Ullagnaw
I heard the Ullagnaw before I understood that hearing it was the mistake. It keeps to the resonant places -- the storm drains under Neepsend, the tiled outflow below the Rivelin dams, the long culverts where the murk pools and a dropped coin rings for a full second before it dies. There is scant body to point at, just a thickening in the dark that answers sound, and until you make a sound it is only dark.
It sleeps. A footfall wakes it, or a cough, or a boot scraping wet brick. Once roused it fixes on the source and comes, and it does not stop coming. I have tested this. I went still -- properly still, the stillness you learn from the scratcher -- and the note under everything only softened. It did not leave. Whatever the Ullagnaw takes it takes at its own pace, and going quiet after the fact buys you minutes, not escape. Silence slows the erosion. It never halts it.
The drain is not to your body. It is to the murk carried in you -- the part The Nascenti read and the hive mind files, the soul-weight that makes you a person the murk recognises. Standing near a roused Ullagnaw you feel it as a note in the teeth and a pressure behind the eyes, and under both of those the sensation of being slowly tuned down. Nothing hurts. You simply have less of yourself each minute, and what goes does not come back. I have known men walk out of the Rivelin culverts intact in every way you could measure and hollow in every way you could not.
Nobody recovers a corpse, because there is no corpse. Driven off, the Ullagnaw leaves one batch of murk-salt cooling on the brick and nothing else. Cup it while it is fresh and it rings, faintly, as though the sound it took were still inside looking for the way out. I suspect it is less an animal than a standing wave in the murk that has learned, over Dunlockslyn knows how long, to feed on whatever disturbs it -- a cousin to the murk wraith and the Syncarid, though neither of those needs a sound to find you. Iron dampens it; the metal seems to foul whatever it resonates through. A lit snough torch wards it for one round and no more. By the second the murk has saturated the flame, and the flame is just light.
Field note: do not sing in the culverts. If one has already fixed on you, going silent will slow the drain but it will not send the thing back -- carry iron, keep moving toward open ground, and accept that you will leave lighter than you came.
| Type | Listener |
| HP | 7 |
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