Rattlecut Dead
The worst stretch of the main road through the Headwater Marches is the Rattlecut, a gorge so narrow that in a wet spring the river takes the road and gives back only part of it. It takes travellers the same way, and gives back only part of them: a body without its name, a cart without its carter, or nothing. The Rattlecut Dead are the remnants of those it took.
Appearance
They are seen on the road in the gorge, in spray and dusk: a carter walking beside a team that is not there, a woman on the edge of the road looking down at the water, a line of travellers walking into the river. Many are not whole. One is only a voice calling from below the road; another is seen from the waist up, as if the rest of it were still under the water. The gorge is loud, and they are heard under the roar as a rattle of stones that moves against the current. The air there smells of wet rock and river mud.
Habitat and Range
They keep to the Rattlecut itself, the gorge road and the stretches of river below it where bodies come ashore. They are seen most in the wet spring, when the river rises and takes the road again.
Behaviour and Temperament
They look for what they lost. A Rattlecut remnant searches the road and the shallows for its missing part: its body, its name, its goods, its companions. It does not mean harm. It draws the living to the edge, as if asking them to look too, and a traveller who stops to look down from the Rattlecut’s edge in the spring may follow.
Abilities
They chill and frighten, as remnants do, and the strongest move stones on the road. They seem to know when the river is about to rise: travellers who see many of them on the road that day say the gorge took the road within hours.
Uses and Dangers
They are a warning, and road people read them as one: a gorge full of the dead is a gorge about to flood. The Troll house that holds the Rattlecut by oath and toll keeps a count of the dead with its count of collapses, and its keepers will close the passage when the dead walk. The danger is to those who stop and look, and to those who will not wait.
Lore and Belief
Headwater people say the river keeps what it takes and gives back what it does not want, and that a body brought ashore whole is a body the river has finished with. When a part of someone is found below the gorge, it is buried with the rites in full, and the name of the whole person said over it; carters say the dead of the Rattlecut grow quieter each time this is done. Some believe the gorge owes a death each spring, and that a year without one is a bad sign.
Carters who would not wait have driven into the gorge with the dead walking and the water rising, and the carters toast the one who got his team through and the dozen who did not.