They look like any traveller long on the road: a pilgrim, a carter without a cart, a messenger with a pouch of letters gone to pulp. Their clothes are worn through at the same places, and their boots are worn to the uppers and mended many times. Their faces are calm, eager, and blank, and their eyes do not quite settle on anything, like the needle in the Compass’s forehead. Many carry something that once pointed the way, a staff with a cut notch, a cracked lodestone, a map drawn and redrawn until it is all ink. They talk in a low, steady voice, and the same few phrases come round again: "This way. It is not far. I know this road."

They are found where the Compass has looped a road or a pass: a stretch of highway that travellers seem never to finish, a fogbound ford, a mountain path that brings walkers back to the same cairn. They keep to their loop, and some loops have outlasted the Compass by generations.

They want to help. They come up to the lost, the hesitant, and the tired, walk beside them, and lead them on, and they mean it kindly. They cannot leave the loop and do not know they are in one. They do not attack; when a traveller turns away, they stand looking after them, puzzled, and then walk on.

They carry the Compass’s drift with them. Near a Wayturned, a traveller’s sense of direction loosens, and the guide’s certainty becomes very easy to follow. Those who follow for long enough walk the loop with them and begin to forget, purpose first, then destination. Choosing a way of one’s own, even a wrong one, breaks the pull.

They give nothing, except, sometimes, their memory of a road as it was long ago. The danger is the following: whole parties have gone missing on a road with a Wayturned on it. Road peoples teach their children never to take a stranger’s guidance on a road that seems too long, and to turn round inside a loop. Searchers who go to walk a Wayturned out must let them choose the way home themselves.

All peoples know them by rumour, under many names: "the helpful pilgrim", "the one who knows a shorter way". Most believe they are the ghosts of travellers who died lost. They are not ghosts; they are alive, and do not die while the loop holds them. Some believe a Wayturned can be freed by making them toss a coin and follow it.

Caravans that lose a guide to a loop are seldom seen again on that road, and the songs of the passes remember a whole war-band that followed a helpful pilgrim off the road on the eve of a battle and has been marching to it ever since.