longleg
A hare. Except it isn't, not really, and the longer you look at it the more you understand that.
The longleg stands at the edge of things — the tree line where the murk thins, the broken wall where two territories meet, the place where the bluebell carpet stops and the elder root begins. It is always at a boundary. It is always watching you from that boundary. It has been there longer than you have been in the wood, and it will be there after you leave, and the particular quality of its stillness makes you feel this in a way that is difficult to put words to.
Its legs are wrong. Not grotesquely — nothing here is grotesque in the way the off-world imagines grotesque. They are simply longer than they should be, and jointed in a way that allows it to move with a silence that a creature of that size should not possess. When it runs, it doesn't bound. It flows. Low and fast and deliberate, like water finding a drain.
The eyes are what stay with you. Large, amber, with a horizontal pupil that tracks you even when the head doesn't turn. There is recognition in those eyes — not the recognition of a creature that has identified prey, but of something that has identified you specifically. That knows something about you. That is deciding whether that something matters.
Longlegs are wardens in the original sense: they hold territory. Not aggressively. They do not attack from ambition or hunger. They attack when you are in a place where you should not be, and they have determined that you know it. The distinction is finer than it sounds — a lost crosslander in the wrong valley will be watched and followed and eventually herded back. A crosslander who takes something that was not theirs to take will find the longleg at their heel, and it will not stop.
They nest in old root systems and abandoned structures. They have no interest in the hive mind and the hive mind has no record of them. The nascenti consider them a minor nuisance and have not committed resources to their study. This is a mistake.
Field note: do not make eye contact at the boundary. It is not a threat display. It is something else, and I have not determined what. — P.R.
| Type | Warden |
| HP | 4 |
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