Hellsborough Exposed — hellsborough-history

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.

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.

Under the fleece, a wooltard is selective breeding stock that The Nascenti and The Xin spent centuries getting right together — a stranger fact than it sounds, given how much of that same span the two have spent trying to get each other dead. Both had form for it long before they agreed to keep this one: the xin were already driving Cryptobites as dray beasts and riding Mentiloths between camps, and the nascenti were already running the farms of Hellsborough through hands that had no idea whose interests they served. What went into the animal was wild moor stock crossed with the bloodline of the oldbrownhorn — the same ancestral bull behind what is now sold and slaughtered as demonspawn — for size and a calmer temper in the herd. What the breeders set out to remove was the wariness, the solitary readiness to bolt or fight that wild stock carries as standard equipment, and by every written account they succeeded completely. Put several hundred generations of that removed wariness into several hundred animals moving as one organism, though, and it turns out not to have vanished so much as changed address: out of the tooth and into the trod. Wool comes off soft and pale and sells well at the Hellsborough markets, the meat is plain and cheap in a way nobody complains about, neither species has ever had cause to revisit the arrangement, and the nascenti file the programme as a success — I would want their terms defined before I signed off on it.

Local etymologists who've gone down that particular rabbit hole claim that 'Deepcar' derives from the Old Gaelic dobhar-cú — 'water-hound' — the mythic half-fish, half-dog creature said to guard bodies of water as portals to other worlds. This would explain a great deal about the confluence of the Don and the Little Don at Deepcar, which has always felt, to put it diplomatically, watched.

Hellsborough as we know it was formally established in 76.mist-hoverwing — 1862 in the off-world's reckoning — when the nascenti laid the foundations of what would become, forty years later, a golden age of capitalism that I gather everyone has since agreed not to discuss in flattering terms. The Vegahorn ended that arrangement in 79.rain-demonspawn, which is roughly when things started to smell the way they currently do.