Glossary
Every word the game uses and never stops to explain. Nobody in this story lectures anybody, so the explaining happens here instead.
- A littermate
- A cub raised alongside another from the start, brought or born, treated as blood in every way that matters to the pack.
- A pack
- Where the Bound live, hunt and raise their young. A pack that cannot hold its numbers does not disappear, it replenishes.
- Brought
- The pack's own word for a human child taken in and made one of them. A plain past-tense verb, used in the same tone as any other ordinary fact about a person, and the flatness of it is the point. humans say taken. Nobody in a den does.
- essence
- The inherited force that runs in the Bound's blood and nowhere else. It is where their magic comes from, and humans are born without it.
- hallowbound
- Taken and remade by the rite. A hallowbound child keeps the shape of the body they were born into and loses almost everything else of who they were before.
- The Bound
- What the Bound call themselves. To humans, the word is beasts; neither term is neutral, and nobody in a den much cares which one the surface prefers.
- The hand game
- A clapping and counting game invented in 2012 by a nine-year-old and a six-year-old, in a yard, out of things they could see from the porch. Nobody else ever learned it. It has a second half and the second half is faster.
- The near
- Everything about a place that reaches you without being looked at: what a room sounds like, smells like and feels like before you are in it. the Bound read it the way humans read a screen. There is no word for it on the surface because nothing up there has ever needed one.
- The Rite
- Known outside the dens as the binding rite: the ceremony that takes a human child and grafts essence into them, binding them to a pack for good.
- The Undercity
- Home to the Bound: torchlit, built up and down rather than across, firelight against cold stone. People live here, cook here, and raise their young here.