The Curated Guide to Hellsborough and The Dark Peak
Your Guide to navigating Hellsborough and The Dark Peak by Pip Rippon.
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Introduction » Chapter 1 » Chapter 2 » Chapter 3 » Chapter 4 » Chapter 5 » Chapter 6 »
Hellsborough is very different from the off-world
Part 1 - The Denizens
After the illimitable cleavage of 66 Ma, the creatures that survived after the dinosaurs and much other life had been eliminated from the planet, fought for supremacy. As Milting observed and later recorded, many species developed in powerful and warlike ways, some establishing great empires.
The Dark Peak is a great wilderness situated on the island of Great Britain, part of the British isles. Surrounded by ocean, or sea, salty water in any case, the ancient dark peak covers the majority of the island, a wild and inhospitable place. Until the advent of mankind, the denizens ruled the entire land, after the demise of the wasps, but as primates came to prominence, so the dark peak shrank in the off-world and this side of the hinge to compensate, and the current area encompasses the upland area in England at the southern end of the Pennines, where moorland is found and the geology is dominated by gritstone. It is still a wild a rugged place. Hellsborough is a frontier town on the edge of The Dark Peak, but separated by the wisewood and surrounded by the greater Barnsdale forest.
The insects being a much older genus than other land dwellers and possessing an adolescent hivemind, took an early strangle-hold on the world, with the wasps, in particular becoming highly dominant. The wasps built great cities of corrugated bark which offered refuge from the worst excesses of The Murk, and they became adept at conquering and enslaving other lesser species, to carry out their labour, toil and soldiery.
The wasps were intelligent and ruthless, had grown in physical size from skinny bees to tank-like creatures, and armed with their natural weaponry: Gusting wings and rapier like reusable stings, had become a truly formidable opponent; in fact, by the zenith of their reign, there was no opponent capable of challenging their might. As a species, the wasps looked set to rule the world for a millennium. And they did.
The wasp empire was the largest contiguous land empire in the history of The Dark Peak. They ruled without mercy, but strangely, fairly; encouraging trade routes, like establishing the long causeway between the embryonic (pre-ape) settlements at Sheffield and Hathersage. They shared their technology for the greater good of all, they fostered community of their slave species, eventually releasing all with full “freedoms”. They admitted to past wrongs, and paid for those wrongs honourably.
But such altruism eventually led to splits within the wasp hierarchy and civil war – those that cared, and those that didn’t. A racist element that the hivemind was unable to comprehend, a dichotomy at odds with their altruism. The wasps died of their own stupidity, which left a massive gap in the ecosystem, and the denizens evolved to compete in that gap (and what a gap, one species becomes extinct, and leads to the development of 6 others). The empire fractured, and the world entered another period of prolonged technological dark ages.
A New World Order
Around 50 hours before the divergence of humans from apes, in our aforementioned history of the Earth in a year, something like 32 million years ago, a new world order started establishing itself.
Originally, there were six* – the denizens of the hex – cultivated and nurtured by Milting, but given no favouritism, just monitored and their progress recorded. In the dark ages, Milting accelerated their development and gave each their own territory to restore world order.
Why did Milting do this? – There is no answer that I have found. The only thing of relevance that I have uncovered was a partial scripture – or semagram – that hinted that one day the wasps would return – a prophesy well understood in The Dark Peak.
There are now 11 denizens of The Dark Peak. The next five were domesticated by the original six as helper species, in much the same way that a barker or a onetoe is a helper species of us humans. Of course, like there are wild barkers, there are also wild dyapnid. Similarly, wooltards and demonspawn were selectively bred, as they were in the off-world, producing similar results to sheep and cows respectively.
The
Nascenti*
Rarely seen but vast in number, the nascenti are a highly intelligent
race of langoustine type creatures, that own Hellsborough and the
Eastern part of The Dark Peak.
Exacid
Law enforcers of The Dark Peak, with license to use deadly force.
Hexikid
Genetically engineered heavy duty street cleaners and road clearers.
The
Xin*
Nomadic tribes several thousand in number of warlike insectoid frogs
with a strong set of hind legs and two pairs of forearms, they spend
their time in the farther reaches of The Dark Peak.
Mentiloth
Death winged steeds of the xin, used for high speed transport and
dexterity during battle.
Crytobite
Heavy dray animals used by the xin.
Dyapnid
Domesticated by the xin as hunting animals or wandering wild in
intimidating packs throughout The Dark Peak, their collective
intelligence is much like buzzers and biters.
Xaexs*
Solitary female mercenary warriors, specialising in technology and
warfare; often described as being like a ruthless samurai cockroach.
Clown*
Physically identical to humans, but with highly decorated bodies, the
clowns once ruled The Dark Peak. Now, they are frequently seen in
Hellsborough, but are known for being spies and couriers.
For: Morivarid* and Syncarid* (see chapter 5)
None of the denizens exist in the off-world, and all are the result of the extinction of wasps. They are all classed as intelligent species and all have access to the hive mind (as do some cryptids, and dwellers of The Murk, such as barghests, see chapter 5). All denizens are hatched from eggs, and the evolution of all of them is pre-mammalian. The Nascenti and Exacid are descendants of crustacean, The Xin were originally amphibian, Morivarid and Syncarid of fish, and the rest of various strains of insect. All succeeded in the place of the extinct wasps as scavengers and recyclers in the circle of life, and in the absence of wasps were able to progress over the eons, developing consciousness and establishing various levels of society.
Saying that these denizens are intelligent doesn’t mean that other residents of Hellsborough and The Dark Peak don’t share that ability. It is well known that the corvid, barker, rooter, scrufftail and even gnawmard and many other species are all known to show signs of exceptional intelligence and able to solve many problems. Likewise, the lesser denizens, although they have access to the hive mind, do not show the same levels of intelligence as the “denizens of the hex”.