Slithering pit

A slithering pit does not think and is not alive, and it moves. What lies on the stone ahead of you is a slick puddle, and if you look at it properly it is not a puddle at all but a hole, with something like a chasm under it. The floor beneath is untouched. A man can climb down into one without going into the ground, which is the whole of the thing: a hole that goes where it likes, made of nothing anyone has been able to name. Mikhail Kethrel knew it from an Arcane Congress bestiary, which files it among the blobs and oozes, animate and neither sentient nor living.

How It Hunts

It is slow. A walking man outpaces it without hurrying, and it comes on anyway, at its own pace, for as long as there is a man to come after. It kills by getting underneath. It slides beneath someone standing still and he falls in, and when he backs away it stretches itself long and thin to stay under his feet. Where a closed door meets the floor without a seam it will use the door for a wall and lie flat against it. Once a man is over the rim, the sides of it bat at him to knock him the rest of the way down.

Nothing reaches it at a distance. A scream pitched to split a skull went into it and stopped there. Crossbow bolts fell in and did nothing, though one shot from outside while Koa was inside it struck the wall from within and tore it, and the wall worked back and forth until the bolt came free and the tear closed over. It has to be cut, and cutting it means standing where it can take you.

The One Under Haudh-Gwenn

One has ever been met. It was in a Mól tunnel beneath Haudh-Gwenn, a mile of worked stone curving southeast from the ruins to a rusted iron grate above the river: an exit, with no mechanism on the inside of it and no way to open it. Walking back up the tunnel, Mikhail noticed that a puddle he had passed on the way down was no longer where he had passed it.

It went for Koa first and he threw himself clear of it. The fight after that went badly for a long while. It took him in twice, and twice he got a hand to the rim and climbed out, and it ended when he jumped in on purpose with the greatsword coming down. Then it stopped moving, and they roped him up through the tears he had opened in it.

Behind them the stone door had shut on its own timer, with nothing on that side to work it, so they were sealed in a mile of tunnel with a grate they could not cut. It was the corpse that got them out. They dragged it to the grate, worked it partway underneath, and climbed down through the hole to the riverside.

What Is Left of One

Dead, the hole stays. It is stable, it can be lifted and hauled about, and it will still take a thing put into it. Left alone it goes off unevenly, some of it failing before the rest, with a day or two of use in it before there is nothing. Professor Ashanti al-Hassan, who had studied them and never seen one, jumped into this one to marvel at it and sprained her ankle.

Tanned, it keeps. That was a guess when they hauled the carcass across the city on a borrowed cart, and it took Greg the Tanner three months to prove out. What came off his bench holds the space inside: a weightless scrap of inky hide a few inches deep that flattens whatever goes into it, which is the Oubliette. Greg said it should not exist, and kept a better piece of the hide for himself. Seasons later it was that offcut that went down over the Wraithblade Khopesh in a Haudh-Gwenn street, so the cursed thing could be picked up with nothing touching it.

The tunnel it came out of has not been walked since. Whether there are others down there was never discovered, and where a hole that hunts comes from in the first place was never written down.