BESTIARY

A thorn-prick of the deep grove given form. Where it passes, the briars remember the shape · it does not.

A grove-spirit who threads broken roots back into the earth. The wound it touches forgets itself, briefly.

A grove-bull crowned in living blossom, walking under skies that remember the auroras of older years. Its passing is taken as a blessing. It does not notice.

First of the familiars. Antlers crowned in protective runes; ribcage still glowing with the binding that could not contain it.

Slow guardian of the deep groves. Plants take root in its fur, and the Wyld grows where it walks.

Born of bog and thorn. Hunts patient, ambushes from the mist.

Beautiful and patient. Its scythes drink moonlight and pollen.

A small fae thing of leaf and leather wing. It hangs in the canopy where the fog gathers and listens to the heartbeat of whatever walks beneath it. The bite is tiny. The aim is not.

Each feather ends in a hooked thorn. It mantles its kills under a canopy of its own quills, and the kill stays where it falls. The grove takes the bones back without complaint.

A harvest-spirit that walked off the harvest. It carries a long curved blade of grown thorn-wood, and reaps anything that bleeds in straight rows.

Stag-antlered and grove-painted, it walks the edge between herd and hunter. The recurve is older than the trees it nests against; the arrows know where the heart is before the bow does.

Mossy-pelted, antler-horned bull-brute. It tends the long-rotted gardens of an older Conclave. The labrys is older than the gardens, and the blade has not been put down for any of the seasons.

A small green-stone watcher carved by no human hand. It perches on grove-edges and waits for movement · when it stoops, the talons land before the wings finish the dive.

A great gargoyle ages with its grove. The lichen is part of the joint now, the briars part of the shoulder. When it moves, it moves as a stand of trees moves · slowly, then everywhere.

Green-feathered, stag-horned, a forest's own predator. It ranges the canopy in slow circles and the canopy ranges with it · the leaves part for the dive and close behind the kill.

Hide painted in the green ochres of the deep grove, fox-skull on the shoulder. They keep no maps · they read the moss for which way the wind has been moving the wyld.

A green-shelled cloud the size of a small horse, made of wing and chitin and the smell of sap. The cloud has one mind · it has many opinions about the soft places on you.

A stag-lord whose antlers crown an entire grove. Where the Wyldstag is the first familiar, the Warden is the one the Wyldstag answers to. Few apprentices have stood in front of it twice.

Fae-skinned, crowned in late wildflowers. The line that follows her does so without quite remembering deciding to · she gathers the wounded behind her and the wounds, like wildflowers, slowly close.

Hound-shape green as wet bark, lichen smouldering along the spine where the heat from below has found it. It runs ahead of the pack and circles back to bite the slowest.

Horned plate-warrior with bark grown into the seams of the armour, an iron polearm rusted only where the rust serves the cut. It speaks once per fight and never to ask.

Mischief made flesh, hatched from the embers of dead pyres. Drawn to scorched ground.

Wings of cooling lava, shedding ash with every beat. Drawn to ruin and ritual fire.

Acolyte of the burning halls. Bears its faith as runes pulsing under the skin.

A war-steed loosed from a binding gone wrong. Storm and pyre walk with it; the chain lightning that arcs between its horns is the part of its grief that still answers to no one.

An ant from a colony that hatched in the heart of a pyre. Its plates remember the heat, and the heat remembers them. It does not retreat.

A pyromancer who could not stop. The flames learned her name and spoke it back · the spell, now, runs in both directions.

Sovereign of the cracked plains. Its mane is the same fire that hallowed the first forges.

Wings of charred parchment, eyes of sulphur. It nests in the chimneys of forgotten forges and dreams of the heat that made it. Where it passes, the air remembers being burned.

Crow shape, ember-veined, beak hot enough to char the dry. It flies the rim of every burning thing and leaves embers in its wake to keep the fire alive a little longer.

Forged into its own grip. The axe and the slayer are one bone-and-ember weld · it cannot put the weapon down because the weapon is its arm now. It does not seem to mind.

Flame-maned, hooves struck on stone leave a spark and a brand. It carries a brand-iron spear lit at the tip · close range or thrown, the wound is the same.

Coal-skinned, embers banked between the ribs. The smith-hammer it swings is its own lost forge condensed into a shape that hits things · every strike rings like a bell in a furnace.

Basalt-bodied with veins of cooling magma along the joints. It nests in the open mouths of forge-chimneys and dreams the heat that hatched it. The bite leaves a scorch the colour of fresh iron.

Basalt-and-magma, a furnace given a shape. Heat shimmers off the granite shoulders. The fist that comes down weighs the same as the building it left.

Flame-feathered, brass-beaked, the eyes the colour of forge-light. It nests on the shoulders of broken volcanoes and rides the heat-columns up like a pyre rising on its own breath.

Sun-baked, brand-faced. They carry a torch through the line as if the line was already on fire. By the time it answers, it is.

A swirl of ember-wasps, each one a coal with wings. The cloud writes circles in the air the colour of a forge cooling. The sting is hot first, then everywhere.

A flame-mantled bull twice the height of a Pyrelion, brass horns banded in cooling slag. It does not roar · it lets the heat do the speaking for it.

Burning-haired, ember-eyed. She brands the willing with a kiss that takes the hurt out of the next blow they take. The brand fades; the line remembers.

A long hound of slag and smelter-grit, the jaw red where the iron has not cooled. It does not eat what it kills · the heat does.

Plate the colour of cooling iron, the helm horned and slit-eyed, a forge-mark branded into the chestpiece by something older than the wearer. The polearm leaves a smoke trail.

Captain of the reaver-cells. The brand on the breastplate is the same brand the Pyrebrand wears, only smaller. The marshal earned it; the Pyrebrand burned it on.

Lean hunter of the long winter. Stalks where the aurora touches the snow.

Coiled in the deep ice. Older than the caverns it sleeps in.

A walking glacier. Patient. Patient. Then suddenly not.

A heartbeat in crystal. Drifts where the cold sings its name.

Storm-frost given wings. The blue lattice across its flight is older than memory; the lightning is what it does instead of speak.

An ice-mage frozen in the moment of casting. Her grip on the cold is permanent because her grip on anything else broke first.

It walked the long tundra in a time before names. The cold did not let it die · only forget. Now it remembers one thing, and the long matted wool hides what its ribs cannot.

A pale flake on the wing, fast as a thrown knife. It feeds on warm breath in the night. The bite is cold first, then absent · you know you were bitten only because you cannot feel the place.

Old enough that its plumage has glassed over with hoarfrost. It circles for as long as it takes. Patient predator · it knows that sooner or later the cold will do its work.

Glacier-armoured, two-handed, slow. The hammer it swings is cut from a single block of black ice that does not melt. Each strike rings like a bell from the bottom of a frozen lake.

Pale-grey coat, breath that hangs. It rides down from the high pass with a quiver of iced javelins · the throw lands cold first and absent second, like a Rimebat's bite scaled up.

Hoar-frosted hide, an ice-blade labrys cut from the same glacier the creature woke under. Slow to swing, slow to stop · two of either is one too many.

Glacier-rimed, wings glassed over with hoar. It lives at the lip of ice-cliffs where the wind has work to do; the dive is silent because the wing is stiff before the strike.

Glacier-bound, the body is half-submerged in slow ice that walks with it. Carbon-blue light lives in the cracks. A swing arrives with a temperature drop you feel before you see the arc.

White-frost feathered, talons of clear ice. It glides over the long winter's mirror-flats without sound · the only warning is the cold a half-breath before the talons.

Glacier-fur clad, axe-haft wrapped in sealskin. They fight slow because the cold is on their side · the longer the fight, the more theirs it becomes.

A drifting fog of crystalline mites, no bigger than a grain of glass. Where the fog passes, the warmth is taken first and the breath after that.

A white-bear king of the high pass, fur frosted into a crown the wind dressed slowly over centuries. It has won every fight it ever finished and remembers the ones it walked away from too.

Pale-blue, hoar-rimed, lips the colour of a deep lake. The kiss numbs · the wound the kiss covered will not bleed for a while, and the line uses the while.

Pale fur frosted to a glaze, breath that crackles before it reaches the air. The court keeps it on the high shaft because the heat below makes it slower.

The court's heavy in northern climates. Plate frosted to a mirror, polearm sheathed in a single sheath of ice that only breaks when the blade is committed to the strike.

Pale unicorn of the high storms, a horn of running blue lightning held above a mane the colour of fresh snow. The horn touches a wound and the wound does not remain. The horn touches a question and the question does not remain.

Pale winged stallion of the high storms, the horn of blue lightning lower-set than its cousin's · meant for the strike, not the mend. Its wings carry the air-pressure of a winter front, and a thunderclap leaves the cavern after the wings do.

A binding gone wrong. A name forgotten. A door left open.

Lord of a forgotten order. The vow outlasted the man.

A wisp where a traveller was lost. Its fire warms nothing.

A binding stitched a fox to its own ghost. The teeth remembered first. Orange ash trails the chest, violet dusk along the bones.

Light borrowed from the dead. The flame remembers no body but feeds the living all the same.

A skeleton drawn back into killer's posture. The bow is older than its bearer; the arrows older still. They never miss the same way twice.

Bound in linen and binding-rune, an old name given a new century. The bandages remember a face. The face does not.

Hound of the buried halls. Hunts what should not be exhumed.

Bone-frame wings strung with old rune-thread. It haunts barrow-mouths and reads the names of the buried in their breath. The names it knows, it whispers back at night.

Cathedral-bird, mourner-thing. It weighs the bone-coins from the eyes of the dead in its beak, and remembers the face of every grave it has watched.

Once a Conclave slayer. The wraps are still on its arms; the blade is still its old blade. Only the eyes have changed · they look through you to whatever you are trying to keep behind you.

Half a horse, half a barrow-walker. Its bow is strung with the gut of something the Conclave does not name; the arrows are bone, fletched with the feathers of birds that ate the dead.

Undead, patient. The horns are old and worn smooth at the tips by the heads it has gored down to bone. It does not run · the line breaks before it has to.

Carved by an old Conclave for the corners of a tomb. It still keeps the corners. Anything that does not belong in the corner gets removed by the corner.

The carved tomb-warden of a name everyone has forgotten. The Conclave stopped trying to read the worn inscription centuries ago. The colossus did not stop reading it.

Half-skeletal, mourning-bird, a griffin that flew the funerary route of an old Conclave so often that part of it never came back. The screech is what the bell wanted to be.

Tomb-paint across the face, bone-fetishes braided into the hair. They raid the funerary roads for what was meant to be left with the dead, and they leave with it.

Grave-flies in their thousands, buzzing in a column that holds its shape because the column wants something. The bite carries the breath of an old funeral the body can taste.

A lich-warrior of the deep crypts, the funerary armour now part of the body. The blade is older than the binding that holds the armour to the bones · neither has ever lost an edge.

Pale-grey, soft-spoken, drinks the grief out of the line so the line keeps fighting. The grief returns later · the line is grateful for later.

Hound that came up from the family vaults wearing the funeral wrappings of three earlier prides. The wrappings are not entirely empty.

Funerary plate, the helm's mouth-slit stitched shut, polearm bound in the hair of those who refused to be buried. It does not hurry.

A weaver of the wrong shape. The web is older than the room; the room was built around what would not move.

It does not know the room. It does not know the door. It knows the smell of warmth, and it walks toward it · always toward it.

Once a priest. The pestilence learned his name and kept it.

A faith devoured. Beneath the helm, only the rot speaks now.

Hatched from a tear in what was supposed to hold. It should not be here. It is here.

Three voices fused into one hymn. The hymn is wrong.

Once a temple bull, draped and worshipped. The howdah on its back held priests who fed it offerings · then held priests who became them. The runes around its tusks were meant to bind. They held for a while.

Wings of nothing. Eyes of the same. It does not nest · it appears, takes its bite, and is the wrong shape on the way out. The wound it leaves is the only proof it was ever there.

Iridescent black on black, an apex ambusher. It folds out of one shadow and into another, and the violet flash of its eyes is the only warning. There is rarely time.

The blade is not metal. It is the absence of the room around it, drawn into a shape that cuts. The slayer that wields it has agreed to forget its name in exchange for the edge.

Black-fleshed, eyes the wrong colour. The bow it carries does not need a string · it draws something, looses something, and the something arrives as a wound the body did not see opened.

The geometry of it is wrong. The horns curve in a direction that's neither up nor sideways. The hammer it brings down is not at first where you saw it lift, and the impact is at first where you were not standing.

Stone the colour of nothing. The wings should not be that thin and should not bear that weight, but the geometry is wrong in a way the Conclave decided not to record.

Impossibly large, impossibly carved. The angles do not add up to a thing that would stand on its own; it stands anyway. Where it puts its feet, the room is afterwards different.

Feathers of nothing, eyes of the same. The wing-beats are silent because the air does not entirely meet the wing. The dive is over before it begins.

Markings the eye does not entirely see, a cant in the language no one taught them. The Conclave has stopped trying to bargain · the warband is not from anywhere a bargain reaches.

Insects the wrong shape, in numbers the eye gives up counting. The cloud moves in a direction that is not entirely a direction. The wound is in a place that is not entirely a place.

It announces something the rest of the Conclave does not want announced. The robe is the colour of the announcement. The voice arrives at the listener before the figure does.

Beauty the wrong shape, drawing the wound out of the body and into a place the body cannot follow. The body recovers. The other place keeps what it has been given.

Fastest of the pack and the last to be looked at directly · the shape of it shifts at the edges of vision in a way that doesn't quite parse as a hound.

Plate seamed with a dark that wasn't there a moment ago and isn't there a moment later. The polearm is the only fixed thing about it.

The voice of the court in the upper halls · a tribune in plate grey as cold ash, who pronounces sentences the court does not feel obliged to explain. Few who heard the sentence have come back to repeat it.