The Gutters
The one part of the Hedges that is not in the Hedges. The Gutters are the alleys, backstreets, roof-runs and disused spaces of every city in Everdew, claimed and held by the Shah Mira, who left the ring generations ago and never went back.
The Land
Not a territory so much as a layer, laid over the Eternal City, Mousehold, Tidewell, the Duskmarket and every other place large enough to have a wrong side. It is continuous in the way a rumour is continuous: a Shah Mira from one city can read another's Gutters within a day, because the grammar is the same everywhere even when nothing else is.
The Kingdom has never formally acknowledged that a province's population lives largely outside it. The Chancery's position is that the Shah Mira are Hedges subjects temporarily resident elsewhere. This has been the position for four hundred years.
The Shah Mira
Every fur colour and pattern, no discernible clan structure, and no interest in acquiring one. Within their own turf the social order is complex, contested and revised constantly. The moment an outsider enters it, all of that stops and they move as one — and then resume arguing once the intruder has been dealt with.
Cunning, resourceful, and entirely at home in built space: they set traps in stairwells, run ambushes across rooftops, and know which walls are load-bearing in cities whose architects are long dead.
Encounters
Roll d100. Not a biome, a layer. Roll on this in any city; the wildlife is urban and the people are worse. CR is scaled to Faerie size — see Challenge by Size.
| d100 | Encounter | CR |
|---|---|---|
| 01–10 | 1d4 Shah Mira on a roof-run, arguing, who stop arguing the moment they see you | 5 |
| 11–18 | a stairwell trap set for somebody else and perfectly happy to take you instead | — |
| 19–25 | 2d6 cockroaches in a drain, who eat anything and outlast every siege | 1 |
| 26–32 | 1d4 booklice in a condemned archive, reading it faster than anyone will save it | 0 |
| 33–38 | 2d4 houseflies over something in an alley that the watch has not found | ½ |
| 39–44 | 1d6 silverfish in a pantry wall, listless and enormously well informed | ½ |
| 45–50 | 1d3 jumping spiders running a line between roofs, carrying somebody's mail | 1 |
| 51–56 | 1d4 earwigs in a doss-house bedding | 1 |
| 57–62 | 1d2 fences, factors or informers who want the party seen leaving, not arriving | — |
| 63–68 | 1d3 ground beetles in a cellar, night-hunting | 2 |
| 69–74 | 1d2 house centipedes out of a ceiling void, far too fast | 3 |
| 75–79 | 2d4 wolf spiders in a disused space, young on their backs | 3 |
| 80–84 | 1d3 hornets nesting in a shutter box over a busy lane | 4 |
| 85–89 | a load-bearing wall the Shah Mira know about and the party does not | — |
| 90–93 | 1d2 rats running an alley on somebody's behalf, and open to an offer | 12 |
| 94–96 | 1 weasel in the walls, killing far past hunger, entering any hole you can | 15 |
| 97–98 | 1 magpie on the roofline with something it will trade and then cheat over | 17 |
| 99 | 1 dog in the lane — scent, and there is no glamour that beats a nose | 22 |
| 00 | 1 cat on the wall, unhurried, seeing exactly what you are | 26 |