Mist-Merged

Overview

The Mist-Merged are what the Grey Mist leaves of a creature: a body whose edges have run into the ground and the air around it, so that no one can say where it stops. The Mist is a face of the Unformed, the absence of edges, and it wants nothing; edges simply soften where its Blend Field lies. Its victims rarely die. They stay where the field left them, undone in that one respect and still aware of it.

Appearance

A Mist-Merged keeps the rough mass of what it was, a sheep, a dog, a woman at a well, but not its outline. Its skin runs into grey haze a hand's breadth out, and the stone or grass it stands on runs up into it, so a herd caught on a hillside looks like grey humps grown out of the slope. Colour drains from it to the grey of fog. Its eyes are the last thing to go and stay clear and wet in the blur, and they follow whoever comes near. It makes a low drone with no pitch, and it smells of nothing at all.

Habitat and Range

They are found where the Mist's field has lain: in the grey ground of a blurred village, on a pasture whose flock never came home, at a ford where the banks ran into the river. They do not move far, since a creature without edges cannot tell where to step, and many stand for years in one place.

Behaviour and Temperament

They do not hunt, fight, or flee. A Mist-Merged drifts a little, leans towards anything warm, and settles again. People caught in the Blend answer to their names slowly, as if from a distance, and cannot say whether they are standing or sitting. They hold no will of the Mist; they are what is left where its field has been.

Abilities

The blur is catching. Whoever touches a Mist-Merged, or stays long beside one, feels their own edge soften: their hand seems to run into its flank, and it is hard to tell which warmth is whose. A sharp edge holds it off, a knife drawn along the ground, a black line painted on a post, a name said out loud.

Life Cycle

They are not born. They last as long as the blur holds, which may be a lifetime; a beast may die at last of hunger without knowing where its mouth ends. A few people have been drawn back out by kin who kept their own edges and named them, sharply and often, until they found their outline again.

Uses and Dangers

They give nothing. Their danger is to those who love them: a family that sits too long beside a merged child blurs into the same grey. The ground they stand on cannot be ploughed or built on; walls raised there soften into it.

Lore and Belief

The lonely sometimes call the Mist-Merged the joined, people who have found an end to being apart, and walk out to them. The Mist has no word for joining, and the merged are still aware of the blur. Herders who lose a flock to the grey drive a ring of sharp stakes around the ground and do not graze inside it again.

Where It Appears

• The Grey Mist