Hellsborough Exposed — bestiary-legends

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.