Gnawmard
The first gnawmard I ever killed, I killed by accident, standing on it in the murkneet outside a barn near Loxley. It bit me on the way down -- through the boot, which I did not think was possible -- and I carried the mark for a fortnight, a bruise that took its time turning colours it had no business turning. I want to be clear that I did nothing to provoke it beyond existing in its warren at the wrong moment. Gnawmards do not require provocation. They arrive at hostility on their own schedule, usually before you've said hello.
They live in colonies of anywhere from two to eight, sharing warrens dug into field boundaries and drystone gaps, or the crawl space under anything nobody has checked in years. A lone gnawmard is a nuisance: quick and low, foul-tempered besides, given to test-biting anything that comes within reach before deciding whether to commit. A colony is worse by more than the sum of its members -- they work each other up, and every gnawmard beyond the first makes the whole business faster and angrier than the one before it.
Get bitten by a single gnawmard and you'll swear at it and forget the thing existed by Toid'y, once you've washed the wound. Get bitten by five, and you're bleeding in five places while the sixth is still deciding where to go next. They do not coordinate, exactly -- they don't need to. Proximity to their own kind seems to be enough to raise the temperature on all of them at once, the way one dog barking sets off a street.
What makes them worth watching, rather than just avoiding, is what they do when the murk starts to rise. A gnawmard colony reads it before I can, before most gauges the survey teams carry, and they leave -- fast, all together, and in the same direction, ears flat, not looking back, the way you'd move if the ground itself had opinions about you being on it. I have used a gnawmard warren as an early warning system more than once. When a colony goes quiet, or worse, empties out entirely, that is not a good sign for whoever is still standing where they used to be.
Field note: if you find an active warren, walk around it, not through it -- and if you find an empty one that was occupied last murkneet, do not walk toward wherever they went.
| Type | Hunter |
| HP | 1 |
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