Van maintains that every denizen of the Hex has a function — the Cryptobites are the garbage trucks, the Hexikids the street sweepers, the Syncarids the data infrastructure — right down the list, nothing wasted. I find this comforting in exactly the way that discovering your home city has a functioning waste management system would be comforting, if the city was also trying to eat you.

Van's instruction, filed on page forty-three of my second notebook and confirmed by his customary silence, reads: Do not follow the Lonik after murkfall. I have been standing above Malin Bridge for twenty minutes trying to work out exactly where the murkfall ended. The Lonik went left.

Local etymologists who've gone down that particular rabbit hole claim that 'Deepcar' derives from the Old Gaelic dobhar-cú — 'water-hound' — the mythic half-fish, half-dog creature said to guard bodies of water as portals to other worlds. This would explain a great deal about the confluence of the Don and the Little Don at Deepcar, which has always felt, to put it diplomatically, watched.

Mentiloth are the war steeds of the xin: moth-shaped, notoriously unstable, and possessed of a poisonous bite so reliable that their masters are considered more dangerous mounted than they would be simply walking. They are said to strike fear into most species without ever needing to take to the skies, which suggests that anyone present when they do take to the skies probably does not file a report.