The Bullydale Wastes are a Nightmare Realm of the Dreaming.
Overview[]
Past the Fields Behind, the trods grow treacherous, becoming less like roads and more like goat-paths or hunting trails. The faerie villages grow smaller and less common, thinning out until the traveler is alone but for a rude cottage here and there. The cottagers themselves grow increasingly strange, and this is a region of cannibals, inverts, bandits, and witches.
The landscape here tends toward the unknowable but malign depths of the uninhabited wilderness. Old oaks, brambles, and bogs encourage the traveler to keep to the path. In the dark, little nightmares and dreadlings breed, to serve as allies and tools (and often as raw materials) for the lonely faerie inhabitants of this place.
These are the Bullydales, also known as "the Dark Lands" or the "wild country" by Earthward changelings. Swamps alternate with blasted heaths. The proportions are off and everything is a bit unbalanced, but not overwhelmingly so. In other words, Bedlam. Eccentricity, pettiness, greed, short-sightedness, and stupidity rule here.
A nasty, brutish place, the Bullydale (or, sometimes, Hitherdale) Wastes are linked to all creatures that survive through poison, theft, and eating offal: hyenas, lizards, cuckoos, carnivorous plants. The realm's dominant emotional affinity is endless, mindless hunger, which results in the common sight of Bullylings gnawing on one another out of boredom and mutual loathing. Smarter chimera often sublimate this hunger into greedy or hoarding behavior. They perform unspeakably petty and vindictive acts in the hope of being rewarded with gold or jewels, or even a tasty cut of meat or some wet leather. The props that are particularly affiliated with the Bullydales include crude implements of torture and intimidation, but generally extend to anything broken or discarded... the swampy ground of many areas of the Wastes is covered with piles of trash and other useless litter.
At various points, the Wastes completely sink into the bogs, utterly obscuring the trods. Here, local bandit tribes tend to camp, waiting in ambush for hapless travelers to lose the path and become fair game. Other tribes simply block the Silver Path at various strategic points, where they charge a toll that can range from the minor to the ridiculous. Apart from these bandit outposts, the Bullydales are a trackless waste of swamp trails and crude hovels interspersed with Unattended Birthday Parties and other lesser nightmares. Most Bullylings live alone out of a combination of miserliness, paranoias, and self-loathing; as such, settlements are scattered widely.
Creatures of the Squalid Terrain[]
Forgotten by the Arcadian courts (or perhaps it would be better to say "deliberately ignored"), the Bullydales have festered and grown unhealthily fat on their own selfishness since the beginning of time. The traveler experienced in the path through the Wastes is not surprised to learn that the Bullylings allied almost unanimously with the fomorians during the War of Trees. While the world has changed several times since then, the traits that the fomorians exploited still run strong in the Bullyling spirit: petty hubris, stupid greed, and craven cowardice.
Still, the Bullylings seem to enjoy their corrupt lifestyles as outlaws, misers, and bullies. Unseelie nobles often seek out Bullylings to use as suitably pliable lackeys and servants; in particular, the dwellers in the deepest parts of the Hither bogs are highly prized as the Unseeliest of all common chimera, with no Summer anywhere in their nature to destabilize their loyalties. Whether these nightmarish creatures are as mindlessly cruel as the legendary Bullyling servants to the fomorians is an open question that nobody particularly cares to answer. Instead, the more pressing question is: have the latter-day Bullylings (including horrible new breeds like Scarf Hounds and Kroupa) rejoined the service of the resurgent fomorians?
Best known as one of the primary spewing grounds for various nightmare chimera, the Bullydales appear to breed for infamy. Fortunately, the witches, pirates, bandit chiefs, cannibal monsters, and incompetent nightmare races tend to pose even more danger to one another than to innocent travelers, ensuring that the unlucky victim of ambush will probably be able to play the locals against one another.
Unique among the Bullylings, the local redcap population doe not take perverse shame in its origins, nor does it partake in the otherwise universal stupidity and selfish greed that infects the realm. Admittedly, many Bullyling redcaps are both stupid and selfish, but such behavior is less a cultural standard than a personal choice for them. A small but substantial number have actually proven themselves to be quite heroic and gracious faeries, despite their sordid background. These redcaps, in particular, tend to display a curious but stubborn pride in their native land. They neither apologize for its many faults, nor use it to excuse their own character failings. Instead, it is simply "home," the place they are from.
Signs of Winter Approaching[]
It is a sad but understandable fact that most Kithain would not care if time and Banality crushed the Bullydales once and for all. After all, the realm is a breeding ground for monsters and criminals directed only by the schemes of witches and quite possibly by the fomorians themselves. Its destruction would be doing a service to everyone.
Still, the signs of Winter coming to the Bullydales are occasionally quite poignant, no matter how well-deserved a fate it might be. For example, the witches' powers have waned as the nearward Dreaming has faded, turning the once-fearsome hags (with the exception of Lenoora and the rest of the Twelve) into almost pitiful creatures, shadows of their former selves. On the other hand, the weight of Banality on their native land appears to cause many of the Thallain enormous and constant pain, which only makes them more enraged and dangerous. Thallain childlings, who, increasingly, are born either deformed or small and sickly, suffer these ravages in particular.
Meanwhile, the secret magical herbs and preparations that grow rife in the Hitherdale swamps have become ominously rare in modern times. Many magical processes that require such ingredients might now be considered lost to Faerie and impossible to complete under present conditions.
Denizens & the Bullydales[]
The swampy Bullydales have always been a problem for the Fieldlings. Long relegated to the badlands, forced to subsist on lichen and unpleasant things that live under logs, the creatures of the Bullydale Wastes have become heartened by recent developments (since the Week of Nightmares). Formerly disorganized and forced to come up the few navigable trods not protected by the Silver Path, the clumsy raids mounted from the Bullydales were easily routed by the keenly aimed arrows of the Fieldlings. Only the local redcap population constituted an intelligent threat, but they were few in number. Now long-sealed trods have reopened. Fir-bholg, swamp drudes, and the voracious Middlemarch Redcaps from the mountains beyond have rekindled the flames of old.
New leaders have sprung up among the wastelanders. Names like Neerak the Butcher of the redcaps and Olfar the Foul of the fir-bholg are now uttered with dread in the neighboring civilized regions. The Bedlam-bound sidhe queen, Lenoora Ailil now hosts an army of strange guests. These naraka use her lands to launch attacks on the Fieldlings and the Splintered fiefs of the fir-bholg alike, pursuing a rumored alliance with Harroth the Mute.
References[]
- CTD. Dreams and Nightmares, pp. 67-69.
- CTD. Denizens of the Dreaming, p. 31.