Flutterby
Two things get called flutterbys round here, and it took me an embarrassing while to work out I was tracking both as if they were one animal. The Decorated is a butterfly -- the kind of thing you'd stop to photograph anywhere else. The Horned is a moth, and considerably less interested in having its photograph taken.
Decorated flutterbys are what you'll see first: patterns too symmetrical to be accidental, wingspans that flicker between colours depending on the angle you're stood at, mostly harmless if you keep your distance and don't try to touch the wing dust. Touch it anyway and it will still be flaking off your fingers at murkfall, a faint cold-blue itch that has nothing to do with any allergy I've been able to name. Horned flutterbys you mostly hear before you see -- a low, dry clatter, like something running a fingernail down a wall in the dark, three fields over and getting closer.
It's the Horned variety that hunts. The proboscis is longer than the body and it does not sip. A horned flutterby will land, uncoil, and go looking for a vein with the patience of something that has never once been in a hurry, because it has never once needed to be. You will not feel the landing. You will feel the third or fourth minute, once it has settled in The Xin ride the largest of the horned line as steeds -- they call the breed the Mentiloth, and a fully grown one is the size of a carthorse with none of a carthorse's manners. What I have not worked out is whether the Xin tamed something that already hunted like this, or whether riding one for enough generations is what taught it the patience in the first place.
Field note: if you hear the clatter and can't place the direction, stop moving entirely. Horned flutterbys track motion first and body heat a distant second.
| Type | Hunter |
| HP | 1 |
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