dunlockslyn

The three rivers that drain The Dark Peak — the Dun, the Loxley, the Rivelin — are not rivers. I spent the better part of my first year here thinking of them as waterways, following their courses through the valleys, noting the old wheel sites and the rusted mill heads. Then Van mentioned, in the way he mentions things he considers obvious: d'divi has three tails. D' divi. The divine. The divine serpent. The one whose three tails rise in The Dark Peak and whose single head is at the Ripperthroat mountains. I looked back at the river. It looked different. It has looked different ever since. At lowmurk, staring into the Dun gives the same sensation as staring into the murk itself — something watching from directly below the surface.

The Rivelin and the Loxley join at Malin Bridge and are subsumed by the Dun at Owlerton. This is not the creature consolidating — it is three voices converging into one throat. The Dun drops toward the Ripperthroats and empties there into what the Hellsborough library account describes only as the hidden sea, at which point the manuscript stops, which is the sort of editorial decision made by someone who understood what they were describing. The rivers feed the land as they run. They turned the water wheels and drove the mill races and powered the early industry of Sheffield for centuries. Dunlockslyn gives life through its tails the way other creatures give life through their mouths. That it also drowned a valley down the Loxley on a March morning in 1864 is not contradictory. It is the same behaviour. This is understood by every denizen in The Dark Peak. It is the first thing you learn here and the last thing you remember.

Dunlockslyn is not violent. That is not the same as safe. The hazard is simpler and more final: the journey ends at the Ripperthroat mountains, and it ends once. Every denizen — The Xin, The Nascenti, clown, milting, human — eventually takes the dunfall. The god is the passage itself. It is heresy to visit the Ripperthroat mountains and return, and the denizens of The Dark Peak enforce that rule with enthusiasm. I have not been. I plan not to go. I do not know what is there and I am comfortable with this.

The milting created the religion of Dunlockslyn worship — or identified what they were looking at and gave it a name, which amounts to the same thing. scerm, the murk in experiential form accessible through rockcrust, is described as the ethereal embodiment of Dunlockslyn: the god as felt rather than observed. the hinge, the place between places where dead souls collect before their dunfall, is saturated with scerm. Even the Woad, who trace their lineage to the fungai that colonised The Dark Peak before everything else, defer to Dunlockslyn without qualification. Van has invoked the name in every register I have heard him use — in combat, over the bodies of the dead, and once during a rockcrust episode in S6 in which he spoke to it directly: Oh Dunlockslyn. I am ready for you. I am primitive again. He was not ready. He is still here. The god, presumably, is patient.

Field note: the rivers run in one direction. Do not attempt to walk back against the current toward the mountains. Dunlockslyn does not chase. It simply waits at the end of every path you take.

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