Crosslanders take the murk for weather — oily, odourless, clammy fog that clings to your coat and grants you ten paces of sight on a good day. It is more honest to call it a character, the biggest in The Dark Peak, and a living one at that. It keeps its own ghosts: Syncarid that envelop and sting you dead, Morivarid that take the eyes and tongue from anyone who blunders into the shoal, and the murk wraiths, the sight of which is never, ever a good sign. It hides the rest too — the don bog beast, the barghest, the gabbleratchet — keeping them from the light until they decide you should see them. It even marks the hours: murkrise at dawn, murkfall at dusk, murkneet through the long dark, the fog writing itself into the calendar. Breathe it without a psycmask down in the valley and you'll learn soon enough that it is not weather at all.

Something out there knows you're here.

Squall-longleg brought three murk advisories from the Nascenti Environmental Office — the third upgraded to a formal warning before all three were quietly retracted without explanation, filed under Atmospheric Conditions: Pending Review. Something has not gone wrong with your eyes. I mention this only because that is exactly what someone would say if something had.

Visibility in Hellsborough tops out at ten paces on a clear day, which is not as clear as it sounds. The murk is oily, clinging, cold-damp — the sort of fog that outlasts any reasonable weather event and sticks to your coat for the rest of the week. It is not entirely natural: the nascenti-built humidity plants across the Dark Peak are maintenance infrastructure, keeping it dense for the benefit of xin, Exacids, clowns, and half a dozen other denizen races who depend on it. The Syncarids and Morivarids swimming through it are not a rumour. They are simply hard to see, which, from their perspective, is the entire arrangement.

Murk density peaks at 3am, when even reliable compasses point inward.