Hellsborough Exposed

Long before anything with a backbone mattered, wasps ran The Dark Peak: grown from skinny bees into tank-like things with gusting wings and reusable stings, building cities of corrugated bark to shelter from the murk, and holding the largest unbroken land empire it has ever known. What unsettles me is that they ruled fairly, laying the long causeway between Sheffield and Hathersage, freeing their slave species and paying for their wrongs, and it was that same altruism that split them into civil war and finished them. Milting recorded a prophecy that the wasps will one day return, and I've stopped swatting them on principle.

A sly is one of the few Wisewood residents that will use a garden as readily as a hedgerow, and its contact bark carries on a still murkneet so close to a scream that half of Hellsborough has woken convinced someone's being murdered two gardens over. The bark on its own means nothing. A bark that keeps going from one spot, long past when a fox would give up and move on, means something's cornered it or it's cornered something, so stay away until it stops.