Researcher's Insight into the Hellborn
Undated
Written on the back of a sketch of a hand

Much like a fire stoked by wind, tales, too, do spread.

In the archives of dime novel author Jasper Priest, I discovered a manuscript whose story mirrors first-hand accounts of the appearance of the Hellborn. Did he have a direct source? Or did authorial imagination run wild with the rumors spreading across Colorado? Thank God the thing never saw publication.

Imagine, for a moment, that the story is true. Then here we might extrapolate new evidence of the Corruption's power to twist, mangle, and deform. Yet, even as it deforms, we see it strip a soul down to its very essence. Flaying off the skin, as it were, to reveal the truth beneath. Damon's story, should we believe it, ties his transformation to unspeakable grief, unrepentant violence performed on innocents in the name of greed, and finally, a sacrifice in the name of both redemption and revenge. It is a curious tale indeed.

I have returned to Mammon's Gulch on several occasions to further my own observations of the Hellborn, and its behaviors are best described as volatile. The lava within is identical to that found below the Colorado crust. Its aggression is matched by a speed that can easily dodge slower projectiles. If indeed the creature was once human, I cannot help but wonder if its personality matches its nature.

Though at first glance similar to the Immolator, the Hellborn is unique in its larger stature and the lava which it produces internally. This, and its unmistakable scent of brimstone, are the markers of Hell which led to its naming.

Measurements show aftershocks of the Hellborn's emergence are still felt to this day. Seismographs scribble in a frenzy at its screams when the monstrosity is provoked. Thermometers rupture whenever it draws near. Both tremors and heat show no sign of dissipating.

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Tortured Peaks Excerpt
Author: Jasper Priest
From Chapter 1: Peshtigo, Wisconsin

Damon saw it fall from the sky. Sitting at his bedroom window, the blue-white star trailed through the evening like an angel losing feathers—a screaming, dying angel. Everywhere a feather touched, fire sprouted.

The comet-shard roared over the house and landed far down the road with the crash of a great mirror. Phosphorus light sprang in pillars from the town where his father worked late in his candle shop.

Damon took a horse and rode as fast as he could. Fish scales of heat fluttered and burned in the oak canopies. A cattle driver up on a hill walked into the flickering embers and caught fire so fast Damon thought he'd been doused in kerosene.

In town, bodies burned in a thousand flames. They smoldered out of windows, boiled water troughs, crumbled into ash.

Horses on Main Street gathered in a circle around a monolith shard of the comet. Maddened by its flames, they tasted of it like grazers at a salt lick, their teeth clacking on its otherworldly stone.

Damon searched for his father through bodies charred beyond recognition.

The only movement came from a man crawling away from the evaporating comet, crushed in half. His blood burned on the dirt. Entrails sputtered and curled in letters of an unspeakable language. Damon found his father, knelt inside the remnants of him, the smell of sizzling fat and bile stinging his eyes.

He held his father's hand. Meteoric heat seared his palm, and his memory.

Damon closed his eyes, but the image of his father burned there too, a ghost. His father's final scream framed by flames, doused by pain, in filaments of some unknowable void, passed into Damon's blood. Something sleeping waiting to be born.

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Tortured Peaks Excerpt
Author: Jasper Priest
From Chapter 2: Mammon's Gulch, CO

The dog drank water greedily from a helmet. Miners crowded round, pulling draughts of moonshine, smoking pipes, rubbing coal flecked with silver between stained fingers.

"Why do we need the dog?" Damon asked.

"'Cause otherwise," the toothless man said, "we'd be sending you down."

Greenest of the lot, Damon had yet to adjust to the darkness of a day spent in the bowels of Oro Gordo Mine. When lanterns winked out and shadow overtook him, he could feel the tunnels and chasms like an extension of his own gut. He had hardly been in the Gulch a month, hoping the western frontiers would give him a fresh start.

Two miners tied a bundle of dynamite to the dog. The toothless man, reeking of kerosene, grabbed Damon by the shoulder, and whispered in his ear: boom.

With reverence, Damon was given a sputtering match.

He took the dog's paw in his hand. Squeezed it gently, as gently as he had held his father's hand. Damon lit the fuse and the toothless man tossed a stick far down the tunnel ahead, down into the cracks of the chamber in need of widening.

The dog ran off to fetch the stick. Darkness swallowed the mutt, and then the dynamite turned its happy bark into a deft roar.

"Why bring blood to the bottom of the world?" Damon asked.

"So that the things that drink of blood do not rise to seek it up here."

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Tortured Peaks Excerpt
Author: Jasper Priest
From Chapter 3: Mammon's Gulch, CO

Damon opened the coffin lid. Inside, the toothless miner stared wide-eyed, bound by ropes. A cloth thick with oil pushed deep into his mouth.

"There are curses deep below the earth," the Boss said. He toed the edge of the drilling platform, spat into the open chasm below them. "We abide by the superstitions, and bring offerings. When evil is disturbed here, we do what we must to quell it."

The Boss handed Damon a token of strange shape and weight.

"Give him what he tried to steal from me," the Boss said. "Feed it to him."

Damon closed his eyes, and his father's screams spooled in flames across the darkness of his vision. Gently, he squeezed the toothless miner's hand. Then he removed the oiled cloth and shoved the token into his mouth.

"You'll need this to push it deeper Mr. Delacroix." The Boss put a thorny branch in Damon's hand, helped guide it into the miner's throat, slide it forcibly into the stomach. The man tried to scream, but only gummed thorns and bled.

Lightning struck the derrick above them as Damon withdrew his arm. The coffin tumbled over platform's edge and the miner plunged into depths of the Gulch.

From those depths, came a spark of phantom light.

The whole of Colorado began to tremble. An earthquake bit upon the very foundations of the Gulch and shook it like a rabid dog. Avalanches cascaded down steep slopes, split trees, crushed train cars. The world's lifeblood flushed forth to heal this new wound. Dry wells and pools flooded black. Oil surged forth and spewed to create a land of forbidden fountains.

Tasting the black rain on his tongue, the thing which had slept inside Damon began to wake.

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Tortured Peaks Excerpt
Author: Jasper Priest
From Chapter 4: Mammon's Gulch, CO

"Looking for these?" the Boss asked. He held a box inlaid with velvet. Six hands rested within.

Horses slicked with oil circled the iron vats below. Candles cast demented shadows upon the walls. The scene was a recreation of the night of the Peshtigo fire. The horses circling, the charred bodies strewn across the foundry floor.

Three bandits bound by chains dangled over the smelting ores.

Damon reached out to one of their hands, found nothing but a bloodied stump.

"Kindness stains the ritual, Mr. Delacroix. It lowers the output of the wells."

One by one, Damon took the severed hands. Felt their callouses, traced the circle of a wedding ring. Dropped them into the molten metals.

"Let us drink from the fountain of death," Damon said , finishing the rite. He finished recording the experiment's notes. Steeled himself.

"We've…we've done nothing wrong," a bandit sputtered. "We're surveyors!"

"Below us, there is sin foul enough to ruin the earth," Damon said to the bandit. “We offer up evil men to soothe it and lull it to sleep. If you're a good man, truly good, then I'll take the whole of the world's curses upon myself. If you're good, I'll burn with fire enough to blacken the moon."

With a great clamp and vice, Damon pressed each bandit into a slender iron cylinder. Flesh boiled and overflowed. Fat dripped and sizzled. Tendons writhed like the hair of angels on fire. The tokens inside them kept them awake, bound the awareness of their soul to crumpling bone.

At the oil field, Damon dropped the cylinders down new boreholes. Each time the thing sleeping within him sieved blood through its mouth, pressed sacrifices into kindling for the great pyre to come.

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Tortured Peaks Excerpt

Author: Jasper Priest
From Chapter 5: Mammon's Gulch, CO

"You've let guilt stain your soul instead of free it," the Boss said on the oil platform. "You've taken so many hands in your own, but won't let the Lord take yours."

Damon's nerves and flesh roiled molten inside one of the ritual cylinders he had invented. He accepted the punishment of his body, compressed and imprisoned. It was penance for all the people he'd sacrificed before, thinking they were bandits. They were not. He'd released the last group, and if they managed to escape the Gulch and the Boss's wrath, Damon thought he might find some kind of peace beyond death.

There would be no more ceremony. What was left of him was dropped down a borehole, the deepest one yet. Layers of dirt and rock flew past on his descent. Time slowed.

Damon remembered the dog in Oro Gordo Mine, the feel of its fur. He recalled the gums of the toothless miner biting his arm, their warmth. He felt the urge to scream as his burning father had screamed, and he felt the thing sleeping inside him swallow up his wrath one final time.

Then he felt it wake up.

Damon landed upon a firmament, one from before the time of men and beasts and vast salt seas. His skull passed through its membrane. There, heat from the comet still living inside him drank the curses from every other sacrifice piled upon the void.

His lungs expanded and became the very chambers of the earth, its magma wells and hollows. His flesh reforged as hardened basalt around his spine. Arms and legs regrew as he crawled in placental lava towards the sky.

A roar let loose. West of the continental divide, the ears of every man, woman, and child bled. The blood seeped into their pillows. Red stains splayed out on cotton like fingers from a hand reaching out through some terrible lake of fire, of dream, all to hold theirs.

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