Hellsborough Exposed

Hunting animals are an institution among The Xin, who keep Dyapnids in much the way humans turned ripperthroats into barkers, and I am not convinced either species came out of that arrangement better off. What makes a dyapnid worth the trouble is that it is a denizen of the third kind: not of the hex, not engineered by anybody, simply something evolution threw up in the wild that happens to have access to the hive mind. Packs that never found a xin master are still out there marauding The Dark Peak in numbers, and those ones answer to nobody.

Something came up out of the trees behind Worral with a wing a foot and a half long, shrieked like a banshee, and was gone before I could get a proper look: white with brown speckling, far too big for a hoverwing, the wrong colouring for a ripperwing, and hunting rather than scavenging, which rules out everything sensible. I went back and stared at that spot for hours and saw nothing further, which did wonders for my confidence in my own sanity. Call it the giant raptor of Worral for now; there must be other witnesses, and I would very much like to hear from one.