Hellsborough Exposed — dark-peak-weather

Hellsborough's deep winter has a specific name: the bleak. Frost hard overnight, the murk thickened with cold, nothing comfortable to say about the conditions for as long as it lasts. Worth going up onto Wadsley and Loxley commons anyway - something up there takes the weight of it, even when the ground is trying to break your ankles.

When the humidity plant stopped, The Dark Peak had three days. On the morning of the third day, breathing became difficult in Hathersage; by murknoon the weakest had started to wither. Van says it is the sort of thing you remember — watching an entire civilisation count down to its last breath — and I have not pressed him on why, exactly, he left it until almost the last possible moment before going to fix it.

Most crosslanders assume the murk is weather. It is, partly — but a significant fraction is manufactured, maintained by humidity plants the nascenti built across the five territories of The Dark Peak. Xin, Exacids, clowns, Dyapnids, Mentiloths, and Cryptobites all prefer additional moisture in the air, which makes the murk less an atmospheric nuisance and more a shared infrastructure project that humans have the misfortune of also breathing.

Mist off the flagstones every murkrise, corvids circling what's left of the visibility, flies at the ankles. No sun. Hasn't been one in living memory. I checked.