gabbleratchets — gabriel ratchets, the flying dogs with the heads of men — are reckoned the most bitter of all Dunlockslyn's creatures: angels of evil, bloody scars on the face of D'divi. They take you off the street talons-first, four to a victim, two on each arm, and carry you screaming into the murknight — then suck the soul out through your eyes and leave the sockets staring.

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.

Call themselves the First Born of The Dark Peak, the Woad trace their lineage back to the fungi that colonised the world before anything else made a start, and they are defensive about it in the way that only an ancient and terrifying race can be. Their flesh hangs off their faces like candle wax left near a Fecunder. Van Hallam, not easily impressed by combat, described their feighting skills as second to nowt — and said it with some emotion, a century later.

gabbleratchets are phantom human-headed barkers that fly through the murk at night, producing a noise old accounts compare to a great number of whelps howling simultaneously — heard always, seen rarely, and reliably preceding death or disaster in records from both sides of the crossroads. Those who hear the full din at close quarters are said to run the risk of losing their reason entirely, spending the rest of their lives wandering with outstretched arms and staring eyes, in grim imitation of the beasts themselves. Hellsborough residents tend to dismiss this last part, which is itself a symptom I have documented.

Wadsley Common has older legends than most people think necessary. Witnesses described something emerging from the centre of a stone circle: legs of bandy ash, arms of twisted briar, head formed of gorse, eyes the orange of burning coals. Whether someone built the circle to contain it, or it built the circle itself, the historical record declines to say, which is in keeping with how the historical record tends to behave around here.