barghest

Shad was, by any measure, a barker — loyal, half-wild, fond of Van's boots — right up until a Dyapnid took his throat out in an xin encampment on the edge of the Wisewood. That should have been the end of it. Then the murk thickened in the room, and Shad stood back up: larger, shaggier, his eyes the colour of the moon and the same size, and went straight back to work on the dyapnid. The murk, I have since noted, smells faintly of wet wool in the moments after a barghest reasserts itself. I have not found a naturalist who can explain this. I have stopped asking.

A barghest is a dead barker that won't stay dead. The bond that holds it to the living — to its person, its place, its unfinished business — is stronger than whatever is pulling it the other way. They stay close, but not so close that you notice. A shuffle in the leaves. A sniff from a darkened entry. The feeling of something just past the edge of your vision, gone by the time you turn. They come when called. The ones with a living bond come when their name is used. The older ones, the ones whose bond has no living anchor, come for other reasons, and you do not always see them coming.

If the barghest is bonded to you — forged in extremis, in a place like the Wisewood where those bonds take properly — then you have an ally of considerable ferocity. Shad once cleared a room of hostile xin with the efficiency of a scythe through wheat, and I have more than once owed my safe passage through Hellsborough at murkneet to the sound of his snuffling behind me in the dark. The danger is the barghest that has no bond with you. These are the ones you see standing too still at the edge of a graveyard, or at the riverbank at murkrise. Sighting one is said to precede tragedy. I can confirm this reputation is not unearned. Some inflict wounds that close on the surface but don't heal — what they take with them does not come back. The organic network, which logs and indexes everything in Hellsborough, has no category for these wounds. This is the detail I find most alarming.

Barghests arise from dead barkers — worth noting, since barkers are, in Van's estimation, only recently domesticated from ripperthroat stock, and whatever was bred out of them comes back in death. They congregate at liminal places: rivers, graveyards, the murk wherever it pools deepest. They are most active at murkneet. They can change shape, or appear to — corvid, clovenfoot, a lean figure of great stature, a flame — and whether these are distinct forms or one creature seen at different degrees of having decided to be solid is something I haven't resolved. The gabbleratchet shares this territory — the newly dead, the liminal, the places where The Dark Peak stops caring whether you're alive or not — though barghests are, at their root, a human thing. The clowns of The Dark Peak pay them no attention. Van says this is because the barghest haunts a human world for human reasons. I find this comforting, on balance.

Field note: if something is walking behind you through Hellsborough at murkneet, matching your pace exactly, do not speed up. Do not look back. If it is Shad, he is keeping an eye on you. If it isn't Shad, turning around confirms you can see it, and that changes the nature of the encounter considerably.

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