Woad raiders come down from the Ripperthroat range in black Gruizers barely big enough for three, firing fungets before anyone on the ground has time to understand what is happening; the flesh hangs off their faces like candle wax in Fecunder, which is why the milting call them flesh'eads, and which I spent some time assuming was burns. Below the waist they are something other than human - a dense mass of tentacles that propels them at twice the speed of most creatures in The Dark Peak, combined with solid blades that Van Hallam, who is not easily impressed by combat, described as second to nowt. They call themselves the First Born of The Dark Peak, tracing their lineage to the fungai that colonised the world before anything else made a start; in their cosmology every nascenti, milting, clown and xin is a descended thing, lesser, partially made from them. Woad take prisoners and do not take them for ransom - no milting stolen by a raiding party has ever returned to describe what awaits. They tried to destroy a woad Gruizer once and spent a full murkmoon learning why that was the wrong choice.