Rift Plate 081 · Gate of Stone
Hairpin Reaver
A road-cutting reaver uses switchback geometry, scavenged climbing gear, and practiced cruelty to make pursuit run backward.
- Plate group
- Gate of Stone
- Classification
- Humanoid
- Field account
- Recovered
Recovered natural history
Field record
Switchback ambush marks
Read the cuts beneath the road signs from bottom to top. They mark the ambush: where the blade enters, where you will turn, where a body should leave the road.
The Reaver inside our curve wore a short surveyor's coat and polished iron toe hooks. From a distance it looked human. Close up, the extra bends in its arms let it reverse a blade without moving its shoulders. It hit our lead from above and dropped past on a rope fixed under the road. By the time we turned downhill, it was climbing behind us on the quarry spikes.
Prepared escape
The exit is prepared first. Ropes are fixed below ledges, route spikes loosened for quick release. A chalk throw or visible silhouette makes someone turn; that person gets cut. Several Reavers can pass a pursuit up and down one hairpin until the travelers lose their sense of forward.
A map or toll token is worth more to them than coin. Useful tools are valued too, and an unknown route may open bargaining. On open ground they lose confidence and try to make new angles from carts or packs, even fallen bodies.
Read the environment
Signs of its presence
Fresh angled knife cuts sit beneath ordinary quarry directions.
Ropes are fixed below the road where maintenance workers couldn't use them.
Route spikes are easily pulled free and polished by hands.
Survival doctrine
Field precautions
01
Straight-Line Discomfort
Force an approach on open, unbroken road. Without corners or height changes, the extra joints overcorrect.
02
Mapped Vanity
A genuinely new route or convincingly changed switchback can occupy a Reaver with studying the marks instead of finishing the attack.
Continue through the folio
081 of 100 recovered plates