Forktail
A swallow, and if you've ever stood in a farmyard off-world watching them scythe low over a yard at dusk, you already know the shape: blue-black back, pale throat, a tail forked like a fishtail. A forktail does the same flight, just faster, and it does not stop at dusk the way an off-world swallow does.
They hunt on the wing, snapping midges and moth-flurries out of the air in turns too tight for the eye to track, and a forktail's whole life seems to happen up there -- feeding, courting, most of the sleeping, all of it at speed and altitude. I have watched one take a flutterby clean out of a stoop mid-hunt, which tells you something about the ranking of predators in that particular patch of sky.
They are not aggressive toward anything person-sized, and the danger, such as it is, isn't the bird. It's the flock. Forktails nest colonially under bridges and eaves in their hundreds, and a disturbed colony leaving the roof at once is a wall of wingbeats that will put you on your back on a narrow towpath before you've worked out what happened.
The murk doesn't seem to trouble them the way it troubles ground-dwelling things. A forktail will fly straight through a bank of it at full speed with no more hesitation than mist, which either means it can't see the murk or means the murk can't see it.
Field note: give a forktail roost a wide berth at murkfall, when the whole colony leaves at once. Watch from a doorway, not the open path underneath.
| Type | Blinker |
| HP | 2 |
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