Hellsborough Exposed

Gloaming is the good part of the day, and it does not run to the same length all year. During the Windstrom it is over before you have registered it started, but around the vernal equinox it stretches out, holding the murklight for many moments before murknight shuts it down, and everything that lives in that margin comes out to make use of the extra time. Stand still in it and you will get the screetch-chatter of a pied corvid, a scrufftail laughing its way through a nest of ashpeeps, the hoot of a flatface, the yelp of barkers somewhere down the valley. This is also when the natural strength of The Dark Peak is reckoned to be at its greatest, and the old advice is that now is the time to be practising your spells and your mysticism, which would be of considerably more use to me if I knew any. What I do have are copies of the milting semagrams, including a fair number whose function I have never established, and it occurs to me at exactly this point every year that I ought to try reciting them, and every year I find a reason not to.