Hellsborough Exposed — pandora-I

Van was mid-tale about his first days in the xin village when Pip caught him in a discrepancy that unravelled fifty years of Hellsborough history.

"Well over there, sat by the door is Pandora the clown. Yet you talk about Pandora the clown from years ago - surely they cannot be the same?"

"Can't they?"

"Well how?"

"You tell me, you're the academic."

Van told me he had been inside the chambers of Onesimus when he overheard Pandora, Princess of Hathersage, pledge herself to Ocnus of Glossop — a political manoeuvre she delivered with the calm of someone who had been choosing her moment. He deserted his post immediately, blundered through corridors he described as "worse than t'Wisewood," and drew his whipo'wil on four royal guards before doing the arithmetic. He didn't get to her rooms; he doesn't like to dwell on this.

A Glossopian diplomat Van encountered at a moorland inn told him Pandora was dead — a captured green warrior had confirmed she escaped from the swamp with an unknown creature not of The Dark Peak, only to fall into Strinxin hands; her Mentiloth had been found wandering alone on the moor with evidence of a battle nearby. Van reasoned, quickly for him, that none of this actually confirmed she was dead. This did not stop him from needing to move significantly faster.

Pandora I — the clown woman from Van's early Dark Peak years, not to be confused with the Pandora in the bar who is a generation removed — relayed a cultural rule I have since found consistent: in The Dark Peak, no man lies; if he does not wish to speak the truth, he is silent. Van used this to establish trust with her early in his time among the xin. I have tested the rule against subsequent encounters and cannot find a counterexample, which I find either admirable or deeply unsettling depending on what the silence is covering.