Gabbleratchets come with two hazards, and the second is worse: hearing the pack without seeing them seeds a madness that does not improve, quiet and permanent, victims walking arms out and replicating something they cannot name. The first time they see you running, they take the soul - the body keeps working for a while, but the soul does not come back, and I have no clinical category for what is left.

Shad was a barker until a Dyapnid took his throat in a xin encampment on the edge of the Wisewood. Then the murk thickened, and he stood back up - larger, shaggier, eyes the colour of the moon - and went straight back to work. A barghest is a dead barker that will not stay dead: the bond holding it to the living is stronger than whatever is pulling it the other way. Bonded to you, one is a formidable ally; unbonded, it stands too still at riverbanks and graveyards at murkrise, and inflicts wounds that close on the surface but do not heal. Whatever it takes with it does not come back. The organic network catalogs everything in Hellsborough and has no category for these wounds - that detail is the one I find hardest to set aside.

A murk wraith doesn't pursue — it stands in whatever shadow is available, waits for eye contact, and asks one question. Nigel Hapworth the librarian had one ask him what he knew about dark matter at the hinge on Middlewood Road; he didn't answer, went to work, and was annihilated at The Hinge by Besd'y. His query on the hivemind is still pending.

Murk smells faintly of wet wool in the moments after a barghest reasserts itself — I have noted this three times now, found no naturalist able to explain it, and have stopped asking. Field note worth keeping: if something is matching your pace exactly through Hellsborough at murkneet, do not speed up, do not look back; if it is Shad, he is keeping watch; if it is not Shad, confirming you can see it changes the nature of the encounter considerably.

murk wraiths do not pursue and they are not predators in the conventional sense — a sighting alone, documented across multiple encounters in my records, is associated with impending misfortune, and eye contact compounds this considerably. Nigel Hapworth, the librarian at the Hellsborough terminus, made eye contact on Middlewood Road; he was annihilated at the hinge by the following Besd'y. His hivemind query is still pending. It will remain pending.

boggarts — or hobs, the terms are interchangeable — are location-specific supernatural presences associated with liminal places (riverbanks, caves, sharp bends in roads) and cannot be left behind. There is a documented case of a family loading their possessions onto a handcart to escape their household boggart quietly at night, only for the boggart to answer a passing neighbour's enquiry with "why, we're flittin'." They will perform household chores in exchange for a saucer of milk, making them, by Dark Peak standards, a relatively negotiable presence.

Gabbleratchets fly through the murk at night — phantom, human-headed, barking and whelping and announcing themselves with enough cacophony that you hear them well before they find you. Their din can induce what the locals call skriker: the victim loses all reason and wanders open-armed and staring, in the same attitude as the creatures themselves. Sophie Hinchcliffe heard them one evening leaving Farantees. She stopped under a tram shelter. She ran when she couldn't stand it any longer. Nobody saw her after that.