Hellsborough Chronicles - Hellsborough and The Dark Peak
The semi-mythical Van Hallam's adventures in Hellsborough and The Dark Peak.
The finished version of Dark Peak: Hellsborough Chronicles Book One, is now available in Kindle and paperback formats from Amazon -- or you can download the first 7 chapters for free in ePub or Kindle mobi format from Hellsborough Library
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Introduction » Chapter 1 » Chapter 2 » Chapter 3 » Chapter 4 » Chapter 5 » Chapter 6 » Chapter 7 »
I dunno, probably asleep in the pantry, said Van, I haven't seen him today, I suspect he got in late last night, later than us I imagine. Anyway, the enclosure contained young xin hatching from eggs, the enclosure was a incubator. But those eggs in the incubator, they are not part of a brood as you would get with cluckers or quackers, no, that icubator is filled with the eggs of the whole community -- think of it as like all the frog spawn from a small pond; all mingled together and then when the frogspawn emerge as a cohort, they're all brother and sisters, regardless of their parents -- no-one even knows who their parents are -- and from then on, it's simply survival of the fittest.
Each adult xin female lays around a dozen eggs each year, and those which meet the size, weight, and specific gravity tests are hidden in the recesses of some subterranean vault where the temperature is too low for incubation. These eggs are then carefully examined by senior community midwives, and all but the most perfect are destroyed out of each year's supply.
Destroyed? I said, incredulous as such a barbaric act.
Yes, destroyed Pip. Eggs are protein, aren't they; like I said, survival of the fittest. And yes, it is barbaric, and the xin are barbarians. At the end of five years about five hundred almost perfect eggs have been chosen from thousands of candidates. These are then placed in the almost air-tight incubators to be hatched by the sun's paltry rays after this long period of five years.
Parental and filial love is as unknown the xin, as it is common to us humans. I believe this horrible system which has been carried on for ages is the direct cause of the loss of all their better feelings and higher instincts. Remember last night when I said about the dead dyapnid that Shad dispatched, and then Fenimoss just didn't question it when she came back into the room, I'm sure you do. That's because from birth they know no father or mother love, they know not the meaning of the word home; they are taught that they are only suffered to live until they can demonstrate by their physique and ferocity that they are fit to live. Should they prove deformed or defective in any way they are promptly exterminated; nor do they see a tear shed for a single one of the many cruel hardships they pass through from earliest infancy.
I do not mean that the adult xin are unnecessarily or intentionally cruel to the young, but theirs is a hard and pitiless struggle for existence in a cruel world, the natural resources of which have dwindled to a point where the support of each additional life means an added tax upon the community into which it is thrown.
By careful selection they rear only the hardiest specimens of their species, and with almost supernatural foresight they regulate the birth rate to merely offset the loss by death.
And that's the sort of people they are, and from birth they are armed heavily and their only education is in combat and how to survive in The Dark Peak, and as I was new to this place and needed to learn the same skills, I began to follow the ways of the xin and follow their teachings so that I might survive in this place.
The xin language, as I have said, is extremely simple, and in a week I could make all my wants known, and understand nearly everything that was said to me. Likewise, with Fenimoss as my tutor, I developed my telepathic powers so that I shortly could sense practically everything that went on around me.
What surprised Fenimoss most was that while I could catch telepathic messages easily from others, and often when they were not intended for me, no one could read a jot from my mind under any circumstances. At first this annoyed me intently, until, said Van with a wink, I realised it was something of an advantage.
OK, that's interesting, I said, jotting down a few words in my notepad as Van came to a poignant pause in this story.
What is?
The hive mind, and you being able to read the thoughts if the xin, but not visa-versa. And of course, your recently found ability to communicate with the dead, via Shad.
Ah! Well, Shad here, that's different. Our souls were conjoined before his demise, I won't say that the bond hasn't strengthened since though. The xin, that was a gift, and a definite advantage over the them -- and, by association all the denizen races of The Dark Peak; they have their organic network and their hive mind, but if I get close enough, I can literally hear their thoughts, which comes in very handy indeed.
As a small child, my "mother" had said that I possessed this gift for talking to people who weren't there. I didn't realise at the time for I was far too young, but it was the same, it was talking to dead people. That incident after Shad had become a barghest, that was just a physical realisation of this power that had always been there, I guess.
Sometimes Pip, I wondered why this might be, but in retrospect, it gave me a complete advantage. I have always thought that my space lies between the living and the dead, as you maybe witness here in Hellsborough. You have surely noted that whilst I am not invisible, I am largely ignored by everyone, yet I am not insignificant.
Tell me more about some of your childhood experiences, I said, but I could tell that Van had little interest in telling those stories the way that he picked up his pint and just quaffed, as if snubbing my question. I guess he was just too young to understand such things and took them for granted, it's just the same old story about talking to imaginary friends, and didn't we all have one of them, eh?
There's always a bigger picture, isn't there?