Hellsborough Exposed — murk-lore

Over a pint in the bar, Van set about teaching me to work the murk:

"Tha sees Pip, tha can control the murk; this is me programming the scerm to make the murk do my bidding -- try it."

"There you go Pip, I saw it, that little wisp that touched tha 'and there. Tha made the murk do what tha wanted."

"Maybe it was a gust from somewhere," I said. "I don't think I have done much."

"No," said Van, "that were intentional murk changing, I saw it, tha bent it to tha will, tha did that, now try it again."

"Scerm surfing is a degrading activity, akin to chasing the dragon." Pip's own words for it — and not a verdict reached from the outside.

A housing assessor is an event. The ones with the Molon-Tor are a condition.

Somewhere on the western edge of the Wisewood, near the gosava tree grove, there is a creature that has been attempting to scratch its own face off with a piece of flint for eleven years and has not yet succeeded. boggart heritage is the likely explanation for the Wisewood Reaper — murkwraith plague the likelier one, given the hollow eyes, the stillness, and the fly agaric caps in its pouch that have not decayed in the years it has been carrying them. It does not pursue and does not threaten; what it does is attempt to explain, in a flat and thorough voice, why your life has meaning — citing examples uniformly bleak, arriving at a conclusion so wrapped in despair that by the time it finishes, you have forgotten what it was arguing. Three people I spoke to walked away intact, and all three said the same thing: at some point during the conversation they had started asking it to cognivise them, and they didn't know when they'd started asking. Van once told me it said it had been made for something and then not used — he did not ask what, and neither did I, and I consider that the most sensible decision either of us has ever made in the Wisewood.

Van Hallam once explained scerm to me using a triangle: Liminal at the top, Physical at the bottom-left, Social at the bottom-right. Most folk ignore the liminal, he said, which goes a long way toward explaining why Hellsborough functions the way it does — which is to say, poorly and with great conviction. Scerm is the embodiment of the murk, the prayers of Dunlockslyn, quantum code — once you know it, he told me, there is no unknowing it. He said this as a fact. I suspect that was also intentional.