The Cinderkin come out at night

The things that crept out of the old shafts at night used to be called glimmers, and they looked like balloons on legs. Round, soft and a little shiny, they waddled up to the berry bushes and ate them. In the berries video two of them stripped a strawberry patch bare, and all I could think was that I would happily keep one on a rope and take it for a walk. That is not what you should feel about the thing that eats your town’s food.

So they went back to the drawing board, more than once. My first try was a family of spiders, and that was wrong twice over: plenty of people cannot look at a spider, and my five kinds turned out to be one spider in five sizes. Then came a worm, which made no sense in a mining town, and a ghoul that just did not fit. What stayed was an imp: a squat body of rock, two slanted glowing eyes, a grin with fangs in it and a small red fire licking out of its cracks.

From the imp a whole family grew, and in the video each of them walks up to a blueberry bush in the dark and starts to eat. The first is the Ashpaw, a small hunched scout with clawed hands and no fire yet. It is the one that shows up first, the only one the game sends at you so far, and its eyes glow like the eyes you see in the dark of the old shaft. After it comes the Sparkjaw, the imp, with its little red flame. The Burrowcoal is a digger that rolls from side to side on short legs and burns a bigger red. The Coldstoke is wide and armoured and burns blue. Last comes the Cragback, which carries a piece of the hill on its back, moss and glowing crystals and all, with red and blue fire across it.

When I stood them next to a villager, the whole family came out too small. The biggest was hardly taller than a grown man, and the Coldstoke, being the widest, looked heavier than the one that was meant to be the worst of them. So I sized them against a villager instead: the Ashpaw at seventy percent of one, the Sparkjaw as tall as one, then one and a third and one and two thirds, and the Cragback at two and a half times. The bigger ones did not get bigger flames, just more of them along their backs. Now the Cragback reads like what it is, the one you hope never walks out of the shaft.

They got a real name too. Nothing in the game says glimmer any more. The family is the Cinderkin, born of the cinders down in the old workings, and each kind goes by its own name on the help page. What the bigger four will do when they finally come out is still open. For now they stand in the gallery, waiting for later nights.