"Why does it wash its mouth?" a boy asks at the pipe-works in Cefn Orrach, and the answer is only what I have watched from the sheepfold wall since August. Each dusk the mind flayer kneels at the stock trough and rinses its four face-tentacles one at a time, left to right, like a man cleaning a pipe stem. It takes eleven minutes. It does this whether or not it has eaten, and no one in the valley has found a reason.
August and September are dry, and the creature is at its most purposeful. It walks the Vellan Dhu moor road upright, six and a half feet tall, in a mauve robe gone black at the hem. What it eats is thought, drawn through the skull of anyone who stops to look at it. Sheep give the first sign. They quit grazing and stand facing the road like fence posts, then resume a day later with no notion why. Where it has laid a hand on a gate, the wet print dries to a gray film that flakes off under a thumbnail. Travelers who go missing are sometimes found sitting up, unhurt, and empty of their own names.
October rain makes it sullen. It will not step in a puddle, and its tracks in wet weather run in wide loops around every one. It also turns over any flat stone another creature has sat on before it will use it, a habit the drovers find funnier than they admit. The valley has built a trade around the thing. Gethin Prosser cuts reed drones, each tuned to one low flat note, and every household on the lane owns one, set in the doorway and worked all night with a foot bellows. The flayer's attention slides off that note the way a boot slides off ice, and a mind it cannot hold, it cannot enter. On the moor road, the custom is to call no one by name, since a name is a handle. People say "you there," even to their brothers.
By December frost its tentacles stiffen and curl inward, and it comes down to the barns for the heat of the cattle, standing in doorways with its head tipped, doing nothing at all. Gethin sets a drone at each door. In three winters the creature has stopped every time at forty-one inches from the nearest pipe, measured on the frosted ground with Gethin's folding rule, and stood there until it is light.
- Classification
- Aberration, psionic humanoid
- Habitat
- Moorland sheepfolds and cold barns
- Danger
- Extreme
- Size
- 6.5 ft tall
- Activity
- Crepuscular
- Realm
- Cold upland moors
- Binomial
- Phrenovora cephalica
- Diet
- Thought, drawn through the skull
- Temperament
- Cold, patient, oddly fussy