Backflit
Ask two people round the Hinge's edge which came first, the bat or the word, and you'll get two different answers, both delivered with total confidence. Backflit is what the old hands call the crossing itself, the manoeuvre a return trip through the Hinge is meant to make: out, round, and back facing the way you came. The creature does the same thing with its whole body, on a loop, every few seconds, for no reason I've ever pinned down beyond that it apparently works for it. I've watched them at murkfall over roof voids from Middlewood right out to where the streets stop being sure of themselves and the Hinge proper starts, and it's the same trick every time. Fly one way. Snap round mid-wingbeat. Land facing where you just came from.
Its eyes are decorative. I don't say that to be unkind - I've had one fly a dead straight line past my face in full dark and clip a moth off my shoulder without so much as brushing my ear, and its eyes never once tracked either of us. What it's reading is sound, all of it, constantly: wingbeats, footfall, the creak a slate makes right before it lets go, the low hum a psycmask visor puts out that most of us have stopped noticing, which says less about a backflit's hearing than about how thoroughly a mask trains you to stop listening to your own head. It builds a picture of a room out of echo the way I'd build one out of a glance, and it does it fast enough that watching a backflit hunt feels like watching someone read a page over your shoulder that you can't see yourself.
The trouble starts if you're carrying something that talks back. A psycmask idling near a roost puts out a low signal that isn't meant for anyone, just background chatter off the visor, and a backflit reads that chatter as a rival colony announcing territory. What follows isn't an attack so much as a full scramble: every backflit in the roof void comes off the rafters at once, aimed at the mask rather than the person wearing it, which is a distinction that stops mattering once there's forty of them loose in a stairwell built for one. Whistling under a roost does something similar on a smaller scale. Don't do that either.
They roost in numbers, always in dead space: loft voids, collapsed stairwells, the backs of chimney breasts nobody's fired up since the boiler went. They leave in a single wave at murkfall that sounds like a round of applause starting and then being told off halfway through. Set that against a yellow-wagtail, which hunts alone and lures its dinner in with light rather than reading it in on sound. Both count as listeners in the trade sense of the word, but a wagtail wants you to notice it, and a backflit very much doesn't want you to notice it's already noticed you. Where the two overlap, which happens more than either species would probably like out toward the Wisewood, the wagtails tend to lose the argument, and there's usually a scatter of yellow tail-feathers under the eaves the next morning to prove it.
Field note: if you're carrying a psycmask through backflit country, mute it before you reach the roost, not after you hear the first wingbeat. By the time you can hear one, the whole roof is already awake.
| Type | Listener |
| HP | 2 |
Sign-up to see the Foked Stat blocks
Free eBooks & Games
