The people of Brzeny Hollow lend nothing with an edge between the autumn rains and the thaw. Not an ax, not a sickle, not a paring knife passed over a fence. A woman who needs a hatchet buys one. A man who owns two keeps the spare under his bed. The reason is the nycaloth, which treats any blade handed from one neighbor to another as a bargain struck in its hearing, and which arrives to see the terms kept.
It is seven feet of gray, rope-muscled body with a bat's wing folded over each shoulder and a lower jaw set with two short tusks. Autumn is when it walks the Rovtsy Pass road at dusk, because wet wings stiffen and tear and it will not fly in drizzle. Its wingtips drag two grooves in the mud behind it. A borrower who returns a tool a day late finds his barn door lifted off its hinges and laid neatly in the yard, and one ewe fewer in the pen. Kasimir Orlen, who keeps goats above the pass, has replaced the same barn lintel four times because the nycaloth will not duck under it, and he says only that it is a poor sport about doorframes.
By midwinter its habits change. It climbs the cairn at the top of Rovtsy and stays there for weeks, wings wrapped around its shoulders, frost whitening the tusks. It does not move when the snow drifts against it. I have watched one take a single salted ham in January and nothing else in the span of a month. What it leaves is easy to read: three-toed prints sunk deep, flanked by the two wingtip grooves, running from the cairn to the nearest farm gate and back. It is said to answer to a creditor under the pass and to hold every contract it enforces in trust for that master. I have no way of checking this, and report it as it was told to me.
At the thaw it comes down thin and short-tempered. The lambing pastures above Brzeny lose a few animals each spring, and on the first dry day it rises off the cairn with a crack like a sail filling. Then it is gone until the rains. The locals' instruction is flat and the same in every house: keep every edged tool indoors from the first rain to the thaw, lend nothing, and if grooves appear in the snow by your gate, leave the gate open and stay inside.
- Classification
- Winged mercenary fiend
- Habitat
- High passes and goat pastures
- Danger
- High
- Size
- 7 ft tall, 14 ft wingspan
- Activity
- Seasonal
- Realm
- Lower planes, mountain borderlands
- Binomial
- Nyctifer pactarius
- Diet
- Salted meat, lambs, carrion
- Temperament
- Sullen, patient, bound to bargains