Spirit Stug

A great shining thing with eyes upon stalks, passing through a ruin while wolves attend it like hounds. In the country's telling it is the power of the ruin, and the wolves are its own.

The country tells it as a ruin's power, and holds the wolves of that ground to be its own; the name too is the country's, and no two hands write it alike. Under the full moon a vast wet shining thing is seen, a slug the size of a cart, colours sliding over its hide as oil slides upon water, two long stalks turning above the broken walls with an eye at the end of each; and about it grey wolves snarl at whatever comes. Those who live near avoid the ruin at full moon and shut their dogs in, and good ground though the land round it is, they graze none of it.

Before ever it reads a ruin, the march reads the ground lying round it, and the reading here is not hard. Where a mile of sound pasture stands about a ruin with no beast upon it, the district has made up its mind. No one within living memory has stripped anything from the place, and on its walls in summer there sits no crow. Put to the shepherds' three questions, does it breed true, does it keep its ground, can it be turned from the lambing, the wolves have given answers that sit ill with them: that the pack breeds true, and that it keeps its ground more exactly than any wolves of their acquaintance, not one yard beyond where the old wall ran. For wolf the bounty at Harrowgate stands at two shillings a head, and no man has claimed it on this pack.

Over this ground, as over every ground like it in the march, the orders take different roads. Treat with it, says the Concord, the order that makes agreements with powers, since a power answers; and the Concord's first inquiry is what was done there the year before, and what the ground did in reply. The Brethren of the Black Lantern would come and, if pressed, suppress it, which in their usage means to put the power down. The neighbouring parishes have chosen a third way that no rule book mentions: they have ceased to use the ground, shifted the lane, let the field fall back to grass, and said not a word to anybody. Cheap it is, and effective. And it is, the march observes, how a parish begins growing smaller without once having made up its mind to.

It is an avatar: the shape a wandering spirit takes as it moves between nodes, and the wolves that attend it are its servants. Where it has passed, the ground is quiet for a season.

As witnesses describe it

Witnesses tell of a vast slug-like creature, its hide iridescent with colours that shift as it goes, long stalks bearing its eyes, its mouth wet and gaping, passing through a ruin by moonlight. Grey wolves range snarling about it as hounds about a huntsman. The country labels it shortly: guarded by wolves.