Hellsborough Exposed — beast-behaviour

Swiftwings sleep on the wing — never coming to rest on dry land, spending whole lives darting and dancing up in the heights where the murk runs thinner. Watch them long enough through a psycmask and you might find, as I did, that the drifting specks against the mist aren't murk at all but your own eyes starting to go. Hellsborough keeps no opticians worth the name, so a failing that's an afternoon's errand off-world becomes, here, another reason to brave The Hinge.

I mistook the first redfront I saw for an ordinary robin sat too still on a wall along the Bradfield Dale road, until I noticed the eye — it doesn't move the way a bird's should, more like a lens still deciding whether you're in focus. It doesn't feed, preen, or sing; it logs your pace, your direction, the fact that you exist on that stretch of road at that hour, and passes it along whatever the organic network's old lanes have carried since before the lanes were lanes. One on a wall is the toll for using the road — a second one further along means whatever noticed you the first time has already acted on it.

Of everything in the wisewood, the Lonik is the only creature not actively trying to kill you — a distinction that means far less than it ought to, since a harmless thing makes the forest no safer, only stranger. It does not hide so much as stop, becoming part of whatever it happens to be standing beside; you hear the soft chewing before you see anything, and if you turn too quickly there is nothing there at all. Follow that sound at murkrise if you must — but never, ever after murkfall.

curlbeaks hunt by echolocation and hivemind trace, locating a warm body through thirty metres of dense murk - then following the trace for hours without sound, patient in the way that things are patient when patience has never cost them anything. The bill hooks upward at the terminal tip for predatory reasons, not aerodynamic ones; the strike is silent, with no call before it, no warning movement, and the terminal hook is why the entry wound is rarely the problem. The call itself - a falling three-note phrase, hollow, slightly too long - is not a hunting signal. It is a territorial marker. If you hear it a second time from a different direction, it has repositioned around you; if you do not then hear a third call, assume optimal distance has been reached. I have heard the second call and then silence on four separate occasions and am still here, which I consider a statistically uncomfortable sample size.

ripperwings don't hunt — they monitor. By the time the silhouette registers in your peripheral vision, the animal has already completed reconnaissance and is in the assessment phase: you are not watching it circle, you are being circled. Primary feeding strategy is patience: two hours above the same patch of moorland is not indecision, it is better record-keeping than most field operatives I have encountered. Field note: if it circles twice, leave the area. It is not circling because it is lost.

Longlegs station themselves at the edge of things — the tree line, the broken wall, the place where one territory becomes another — and they have been there longer than you have, whatever you think you remember about arriving first. A hare, approximately, except the legs are jointed incorrectly and it moves low and fast like water finding a drain. The hive-mind has no record of them; the nascenti consider this a minor data gap, and I consider that a serious error of judgement.

Van's approach to taming Mentiloth was, by his account, not complicated: feed them, speak to them, do not strike them repeatedly in the head. The xin warriors whose method he was improving were, at the time, being periodically thrown off and killed; Van's mounts followed him about like a small barker pack and rubbed their great snouts against him in affection, and Pondisyke awarded him a gold anklet for transforming the horde's battle effectiveness in a single week.

Mentiloths are drawn to active thought — strong intention, strong emotion, strong concentration. Clearing your mind is the recommended tactic. This is harder than it sounds when something the size of a horse with an acid bite is flickering in and out of visibility two feet from your face.