A curlbeak call — falling three notes, hollow, spaced slightly too far apart — is not a hunting signal. It is a territorial marker. First call: you are in range. Second call from a different direction: it has repositioned around you. No third call means optimal distance has been reached, and you should not wait for the third call before drawing conclusions. I have experienced the no-third-call stage on four separate occasions and am still here. I consider this a statistically uncomfortable sample size and have not sought to expand it.

Wadsley Common has older legends than most people think necessary. Witnesses described something emerging from the centre of a stone circle: legs of bandy ash, arms of twisted briar, head formed of gorse, eyes the orange of burning coals. Whether someone built the circle to contain it, or it built the circle itself, the historical record declines to say, which is in keeping with how the historical record tends to behave around here.

milting are disciples of dunlockslyn and may be what your off-world predecessors were trying to describe when they wrote down the word "angel," which should be taken as evidence of either poor observation or very limited options. Their memory is hereditary, passed through lineage. When you speak to a milting about history, you are speaking to a record that goes back sixty-six million years, and most of them are insufferable about it.

Crosslanders new to Hellsborough report the same thing about Jean's shop on Holme Lane: the amount paid is always correct, the transaction is real, but on the way home you try to reconstruct the coins you used and find they are not available to memory. Jean has been running the shop long enough to have heard this report several hundred times and considers it unremarkable. I use her reaction as a calibration tool.