Hellsborough Exposed — bestiary-legends

Say oldbrownhorn to a stockman old enough to have had it from his own father and he will correct you before you finish the sentence: not a kind of bull. The bull — twice the shoulder height of a working demonspawn bull, horns crossed back toward the eyes in a shape no wandering genetics ever produced unassisted, coat gone the colour of wet peat rather than any farmed hide. It has never once, in every account I have gathered, set a hoof on farmed ground; it stands on its own side of the top wall and calls, two low notes dragged up from somewhere lower in the chest than a bull's bellow has any right to come from, and every demonspawn and wooltard inside that fold answers whether the gate holds or not. Fight it and you have misunderstood the encounter entirely — nobody has ever been given the meeting, only the herd it calls and whatever stands between that herd and the wall. Stranger still is what a long-worked fold does to its oldest hands: more than one stockman has risen from a chair at a calling three valleys off and walked, unhurried and unstoppable, to stand among the driven animals, unable afterward to say what took him there. Whether it is the original bull line the nascenti and the xin drew the tame breeds out of centuries back, or a breeding failure that got out and grew old on the moor edge, is a question I have asked outright and been told, more than once, is not mine to have answered.

Nobody agrees what The Don Bog Beast actually is - water-hound, scimitar-cat, or something shaggy and green with the stature of a small demonspawn - and I have started to suspect that's the point, that naming it wrong is how the moor keeps its secrets. What's certain is that something large and singular hunts the source of The Don, high in the Dark Peak's worst ground, and every theory converges on the same stretch of bog.

Yar Viranna I have never seen, and I intend to keep that record unblemished — the accounts that reach me all come secondhand, since surviving her nearness is not the same as surviving her. She is queen of the cold drowned places, the murk-sinks and sealed pits where the murk pools black and unbothered, and the murk wraiths answer to her as their sovereign. Crack a seal she sleeps under and she begins to climb — not with limbs, but down the hivemind itself, drowning one mind in her long cold before casting for the next; and if you are a denizen or a jellyhead, you are on that channel, which means you are already within reach. What she truly hungers for is the one thing she cannot touch: a quiet, off-hivemind Netherlander's mind, a clean empty foothold she has been drowning toward for a very long time. She cannot be killed, only subdued and sent back down, and she remembers the mind that drove her under. Here is your only warning — when the moor goes silent and the murk reads thin where it ought to read deep, you are already standing over her draw, so leave, and do not go looking to test any of this, because she does not need finding, only an opening.

Wadsley Common has a stone circle, and the stone circle has a Bracken Man — thorn-bodied, ash-legged, coal-eyed — documented in an old poem that predates anyone currently alive. It emerges from the circle. It goes back. What it does in between is not recorded, which I find, on reflection, more alarming than what is.

Documented three specimens patrolling Stanage edge — same route, same stones, never varying by more than a second per circuit over six hours of observation, the gritstone plates on their lower legs having worn grooves into the rock that exactly match their stride. A gritstrike does not hunt; it occupies, and if you are on its path when it arrives, it walks through where you are standing. Step aside when you hear scree shifting in rhythm — it is not interested in you, you are simply in the way.

Somewhere above the source of the Don, where the Dark Peak gets seriously inhospitable, something very large moves through the wetland murk. Witnesses report striped flanks, a low-slung shoulder mass, a silence so absolute it reads as deliberate. Most compare it to a descendant of Dinofelis — a prehistoric felid between a leopard and a lion — though the contingent who claim it barks, once, twice, and then a third time, say that anyone who doesn't reach cover before that third bark dies of the fear itself.

Loxley-Kraken: believed to dwell under the bridge at Hellsborough corner — that most liminal of places where the crossroads, the river, and the bridge occupy the same space simultaneously. It takes passersby from the street above, drowns them in the Loxley river, stores the bodies until decomposed, and sucks the meat from the bones, which wash downriver to the confluence of the Dun and, some believe, all the way to the Ripperthroat mountains where they are met by Dunlockslyn. This is logged in the HiveMind under "cryptids of the murk." I have not crossed that bridge at murkneet since.

Down in the dark pool beneath the Hellsborough Hole road bridge, the Loxley Kraken hunted rats, then cats, then dogs, then things she found more interesting. Van Hallam's solution — riding a river whale into her lair and driving the Skewer of Dunlockslyn through her single real eye — is documented in enough sources that I have stopped questioning it. It explains the smell.