Cryptobites are the psychic garbage collectors of Hellsborough — massive, slow, almost entirely unkillable, and engaged simultaneously inside and outside the dark net in a manner I have stopped trying to parse. If one has fixed its attention on you, something you have been through has left a residue it finds interesting. The field notes recommend staircases.

Van's approach to taming Mentiloth was, by his account, not complicated: feed them, speak to them, do not strike them repeatedly in the head. The xin warriors whose method he was improving were, at the time, being periodically thrown off and killed; Van's mounts followed him about like a small barker pack and rubbed their great snouts against him in affection, and Pondisyke awarded him a gold anklet for transforming the horde's battle effectiveness in a single week.

Pandora I — the clown woman from Van's early Dark Peak years, not to be confused with the Pandora in the bar who is a generation removed — relayed a cultural rule I have since found consistent: in The Dark Peak, no man lies; if he does not wish to speak the truth, he is silent. Van used this to establish trust with her early in his time among the xin. I have tested the rule against subsequent encounters and cannot find a counterexample, which I find either admirable or deeply unsettling depending on what the silence is covering.

A HiveMind direct message arrived from an address I had previously flagged as scum — unknown/unknown_location/000 — warning of danger and naming "the cult of the bitter finger: the crosslander-clown-xaexs alliance." Van, playing cribbage across the table, identified the sender as probably connected to a crosslander who had left the pub shortly before. I did not point out that the message contained exactly the information Van already had.