The Hunt comes as sound first: a horn, thin and far off, then hounds giving tongue, then the drum of many hooves. It appears as a rush of spectral colour against the zone’s washed-out present, vivid at its front and fading behind: a pack of rough-coated hounds of no breed known now, their coats ghost-brown and spotted, then riders on tall horses, cloaked and capped in the fashion of an age no one remembers, spears and horns in hand, faces turned to something ahead that is not there. They cast a second, fainter shadow. As they pass, the air is cold as mist and smells of horse sweat, crushed grass, and a fire long out.

It runs one stretch of the Ghost Step’s road, the stretch its hunt once rode, in both directions along it. How often it runs is not known; travellers report it at dusk most often, and some have walked the Step for days without meeting it.

The Hunt does what it did. It rides after a quarry no one can see, along the same line, with the same cries, and it does not turn, stop, or notice the living. It cannot be spoken to or turned. When it has run its course it fades, until something wakes it again. The zone’s echoes answer the feelings of those who watch them, and a frightened traveller’s fear makes the Hunt come on harder and more solid.

Its echoes carry weight: a hound’s shoulder or a horse’s chest strikes like the real thing and is gone in the same moment, cold as mist. A traveller in its line is knocked flat, struck by hooves, and left bruised and broken. A calm watcher feels it pass thinner, almost as a wind.

It is not alive and was never born. It is what the hunters and their beasts left behind when they died, held on the road by the zone, and it lasts as long as the Step holds its echoes.

It gives antiquarians a glimpse of an age lost to record: the dress, the hounds, the horns. Its danger is the zone’s Collision, at its worst. Travellers who hear the horn get off the road, or, if they cannot, lie flat and still and calm, and let it pass over them. Some of the zone’s Path-Echoes are seen to step aside for it, as they once did in life.

Along old roads near the Path-Gates, people tell of a wild hunt heard on certain nights, and say that whoever sees it will die within the year, or be taken to ride with it. Travellers who have met the Old Hunt say it takes no one; it only runs them down. Who the hunters were and what they chased no one knows, and the Step’s Echoes do not answer.

Wayside inns tell of the poacher who was caught on the hunt’s line, ran with it all night to stay ahead of the hooves, and was found at dawn at the far end of the road, three valleys away, with a stag’s antler in his hand that no one could explain.