Hellsborough Exposed

Van told me of the Sunderlands, and I have not shaken the telling since. Beyond the Ripperthroat mountains, past a fissure in smooth black basalt, lies the great northern expanse — endless ice fields that run on, the Woad swear, forever, and beyond them nothing at all. They name it the bleakness: where our Bleak is a season, theirs is every day of the year, the very end of the world. On the neutral strip between the ice and the mountains huddle the villages of lost souls — pilgrims who turned off the Dun and could not scale the canyon walls, escaped milting slaves, the stranded who can go nowhere and will never leave. Neither woad nor milting trouble to recapture them, for there is nothing out there worth wanting, and the lost souls fight only amongst themselves, harming no one but each other.