Onetoe
The first onetoe I saw was standing in a field off the Bradfield Dale road, doing nothing in particular, and I took it for a horse that had wandered from a paddock further up the valley. It is horse-shaped in the way that something built from the same general idea as a horse, but assembled by someone who had only ever had a horse described to them, is horse-shaped. Get close enough to count and you will find the single hoof on each leg is not a hoof at all. It does not divide. It is one piece. The tracks it leaves are a straight punched line in the mud, not a hoofprint's oval, and the fields it favours stay pocked with them for years after it has moved on.
Onetoes stand in fields and watch the road. That is most of what they do, for as long as you are not on their mind. They do not graze in any way I have been able to confirm. When something passes that interests them, they do not react the way a horse reacts to a stranger -- no ears back, no shifting weight, no snort. They simply start considering it, and the considering can go on for longer than seems reasonable for an animal that size.
They do not chase. This is the part that gets people. An onetoe that has decided you are worth its attention will follow at whatever pace you are moving, matching you zone for zone, field for field, never closing the gap and never falling behind either. Every round you spend anywhere near one, you feel the weight of being looked at -- properly, physically felt, like standing too close to something enormous in a lift. Fail to shake that feeling and it costs you. It also jumps drystone walls clean, without a run-up and without warning, so do not mistake one for cover.
I mention Van here because Van does not, as a rule, write things down twice. Three pages of notes on the onetoe exist, and Van crossed out most of them. What survived to the end of the last page is a single word, underlined once: classified. It is not a word from his usual register -- Van doesn't file things, he either remembers them or he doesn't -- so its being there at all has stayed with me longer than the rest of the page did. Whatever an onetoe decides about you, once it has finished deciding, it acts on it in a way Van apparently did not want on paper. A redfront tagging you on the same stretch of road brings one onto it faster than waiting to be noticed the ordinary way.
Field note: it will not run you down. It will simply still be there, at the same distance, for as long as it takes to decide. Decide something back before it does.
| Type | Lurker |
| HP | 7 |
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