Van defined the Molon-Tor in a single phrase: the social media infection that those native to The Dark Peak carry in their heads — virus, not creature, ancient, distributed, inside you before you had opinions about it. It uses your name. It remembers things about you from before you were born.

John Shalesmoor comes in on his nights off to drink at the competitor's bar — not for intelligence, not out of rivalry, but because sometimes you just want a different view. He works across Middlewood Road. He is six foot seven. These were the only three things I could confidently write about him in the first week; the list has grown considerably longer.

Bradfield is drifting north. Ray Hobson has been measuring the boundary posts for long enough that his clipboard has its own character arc, and the data is consistent: fourteen metres of contested field, moving north at a rate he refuses to estimate in case estimating makes it faster.

Scraith Rawson, Ley engineer and member of the bitter finger, walked into a Moor kitchen and proposed a coalition of all four nether-human factions — Ley, Moor, Marsh, Wood — against the nascenti, with a warhead targeting Damflask and Ladybower, guided by hijacked organic network nodes. He illustrated the concept using stacked preserves. Scarp Southey was blind and smelled the condescension immediately.