Iron was everywhere in this town. Even as she stood on the edge of Coalyard, Morag could feel it seeping from the cars which sat idling by the pavements, from the skeleton frames of the hulking buildings, from the man-made roads themselves. It was only a small itch on her skin, but it was irritating. After a century of open spaces, and grassy moorlands, and barely any iron, she could feel its effects instantly.
She would not have come this close to the town’s border in daylight, were it not for the sense of death, which she felt swooping closer with each passing second. And, as a wolf howls at the full moon, and a spider spins a web, she felt the innate urge to keen a warning as death loomed every closer. And Morag opened her mouth wide, and shrieked. It was a cross between a human wail, a fox’s cry, and a barn owl’s screech -- a wholly unnatural sound, made somewhere deep inside her, and it reverberated up through her chest, through her throat, and out of her mouth. It went on and on, this banshee’s wail, until Morag felt the urge drain out of her, and she fell silent, the sound echoing for a few seconds longer.
The death, she could sense, was a few days away yet, but she had done her duty. She had warned that it was coming, as her brood had warned for a century. She licked her cracked, dry, lips, absentmindedly tugged at her dress, and turned to leave, paying no mind to the figure standing nearby.
