Shad was a barker until a Dyapnid took his throat in a xin encampment on the edge of the Wisewood. Then the murk thickened, and he stood back up - larger, shaggier, eyes the colour of the moon - and went straight back to work. A barghest is a dead barker that will not stay dead: the bond holding it to the living is stronger than whatever is pulling it the other way. Bonded to you, one is a formidable ally; unbonded, it stands too still at riverbanks and graveyards at murkrise, and inflicts wounds that close on the surface but do not heal. Whatever it takes with it does not come back. The organic network catalogs everything in Hellsborough and has no category for these wounds - that detail is the one I find hardest to set aside.