Somewhere on the western edge of the Wisewood, near the gosava tree grove, there is a creature that has been attempting to scratch its own face off with a piece of flint for eleven years and has not yet succeeded. boggart heritage is the likely explanation for the Wisewood Reaper — murkwraith plague the likelier one, given the hollow eyes, the stillness, and the fly agaric caps in its pouch that have not decayed in the years it has been carrying them. It does not pursue and does not threaten; what it does is attempt to explain, in a flat and thorough voice, why your life has meaning — citing examples uniformly bleak, arriving at a conclusion so wrapped in despair that by the time it finishes, you have forgotten what it was arguing. Three people I spoke to walked away intact, and all three said the same thing: at some point during the conversation they had started asking it to cognivise them, and they didn't know when they'd started asking. Van once told me it said it had been made for something and then not used — he did not ask what, and neither did I, and I consider that the most sensible decision either of us has ever made in the Wisewood.