Van's approach to unidentified objects is to handle them immediately and establish terms. By the time I had finished categorising the blinking steel sphere as a probable bomb, Van had already picked it up, looked it in the eyes, named it Sinclair, and sent it back to the bitterfinger with a standing order for rockcrust delivery. Sinclair was a gutterball — Made class, messenger function — and I confirmed this against the hivemind afterwards, less because I doubted Van and more because I needed somewhere to put the information.

Syncarids do not consume the mind — what they consume is the programme running inside it: the accumulated decisions and self-preservation instincts that constitute a person rather than merely a body. At zero Murk, you will walk toward one without understanding that you are doing so, which does not feel like compulsion. It feels like a very good idea.

Shad has no physiological need for food — Van confirmed this directly, noting that an undead barghest is past the point at which the body requires fuel — but Shad eats voraciously regardless. Van's theory is muscle memory: the spirit and habit of the living creature continuing past its own death. The anecdote that produced this theory was Van describing the moment Shad appeared from the dark moorland and stood over the body of the thing that had been killing him, at which point Van, recounting the story in a bar forty years later, had a tear in his eye.

A Glossopian diplomat Van encountered at a moorland inn told him Pandora was dead — a captured green warrior had confirmed she escaped from the swamp with an unknown creature not of The Dark Peak, only to fall into Strinxin hands; her Mentiloth had been found wandering alone on the moor with evidence of a battle nearby. Van reasoned, quickly for him, that none of this actually confirmed she was dead. This did not stop him from needing to move significantly faster.