Wisewood Reaper

I first encountered the Wisewood Reaper near the gosava tree grove on the western edge of the Wisewood, where the murk pools knee-deep between roots. It was sitting with its back against a blackened trunk, attempting to scratch its own face off with a piece of flint. The murk around it was still in a way I hadn't seen before — not pooled, not drifting, but held, as though it had been asked to wait. It looked up when I approached. It said: "I have been doing this for eleven years and it doesn't work." Then it offered me a sip from a clay bottle that smelled of rockcrust and something underripe. I declined. It shrugged and went back to the flint.

The Reaper has the look of a hob — boggart heritage is the most likely explanation, though whether it emerged from the murk as boggarts do, or was made through some nascenti process nobody will confirm. Some say it carries residue of the murkwraith plague; the hollowed eyes and the stillness are consistent with that. What distinguishes it from a standard boggart is the self-directed malice. It does not haunt a location to frighten others. It haunts itself. The fly agaric caps it keeps in a leather pouch, the bottles of alcohol stashed in the roots of the gosava tree, the rockcrust residue ground into its palms — these are not recreational. It is attempting to die. It has been attempting this for a long time and has not succeeded. The fly agaric caps in its pouch are years old by my estimate; they have not decayed.

The danger is not obvious at first. The Wisewood Reaper does not pursue. It does not threaten. In fact, if you stay long enough, it will attempt to explain why your life has meaning. It does this in a flat, thorough voice, citing examples. The examples are uniformly bleak. The logic is airtight and the conclusion — that existence is preferable to non-existence — arrives wrapped in so many layers of despair that by the time it finishes, you will have forgotten what it was trying to argue. I have spoken to three people who encountered it and walked away intact. All three said the same thing: at some point during the conversation they began asking it to cognivise them. They don't know when they started asking. It cognivises willingly. The personality and lifeforce it strips don't go anywhere useful.

I haven't been able to establish whether the Reaper was ever a distinct creature or just a boggart that encountered something it couldn't process. The murkwraith plague theory would explain the compulsive self-harm and the inability to die — murkwraith infection typically makes the host difficult to kill and the living of it worse. What it believes about its own origins, it hasn't said clearly. It once told me it was made for something and then not used. I did not ask what.

Field note: Do not stay long enough for it to start making arguments. One sentence from the Wisewood Reaper is a curiosity. A paragraph is a risk. The full address takes approximately forty minutes and I have not met anyone who sat through it and came back with all of themselves.

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