They are the stranger who cornered you in the market, speaking in circles about their cousin’s cart wheel while you felt the minutes slip from your grasp. They are the neighbor who intercepted you as you left your home, recounting the history of their leaky roof while your appointment time dissolved into nothing. They are the traveler on the road who asked for directions and then kept talking until dusk, as your own destination faded from reach.
Near every lake, beneath docks and boats, behind fish tanks in city apartments, there are Linebinders. Always more than one. Always watching. They drift through the dark spaces beneath water and glass, a quiet order of string-weavers and fish-hangers, their cloaks damp with lake fog, their arms trailing with nets of knotted line.
If you hear a faint rustling among the straw in your henhouse at dawn, followed by a soft, nervous cooing sound that is not quite chicken nor human, you may have been visited by an Eggler.
The Spindlekin is a figure tangled in itself, arms looped over shoulders, cloak twisted like fabric caught in gears. Its face is strained, as though surprised by its own existence. Its body bristles with needles, hooks, and spindles, and from its fingertips trails an impossible length of thread, unraveling from nowhere, stretching into the walls, the floorboards, the furniture.
No one knows where the Scatterkin are going, only that they never stop moving. You will see them in the early light, bare-headed, with cloaks that catch the wind like wings. Their faces are smooth, almost human, but their expressions never quite match their steps. They drift with a strange urgency, as if pulled forward by something unseen. A bird may rest on their hand, a pouch may jangle at their hip, but their true cargo is always the same: seeds.
No one calls for the Pedegrim, but he is summoned all the same. His arrival is not heralded by fog nor nightfall, but by a slow rot that creeps through the corners of a home. First, the beams over the hearth darken with damp, though the fire still burns. Then, flour grows sour overnight, and the milk curdles though the pail was fresh. At last, the house feels heavier, as though the walls lean inward, and that is when he is already inside.
When the summer heat weighs heavy, and the air hums thick with the drone of flies, there is talk of the Flycap Courtier. He is not seen in the deep woods or on forgotten paths, he lingers at the edges of gardens, compost heaps, and kitchens where fruit has turned sweet with rot.
There are few who have seen the Parchmentbearers with their own eyes, yet their work lingers in the corners of every village. Contracts sealed with strangely coiled handwriting, debts repaid with coins that seem older than the sun, and warnings etched into doorframes before disasters strike. These are the marks of the Parchmentbearers, scribes of the unseen order.
Sprigglecap does not wait for travelers to wander into his domain, he comes to you. He squeezes into gardens through holes in fences. He wriggles under cottage doors. He slips between the walls of market stalls, his crooked hat dragging against the beams. He is not bound to forest paths or misty roads. Sprigglecap lives where life is bustling.
There are places in the forest where the air feels stitched together, paths where the world seems held by threads you cannot see. If you walk these places with respect, you may glimpse the Stitchblades.
The Beakwalkers do not speak often. When they do, their voices rasp like wind through reeds, cryptic, brief, but always with purpose. They offer guidance, but not in the way a friend might. They do not lead you to comfort, but to where you are meant to be, even if it is not where you hoped to go.
In the mist-choked fens beyond the lowlands, grotesque creatures known as Curdlings waddle through the muck, fermenters of flesh with sloshing bellies and chitin-wrapped limbs. But among the reeds, one bitter herb offers hope: wormwood, whose sharp taste repels the rot-born and clears the fog of their swampy domain.
