Hellsborough Exposed

Under the fleece, a wooltard is selective breeding stock that The Nascenti and The Xin spent centuries getting right together — a stranger fact than it sounds, given how much of that same span the two have spent trying to get each other dead. Both had form for it long before they agreed to keep this one: the xin were already driving Cryptobites as dray beasts and riding Mentiloths between camps, and the nascenti were already running the farms of Hellsborough through hands that had no idea whose interests they served. What went into the animal was wild moor stock crossed with the bloodline of the oldbrownhorn — the same ancestral bull behind what is now sold and slaughtered as demonspawn — for size and a calmer temper in the herd. What the breeders set out to remove was the wariness, the solitary readiness to bolt or fight that wild stock carries as standard equipment, and by every written account they succeeded completely. Put several hundred generations of that removed wariness into several hundred animals moving as one organism, though, and it turns out not to have vanished so much as changed address: out of the tooth and into the trod. Wool comes off soft and pale and sells well at the Hellsborough markets, the meat is plain and cheap in a way nobody complains about, neither species has ever had cause to revisit the arrangement, and the nascenti file the programme as a success — I would want their terms defined before I signed off on it.