A Night-Marker is a shadowy human shape, a little taller than the traveller who dreams it and darker than the black spires of the Wastes, with no face at all: where features should be there is a void, flat and deep, that the eye slides off. Its edges are not fixed. Seen from far off it may be a cloaked walker; close, its limbs are too long or too many, or it wears something of the fear behind it, a parent’s coat, a soldier’s helm, the shape of a drowned friend. As the fear changes, so does it.

It makes no sound. In the Wastes the only noise is the traveller’s own breath and the thrum that follows their heartbeat, and a Night-Marker comes on in the silence between them. The smell of the place, ozone, burnt hair, and the metal of blood, thickens when one is near. Its shadow does not fall where the light says it should.

Night-Markers exist only within the Wastes, and only for the traveller whose fear they wear. A traveller alone may be followed by one or by several, one for each fear the Wastes have found. They do not follow a traveller out of the Wastes, and companions who enter together rarely see one another’s.

They are silent, patient, and predatory. A Night-Marker stalks rather than charges: it stands on the next dune when the traveller looks up, closer each time, and waits where the traveller must go. It feeds on terror, and the more it feeds the nearer and more solid it becomes, while the Wastes around it grow worse: the sand deepens, the horizon goes out. It is relentless and adaptive, learning the traveller’s anxieties as they change. It does not speak. It is what it is.

A Night-Marker cannot be killed by ordinary means. Blades pass through it; fire lights only the traveller’s fear. What it can do is real: like any shape the Wastes make, a fear given a body can harm as surely as a real one, and a traveller it reaches may be wounded, held, or dragged under the grey sand. It is undone by one thing only, the traveller facing and mastering the fear behind it, and then it is gone at once, with the terrain it made.

The Night-Markers are the worst of the Wastes, and also why some people return to them on purpose: to face one fear, overcome it, and come away with a resilience and a clarity the waking world rarely gives. The danger is the spiral. A traveller who panics feeds the Markers, and the Markers feed the panic, until the traveller is frozen in terror and becomes part of the sand, one of the Lost Dreamers.

Most people who meet a Night-Marker fall into the Wastes through a nightmare that will not end, and they come back, if they come back, believing they met a demon of the night that marked them, which is where the name comes from. Many believe the Markers are spirits that choose their victims and that a marked sleeper will be taken again. The Lucid Walkers, who have mastered their fear and guide others, say otherwise: the Marker was the traveller’s own, made from their own mind, and the way out is through it. That is so. Some sleepless folk hang a mirror over the bed, so that a Marker coming in finds its own face missing and goes away.