A Fear-Monster has the shape of its maker’s fear, drawn in the Trace’s own colours, sepia, grey, indigo, and translucent black: a hunched shape at a sickbed, a tall stranger in a doorway, a hound, a flood, a face from long ago. It is never quite solid, and it is always a little closer than it was. It makes the sounds the visitor fears to hear, and as the fear grows, it grows. When the fear goes, it fades like breath on glass.

They appear wherever a visitor to the Whispering Trace is afraid, most often in its ruins and graveyards, where fear of death comes easily.

A Fear-Monster pursues its maker, and only its maker. It grows with the fear that feeds it, and shrinks as the fear eases. It does not reason; it is the fear given shape.

It can harm its maker, in the Trace, with all the weight of what the maker dreads. It cannot be outrun, because it goes wherever the fear goes.

They give nothing, except, some say, a lesson. Their danger is to the frightened, and the remedy is not a weapon but calm: peace, in the Trace, takes shape as light.

Travellers tell of the monsters of the grey country, each describing a different one, and those who know the Trace say each traveller met their own. They are kin, in kind, to the Nightmares of the Dreaming Veil, which are born of fear in the same way.

An old tale tells of the warrior who went into the grey country after his brother’s Echo and met there the beast that had killed their father, and fought it, and won, because by then he was no longer afraid of it.