City people call them mutants. The codex doesn’t, because a mutation is an accident and there’s nothing accidental in the field record. The Blight takes a host, a wolf, a scavenger, a person, and rebuilds it fast, and the rebuilt thing has a job. Nobody in four centuries has worked out what the job is. The codex only records what the things do, and what worked.
Grazers. Amber-stags, hide laced with crystal, and the big insectile Scrabblers digging lichen from under the snow. Herd animals, and the closest thing the Wastes has to meat on the hoof. Approached wrong, a cornered grazer fights with a fury no herd animal should have, and the codex entry for stags is one line long. Take the shot from cover or don’t take it.
Stalkers. Static-hounds hunt by signal and cross short ground in a flicker your eye reads as a glitch, so the drill is go quiet, go cold, and never aim where one is, aim where it lands. Shriekers cry a note that floods ears and receivers alike, and their call isn’t the attack, it’s the dinner bell, everything in earshot now knows where you are. Kill the crier first or leave.
Abominations. Old conversions, saturated. Near one, straight lines look wrong, your Wisp ticks without pause, and the air moves like heat shimmer in the cold. The codex instruction is one word, leave. The entries that argue with that instruction were all finished in another survivor’s handwriting.
Most Riftspawn die to honest weapons more easily than the stories claim. The danger was never the fight, it’s the exposure, every close kill is a dose. There’s a trade the codex records without instructions, the eating of Riftspawn flesh, meat so rewritten it’s a concentrated dose of somewhere else. The desperate call it medicine. The Ascension calls it communion. The clans call it the fastest way to stop being you.
And the oldest line in the codex, underlined in every copy. Never trust a familiar form. Bodies left in the deep Wastes come back wearing enough of the face to make you hesitate. Hunters who lost someone travel with a partner who didn’t.
[CODEX ENTRY ENDS. ADDITIONS IN YOUR OWN HAND.]