The Murk
Most of what gets said about the murk off-world is romantic nonsense, and most of what gets said about it here is worse: technically accurate and completely unhelpful. So, plainly. The murk is fog. It is thick, oily, odourless and clinging, it blocks out most of the sun and all of the moon, and on a good day it leaves you ten paces of visibility, at murklight and murkneet alike. Most days are not good days.
Some of it is honest weather. The valley has shocking weather, and I say that as someone raised on South Yorkshire drizzle. But the humidity plant, out in the vicinity of Hope and threaded across The Dark Peak like something between infrastructure and an organ, tops the volume up on purpose, because every denizen race down here needs the moisture in the air to function: The Nascenti, The Xin, Exacids, clowns, Dyapnids, Mentiloths, Cryptobites and the formidable Xaexs. Off-worlders need psycmasks to manage it: breathing assistance and augmented reality to see past those ten paces, with nutrition bolted on the side because apparently one implant ought to do three jobs at once. The murk mostly keeps to the valley. It rarely climbs into the Nether Land on the far side of The Road, out towards Southey and Pitsmoor, though "rarely" is doing some work in that sentence I would rather it did not have to do.
It is alive, by every account the DPDC will admit to on the record, and conscious in some fashion nobody has agreed how to measure. It can also want, which is the part that takes newcomers longest to accept and locals no time at all. On the quieter stretches you can hear it: a thin, tinny quality on the air, like a funfair packing up two valleys over, that never once gets any closer, though enough jellyheads claim to recognise the tune that the DPDC has at various points tried to ban humming it in public.
It thickens in stages, and everyone down here learns the names long before they learn any science: clear, thin, risen, thick, and, rarely, an event, which is when it stops behaving like weather altogether and you stop being the thing deciding where you go.
The humidity plant is only the plumbing. What it is plumbed into is the scerm, which is either a soul or a signal depending which denizen you ask, and which the older accounts call memory instead. That may be the most honest of the three and it is certainly the least comforting. Every native creature in The Dark Peak, and every jellyhead whose psycmask has been in long enough to have it done to them, carries a Molon-Tor: a passenger, of sorts, threaded through the mind the way root systems thread through soil, and it is the molon-tor that keeps a person plugged into the scerm whether they asked to be or not.
Add the organic network to that — every root, blade of grass, spore and fungal thread laced under the valley floor, built by the nascenti to watch Hellsborough on their behalf and now demonstrably thinking on its own account — and you have what the DPDC calls quorganic computing, which is the sort of phrase a committee reaches for when it wants a wonder to sound like a utility bill. I do not believe the nascenti built themselves a god. I believe they built plumbing, same as the humidity plant, and something moved in. Where that network answers to anything past its own appetite, the old accounts give it Eron-Htul, god of the fungai and the molon-tor and of nothing else.
As for what lives in it: Syncarids, ray-shaped and sized to whatever your worst case happens to be, which envelop and sting a person to death without hurrying about it; and Morivarids, which travel in shoals and take the eyes and the tongue. Older accounts do not file either as wildlife at all. They call them murkspawn: revenants of those killed in battle or taken by the Dun, come back as drifters of the ether with stinging tails and roving mouths. boggarts keep to the old houses and the liminal edges. smeln are hybrids, human and boggart and hob at once, knuckle-dragging opportunists with nothing in their heads but junk thoughts, and cowardly enough that you will rarely get a good look at one. gabbleratchets travel high and in packs, and the racket of them arrives well before the sight does, which is the only mercy on offer. A barghest is a dead barker that will not stay dead, and whether that is the best ally in The Dark Peak or the worst omen depends entirely on whether its bond runs to someone still living.
And then the murk wraith, which is the one thing in here that does not hunt you, and that is precisely what makes it worse than the things that do. It stands in whatever shadow or murk-bank is to hand, and it waits, and then it speaks. Eye contact is the trigger. You get one question, always specific, always answerable in principle and unanswerable in practice, because by the time you understand what you were asked the wraith has gone and the asking has already done whatever it does to you. They are the residue of the pained dead: not everyone who dies here, only the ones who did not manage it simply or completely. They answer to Yar Viranna, queen of the murk-sinks, who does not come up in the ordinary run of things, and does not have to.
Past the wraiths there is the murk wraith virus, or "the plague" if you want to be understood at a funeral. It is not caught from a wraith. It is caught from wraith-dense murk: the lower Loxley, the wisewood boundary, anywhere close enough to the hinge that the murk stops behaving like fog and starts behaving like something with an opinion. Infection does not kill you. It makes you nearly impossible to kill while quietly colonising everything worth being alive for. The Wisewood Reaper has been carrying it, by my estimate, for longer than most buildings in Hellsborough have been standing, and has been trying to die the entire time.
The full dossier, including the DPDC's own paperwork on the plague and rather more than I should probably have printed, is in Murk Lore Issue One, GOT SOME FRUIT, MURKER?
| Type | Lore |
| HP | 2 |
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