Character Guide

Known to regulars as Nelly the Jelly. Librarian at the Hellsborough terminus, long-standing ally to Pip Rippon during his anthropology research — a reliable source of obscure journals, local artefacts, and folklore leads. Encountered a murk wraith on Middlewood Road on a Toid'y morning, made eye contact, and was annihilated at The Hinge by the following Besd'y. His hivemind query is still logged as pending.

A Psalliota — the woad word for prince — of the First Born of The Dark Peak. Encountered by Van Hallam during the milting raids at the Ripperthroat Mountains and later in captivity in the Sunderlands under Hordrön. Adversary, then reluctant ally. A ferocious warrior who, over the course of her time with Van, breaks from the divine authority of Hordrön. Her face drips, as all woad faces do.

Supreme deity and forge master of the woad, ruling from a stainless steel throne in the temple of D'divi at Dunlockslyn. His face drips and hisses against the flagstones beneath him. Refers to himself in the third person. Fled through a trapdoor in the dais floor when Van Hallam drove toward his throne.

Daughter of Sian Eman, Master of Life and Death in The Dark Peak. Captured by the woad during a raid and taken to Dunlockslyn. Initially hostile to Van Hallam, then dependent on him. Fought alongside him at the rites of Hordrön before urging him to flee and return to the milting temples.

A barker who died at the jaws of a dyapnid in an xin encampment near the Wisewood, and came back as a barghest — larger, shaggier, eyes the colour of the moon. His soul was bonded to Van Hallam's in the Wisewood before his death, a bond strong enough to pull him back across the divide. He travels with Van and Pip across Hellsborough and The Dark Peak, haunting streets at murkneet when not otherwise occupied. Communicates with Pip via the hivemind.

A jellyhead working the checkout at Farantees in Hellsborough who is revealed by the fungai and molon-tor to be an ancient reincarnated soul. Her given name is Nibor-Ud; she has existed since the early history of The Dark Peak. Trained in all five soulprint skills and directed by the molon-tor to eliminate the Bitterfinger resistance, beginning with Pip Rippon.

The sovereign the murk wraiths answer to: a bodiless murk-will that keeps the drowned murk-sinks under the moors and does not, in the ordinary run of things, come up. When her sink is broken open she climbs toward the light through the hivemind, drowning one connected mind after another and casting for the next, and covets above all a quiet off-hivemind Netherlander mind as the foothold she cannot otherwise find. She cannot be killed, only subdued and driven back down her sink — and she remembers the mind that drove her back.

The analyst who commissions the field contracts across the Foked scenarios. She runs Soulprint residue lifted off the stones and the moor against the DPDC's books to put names to what the murk has taken, and pays out of her own margin when the answers frighten her more than the questions did. She files little of what she learns with the DPDC. It was Veth who ran the Hob Stone residue that first surfaced Mnemvore's signature, expecting one name and getting nine.

A DPDC survey assistant whose last reported location was a farmstead ruin on the upper fell. Went missing eight months before the events at the Nine Ladies and was filed as a standard unresolved absence, the survey region quietly reassigned. Rem reached one of the stones and touched it; what remains is a Soulprint echo looping the final three seconds of Rem's perception — one of the nine Mnemvore wears.

The Mother's son and the deadliest fighter in the Pit, billed as — and named for — The Silhouette: a shadow-figure his mother once drilled on a stretched sheet, since given flesh. Fought only in the caged ground beneath Owlerton's Old Terraces, and only against a fighter she has judged good enough to be worth losing. You cannot read him and you cannot easily land on him; most who go in to wear him down do not come back out.

The ancient, near-motionless proprietor of the Pit beneath Owlerton's Old Terraces. She runs the cage from a chair she never seems to leave, holds its only key, and keeps the ledger of every bout and its outcome. No tribe's law reaches her ground; she cannot be fought, bought, or hurried, and she locks the cage the instant a fighter commits and will not open it before the round is done. Mother to Silas, The Silhouette.

Six generations a clovenherd at Storrs above the Loxley valley, breeding wooltards and demonspawn for the Hellsborough tables. Spent so long inside the herd's head through the hivemind that when the oldbrownhorn called and the fold answered, Nan Rocher answered with it. Last seen standing in the yard at lowmurk, facing Bradfield.