of old age.

Lineage

Gumiho can interbreed with kitsune, with foxes and with vulperin. Foxes and vulperin cannot cross with one another, and gumiho cross with both.

Shared instincts

Gumiho share the vulpine body, the native shifting, the appetite and the taking. That is the list.

They do not share a temperament. What a gumiho eats, how deep they go, and whether they ever consume anything fully are choices made one at a time by the person making them, and the species pushes toward none of it.

Where the name comes from

Gumiho (구미호) is Korean, from the Sino-Korean 九尾狐 — nine-tail fox. The same three characters give the Chinese huli jing its nine-tailed form and the Japanese kyūbi no kitsune its name. In the Korean tradition a gumiho is a fox that survives a thousand years, acquires the power to change shape, and takes the form of a beautiful woman in order to reach men and eat their livers or their hearts. Some tellings hand her the yeowu guseul (여우구슬), a fox bead passed mouth to mouth, drawing knowledge and energy out of whoever she kisses. Others set her a condition — a hundred days without human flesh, or a hundred days with a human keeping her secret — after which she becomes human herself.

What we take is the fox, the shapeshifting, and eating as the road to power. The thousand-year transformation, the bead, the hundred days, the woman preying on men and the malevolence the tradition is unusually firm about are all left where they were found.

Field notes

Individual colouring, build, tail count, which forms a gumiho carries permanently and whatever magic they hold beyond the taking belong on each member’s own page.