Every warm season a bluesman sets up on the off-world side of the junction — I call him Bob, after Robert Johnson, who legend says tuned his guitar at a midnight crossroads with a trickster god and walked away soulless and brilliant. I have never once heard the blues on the Hellsborough side of The Hinge; the music over there is a weirdness wholly removed from anything you'd recognise. Which leaves me wondering, on the bad nights, what I myself handed to milting in exchange for mastery of the semagrams and this crossroad.

Of everything in the wisewood, the Lonik is the only creature not actively trying to kill you — a distinction that means far less than it ought to, since a harmless thing makes the forest no safer, only stranger. It does not hide so much as stop, becoming part of whatever it happens to be standing beside; you hear the soft chewing before you see anything, and if you turn too quickly there is nothing there at all. Follow that sound at murkrise if you must — but never, ever after murkfall.