Ashpeep
Any small bird gets called a peep round Hellsborough, the way any small dog gets called a terrier. The ashpeep is what you'd get if you asked for an ash tit and the murk filled the order. Grey-brown, palm-sized, and near enough weightless -- you notice one only by the gap it leaves in your eyeline a half-second after it has already moved, the way a word leaves a gap in a sentence when the mask has redacted it.
They travel in loose scatters of six or seven, never a tight flock, and they do not sing. What they do is flick -- from wall to gutter to washing line to your shoulder and gone again -- fast enough that you register the after-image rather than the bird. Watch a hedge for an hour and you will swear nothing lives in it. Look away and something will have been through your pockets.
The danger with an ashpeep is not the bird. It is the thing you do in response to the bird. Something moves at the edge of your vision, you turn to look, and in the half-second you are not watching the path something else -- something with actual weight to it -- has closed the distance. Ashpeeps are not clever, but they are reliable, and in Hellsborough reliable is worth more than clever to whatever else is hunting alongside them.
What they take is small and shiny: a button, a bootlace tag, a foil wrapper, a filling if you fall asleep with your mouth open near a nest. Nobody has found a nest. I suspect this is because ashpeeps do not build one so much as accumulate in a gap and call it home for a season.
Field note: if a peep startles near your feet on a Wisewood path, do not turn to watch it go. Watch the ground you were about to step on instead.
| Type | Blinker |
| HP | 1 |
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