Moth Imp

When something within an empty manor grows restless, small imps of the night come round it in numbers, on broad and dusty wings. A sign of the trouble, say the Wardens of the Quiet Ground, who count them; not the trouble itself.

It is told from outside, as the country sees it. Some houses in the belt are kept empty by custom, and on certain nights, before such a manor, people passing on the road see lights going about the upper windows and the chimneys. Nearer, they are not lights. They are little grey bodies on dusty, moth-like wings a man’s two spread hands across, with thin faces and small hands clinging to the stone. The road they ignore. Round the house they gather, by the dozen on the worst nights, and settle wherever the house is coldest. One carter who stopped to watch speaks of wings against the glass, inside a room no one had entered for forty years. Along that road the households close their shutters, not against the imps, but against whatever it is that has brought them.

Nobody explains it better than the Wardens of the Quiet Ground, a lay order keeping the vigil of Saint Cuthbert, whose work is to walk bounds, renew marks and keep watch on places past curing. Their teaching is that a haunt is the place and the presence in it, taken together, and is not a demon. The moth imps are another thing. They come to a haunt that has grown restless, the wardens say, as moths come to a lamp, and how many come is a fair gauge of how restless the house now is; to kill them leaves the house no quieter. Some priests hold otherwise: that the creatures feed upon the disturbance, worsen it, and ought on that account to be put down before anything else. Pay the Black Lantern Brethren, who put down troubled powers for a fee, and they will clear the imps. The wardens would have the money laid out on walking the ground instead.

Ground that is walked is known, runs the wardens’ doctrine, and known ground does not go bad unnoticed. Count the moths, they tell a household. A few of a summer night mean little. A house drawing more each month than the month before is a house where something is changing, and help should be sent for while the count is still small. Least regarded and cheapest of the orders, the wardens say of themselves that most of what the other orders are summoned to could have been prevented had the wardens been properly paid.

As witnesses describe it

Small, on huge and dusty moth’s wings, it flits and settles about the walls and windows of a deserted manor. Its body under the broad soft wings is slight and grey, and it is drawn to whatever pale, strange light moves within the house.