Boggart

Gaunt, long-limbed, and rarely seen whole. A boggart binds itself to a place rather than to a people, and then haunts it. Their magic is the magic of souring — milk turns, hinges shriek, luck runs thin — and they favor ruins and abandoned holdings, of which the Kingdom has produced a great many.

There is a bitter joke among the goblins that every Faerie estate left to rot eventually grows its own tenant.

Appearance

Tall, thin, and badly assembled, with joints that bend a little past where they should. Nobody has a reliable description, because boggarts are seen in fragments — a hand at a doorway, a shape at the end of a hall — and because those who stay long enough for a good look tend to leave with a different account.

A boggart at ease, in its own hall, receiving a guest it has decided to receive, is perfectly ordinary to look at. Almost nobody has seen this, and the accounts of those who have are not believed.

Attuned Magic

Blight. A nascent boggart sours what is already going bad. A powerful one can make a sound building feel wrong to stand in, drive a whole household out over the course of a season without ever being seen, and hold a claimed place against intruders more effectively than a garrison.

It works on places, not people. A boggart cannot blight a traveler; it can make the room the traveler is in unbearable, which is not the same thing and is worse.

Life

One ruin, one boggart, and a sequence of duties nobody assigned. A boggart's day is its habits: sweeping, laying, opening, closing, receiving — performed in order, nightly, in a building that has not needed any of it for centuries.

Names. They have none, and they answer to the role: the Steward, the Gate, the Cook of Orchard Ninth. Ask a boggart its name and you will get its office, given without hesitation and without any sense that a question has gone unanswered.

Arrival. Nobody has observed one. New boggarts appear in ruins already keeping a protocol, and no boggart can account for how they chose the place or where the sequence came from. This is the single strangest fact about them and the reason a handful of scholars have started visiting the Marches against advice.

Etiquette. Absolute. One holding, one tenant, and the boundary is never crossed. Boggarts pass each other on the Steward's Road without stopping, and the road has been kept clear for forty kilometers by people who have never coordinated once.

Society

There is none. One boggart, one ruin, and a territorial etiquette that is observed absolutely.

What is genuinely strange about them is the habits. Like all fey, boggarts lost their memories at metamorphosis, so what they retain is not knowledge but routine: sweeping a hall that has no roof, keeping a gate in a wall that has no other side, laying a table in a room with no floor. A great deal could be reconstructed about what the Marches used to be from watching them carefully, if anyone thought a boggart's behavior worth watching. The Steward of the Nameless Hall is the most-watched of them, and has been observed keeping a protocol nobody can identify.

Currents

The Nine. Boggarts who have attached themselves to the Nameless Hall in supporting roles — a gate-keeper, a cook with no kitchen, a groom with no stable. Together, a staff roster for a household that has not existed in centuries.

The Rat Corporation. Not boggarts. The organized rat polity in the connected undercrofts, with contracts, officers, and a written record older than anything the Kingdom admits exists. Boggarts deal with them in terms and consider the arrangement unremarkable.

The Antiquarians. Leprechaun surveyors, Gnome clerks, Gremlin strata-keepers, and one Wisp astronomer who have realized their separate anomalies are one anomaly. Several have sat at the Steward's table and been fed.

Relations

None to speak of. The Great Hunt rides around the Marches rather than through them, and the boggarts have never been asked to swear to anything.

Playing One