The Strayed
The Strayed are animals and people who walk without destination, taken in the Drift Field of the Nameless Current. The Current is a face of the Unformed, the absence of direction, and it wants nothing; headings simply wash away where it runs. The Strayed go on walking long after the field is behind them, aware of the drift and unable to steer, until they fall.
Appearance
A Strayed walks steadily and never quickly, head up, as if going somewhere, and turns for no reason at a stone or a stream or nothing. A strayed herd spreads across a hillside in slow curves that never come together; a strayed man walks in the clothes he set out in, worn to rags, with his boots gone and his feet bound in whatever he found. The eyes are clear and anxious, looking for something on the horizon that is not there. They are thin, sunburnt or frost-bitten by turns, and smell of the road.
Habitat and Range
They are found anywhere, which is what makes them hard to help: a strayed flock turns up three valleys from its fold, a strayed carter on a road he never drove. Most stay within some days of where the Current passed, walking in circles that widen.
Behaviour and Temperament
They walk. They drink at streams they pass and eat what they stumble on, but they do not stop to seek food, and they do not stop for the night unless they fall. A strayed person can speak and knows what is happening, and will say so, and cannot choose a way to go. They hold no will of the Current.
Abilities
The drift is catching to those who follow. Someone who falls in behind a Strayed to bring it home finds their own heading going: the road they came by slopes the wrong way, and the hills trade places. A fixed goal held to, a landmark picked and walked to, a cairn-stone carried from home, holds it off.
Life Cycle
They are not born. Most walk until hunger, cold, or a fall ends them; a beast may last a season, a person less. A few are steered home by kin who lead them by the hand from landmark to landmark, and recover their heading slowly over many days.
Uses and Dangers
They give nothing. Their danger is to the kind: searchers who follow a strayed child into open country come back strayed themselves, or not at all. Upland villages send searchers out in pairs, one to hold the heading and one to fetch the lost.
Lore and Belief
The restless sometimes call the Strayed the free, people loosed from every errand, and follow them out for a day to feel it. The Current calls nothing freedom, and the Strayed are still looking for their way. Drovers say a beast that stops at a crossroads and turns its head both ways at once has felt the Current, and tie it to the beast in front.