Hellsborough Exposed — hellsborough-religion

Van, held in the milting caves beneath the Ripperthroats, had just been told by a slave there that any milting who dies before its million years are up becomes a Syncarid:

"And what if a syncarid snuffs it?" said Van.

"Then that milting's soul becomes dispersed into a shoal of Morivarid. And if that entire shoal dies before those million years have elapsed, the soul is lost forever, and is subsumed by the murk."

"We sent a few of them milting to the murk today then," said Siltibog, laughing.

"And for that, your death be the more terrible when it comes," she said.

Up on Wadsley Common sits a glade that will not hold still — find it at the wrong hour, from the wrong bearing off the white obelisk on Loxley Edge, and it simply is not there. Inside stands the Sentinel stone, held sacred by the Moor and Ley clans as the place you stand closest to dunlockslyn, and the closeness does not leave you the way it found you: ground I know like the back of my hand turned strange under my feet, and the only company I trusted afterward was Shad and an ever-watchful redfront.

Ask a folklorist and they'll tell you the milting were cunning folk — but that undersells them by some sixty-six million years. These small, leathery, rice-toothed humanoids are ancient survivors of the illimitable cleavage, the meteor-strike that ended the dinosaurs and birthed the Murk; their wings are long traded for arms like yours and mine, yet the talons linger in the fingernails and their whole lineage's memory sits written, hereditary, in the blood. They created dunlockslyn — the religion itself — and in an earlier eon you might have called them angels and Dunlockslyn your God. Their collective intelligence is the forerunner of the hive mind, which ought to trouble you more than it does. They mill about near elder trees, change into longlegs after dark, and will, given half a chance and a pleasant afternoon, talk you clean out of everything you own. And they exist on both sides of the junction — of course they do.

Van mentioned it the way he mentions things he considers obvious: d'divi has three tails. The three rivers draining The Dark Peak — the Dun, the Loxley, the Rivelin — are not waterways; they are the three tails of the divine serpent, and this is the first thing you learn here and the last thing you remember. Dunlockslyn is not violent, which is not the same as safe: the hazard is that the journey ends at the Ripperthroat mountains, and it ends once. Every denizen in The Dark Peak, regardless of species, eventually takes the dunfall. During a rockcrust episode in S6, Van spoke to it directly — "Oh Dunlockslyn. I am ready for you. I am primitive again" — and the god apparently judged him unready, because he is still here.

dunlockslyn — d'divi, the divine serpent — is not three gods but one head with three tails, each rising from a different point in The Dark Peak before converging at the skull that terminates past the Ripperthroat mountains into the North Sea. Three separate voices, three competing points of view, one deity: whether the god is the head itself or the convergence of the tails is a theological argument the woad have maintained for generations, and I have made a personal decision not to enter it.

milting are disciples of dunlockslyn and may be what your off-world predecessors were trying to describe when they wrote down the word "angel," which should be taken as evidence of either poor observation or very limited options. Their memory is hereditary, passed through lineage. When you speak to a milting about history, you are speaking to a record that goes back sixty-six million years, and most of them are insufferable about it.

Scerm inhabits The Hinge. This is the detail nobody who has not been to the Ripperthroats will take seriously, until they are at the Ripperthroats, at which point it is too late to find it interesting in a purely academic sense. The Hinge is reached via the River Dun — all denizens of The Dark Peak make this pilgrimage at the end of their lives — and the milting keep order there, not through enforcement but through a particular kind of patience: they have been managing arrivals since before the Illimitable Cleavage and show no sign of finding it tedious.

Every crosslander and denizen in The Dark Peak worships Dunlockslyn — the giver of life flowing through the Dun, the Loxley, the Rivelin. At the end of life, the soul goes up to the ripperthroat mountains, where the murk sits thickest. Nobody's come back to confirm the logistics.