Hellsborough Exposed

A rootwing is what happens when a pigeon gives up on looking like a pigeon in favour of never once looking up from a meal — bald-chested, moth-eaten, and constitutionally incapable of recognising "back off" as a concept that applies to anything its own size. Watch where they gather rather than what they eat: a dozen rootwings working one skip means the scran there is arriving faster than they can clear it, and that is rarely down to anything you want to meet.

Up on Wadsley Common sits a glade that will not hold still — find it at the wrong hour, from the wrong bearing off the white obelisk on Loxley Edge, and it simply is not there. Inside stands the Sentinel stone, held sacred by the Moor and Ley clans as the place you stand closest to dunlockslyn, and the closeness does not leave you the way it found you: ground I know like the back of my hand turned strange under my feet, and the only company I trusted afterward was Shad and an ever-watchful redfront.