a spindly, roughly five-foot-tall, ape-like creature, invisible creature, Invisible Attacker
The Invisible Attacker is a spindly thing, perhaps five feet in height, after the fashion of an ape. This elusive being can move about unseen, escaping all notice until it chooses to show itself. In the confusion of one encounter it was marked clambering among the boughs of a burning tree, its contorted shape suggesting that agility and mischief proper to the fae. From its hidden perch it fell to hurling rocks upon Sidra al-Najjar and Ahmet Yusuf.
Sidra, with her keener sight, was the first to descry the Invisible Attacker amidst the tumult of the burning tree. Once she had marked its place, Ahmet loosed a Fire Bolt upon it, at which it gave an aggrieved bark and set about beating out the flames that clung to it. After a concerted stroke in which Ahmet cast a rock, the creature was thrown off its balance, and in the end it succumbed to a Sleep laid upon it by Ahmet, falling from the tree and taking its death from the fall. Its end accomplished, Sidra and Ahmet put out the fire in the tree and bore the body back to the Scavengers, and so laid to rest the immediate danger it had posed.
The Invisible Attacker is besides an unseen thing spoken of by the Scavengers, reputed to have taken from them the tree that once housed them. She is bound up with a larger tree standing two hills beyond the Cemetery, where Sidra and Ahmet fell in with the Scavengers. The Scavengers hold her in fear and resentment, and will neither share cup nor goods with her, accounting her a malevolent creature — a sign that her doings have brought them to grief by driving them from their home.
In the course of an inquiry at the Cemetery, Sidra and Ahmet came upon the mark of the Invisible Attacker upon that ground, when the Scavengers named her in connexion with the local disturbances. The Scavengers pressed their refusal to share anything with the Invisible Attacker, and so confirmed her ill repute. Her name they leave unspoken, and she is known only through the effects of her deeds upon the Scavengers and the tree she has seized, which stands at the heart of the quarrel.