Wadsley Common has a stone circle, and the stone circle has a Bracken Man — thorn-bodied, ash-legged, coal-eyed — documented in an old poem that predates anyone currently alive. It emerges from the circle. It goes back. What it does in between is not recorded, which I find, on reflection, more alarming than what is.
View full editionHellsborough Exposed — bestiary-legends
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Documented three specimens patrolling Stanage edge — same route, same stones, never varying by more than a second per circuit over six hours of observation, the gritstone plates on their lower legs having worn grooves into the rock that exactly match their stride. A gritstrike does not hunt; it occupies, and if you are on its path when it arrives, it walks through where you are standing. Step aside when you hear scree shifting in rhythm — it is not interested in you, you are simply in the way.
View full editionSomewhere above the source of the Don, where the Dark Peak gets seriously inhospitable, something very large moves through the wetland murk. Witnesses report striped flanks, a low-slung shoulder mass, a silence so absolute it reads as deliberate. Most compare it to a descendant of Dinofelis — a prehistoric felid between a leopard and a lion — though the contingent who claim it barks, once, twice, and then a third time, say that anyone who doesn't reach cover before that third bark dies of the fear itself.
View full editionLoxley-Kraken: believed to dwell under the bridge at Hellsborough corner — that most liminal of places where the crossroads, the river, and the bridge occupy the same space simultaneously. It takes passersby from the street above, drowns them in the Loxley river, stores the bodies until decomposed, and sucks the meat from the bones, which wash downriver to the confluence of the Dun and, some believe, all the way to the Ripperthroat mountains where they are met by Dunlockslyn. This is logged in the HiveMind under "cryptids of the murk." I have not crossed that bridge at murkneet since.
View full editionDown in the dark pool beneath the Hellsborough Hole road bridge, the Loxley Kraken hunted rats, then cats, then dogs, then things she found more interesting. Van Hallam's solution — riding a river whale into her lair and driving the Skewer of Dunlockslyn through her single real eye — is documented in enough sources that I have stopped questioning it. It explains the smell.
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