Stinger
A stinger was a wasp, yellow jacket variety, built like something meant to last. It was the former lord of The Dark Peak before anything walking it now had so much as a name for itself. They ruled here for the better part of thirty million years and by every account Milting will admit to keeping, they ruled it well, mostly, before they didn't. The species went extinct roughly thirty-two million years ago. I want that number to sit for a second, because it means every creature I've ever interviewed for this bestiary is describing a war it knows only from what got passed down.
I should not have an entry for something extinct thirty-two million years. I am writing one anyway, because this spring I watched one land on a fence post outside Malin Bridge, fold its wings, and sit there long enough for me to draw it before it noticed me looking and left.
Nobody in Hellsborough will discuss what that means out loud, and neither will I, in any detail, because the word for what it might mean is banned, and banned words tend to get the person who says them disappeared rather than corrected. I will say only that it was built exactly the way the old descriptions have it: gusting wings, a reusable sting the length of my hand, a carapace with the sheen of wet corrugated iron. It did not attack. It watched me the way you watch something whose ending you already know.
The exacid patrols have been thicker round Malin Bridge since, and the the organic network's chatter through that stretch has gone quiet in a way that isn't the same as absent. Draw your own conclusions. I am declining to draw mine in writing.
Field note: if you see a stinger, do not raise the alarm and do not mention what you saw to anyone wearing a psycmask. Write it down somewhere the hive mind can't read, and tell me in person.
| Type | Boss |
| HP | 9 |
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