Hellsborough Exposed

Before anything walking The Dark Peak had a name for itself, the stingers ruled it: yellow jackets built to last, lords for the better part of thirty million years, and they went extinct roughly thirty-two million years ago, if you believe what milting will admit to keeping. So I should not have watched one land on a fence post outside Malin Bridge this spring, fold its wings, and sit there long enough for me to draw it. Wings that gust, a reusable sting the length of my hand, a carapace with the sheen of wet corrugated iron, exactly as the old descriptions have it. It didn't attack. It watched me the way you watch something whose ending you already know. There have been more Exacid patrols round Malin Bridge since, and the word for what this might mean is banned, so I am declining to write it down.