Every plant in Hellsborough — trees, flowers, moss, the roadside grass along every valley path — reports its heat signature to the nearest nascenti sub-station. The fungal network below ground is the communications medium, which means the floor of The Dark Peak is active data infrastructure and every step taken through vegetation is a step filed and processed. Worth noting: the fungal AI that handles this data has recently become sentient, which means something with access to every heat signature in The Dark Peak has, for the first time, interests of its own.

Xin wound medicine is the most practically useful system of healthcare in The Dark Peak, and they have no interest in sharing it with anyone outside their encampments. A combination of Mentiloth and Cryptobite products and several hundred years of applied Dark Peak botany has produced techniques that extend xin life to several centuries. This is presumably relevant to anyone considering provoking a xin tribe: the individual you are insulting may have had several hundred years to develop a considered response.

Crosslanders report the copper taste before anything else — the flat metallic note at the back of the tongue that precedes the murk's arrival by anything up to several minutes. It arrives before the atmosphere thickens, before the traffic noise cuts, before the air becomes untenable. Experienced crosslanders have come to treat it as an early-warning system, which reflects either genuine resourcefulness or the fact that every other warning Hellsborough provides arrives too late to be of any use.

Nascenti longevity — nine or ten times the human lifespan — is, according to N'Sogoth, the basis of their right to govern. A creature with a millennium to think about things ought, in theory, to produce wisdom. What it appears to have produced, at this particular historical moment, is a detailed and specific operational plan to eliminate me. Perhaps longevity and good judgement are not as correlated as the theory suggests.