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elliotgoldner.bsky.social
Back in 2020 we had a viewing party on ye olde Twitter to commemorate the BBC's Halloween screening of The Borderlands, where I shared the story development creature lore. After 5 years that post *still* gets traffic over there, so I thought I'd stick it up here... #TheBorderlands
The Borderlands - Creature lore The original idea was that the ‘creature’ was non-sentient, or plant-like. This new personality doesn’t totally derail that and still complies with the ‘big things eating little things’ theme but moves things along a bit. It hasn’t become a malevolent demon thing that derives pleasure from teasing and torturing humans. It’s not more or less intelligent than humans, it’s a very different mind. It’s not evil, like a shark isn’t evil when it eats a person, though it probably feels that way if you’re the one being eaten. Its intelligence is about as fathomable as a human mind is to an ant colony, and vice versa. Our creature has a similar life cycle to that of a house flea, which can endure many years of starvation, living in a kind of stasis in their pupal state. “Adult fleas jump out of the pupal skin as soon as they detect vibration in the environment, which indicates the arrival of a host." Unlike fleas, our creature has the ability to go back into stasis again. But once woken it must feed. The creatures arrived on the Earth millions of years ago in an asteroid storm, a large cluster of them having hit the south of what is now called England. The pattern of where they landed conflates with a series of tors that pepper this part of the land and is the true cause of the ley/energy lines that crisscross the area. Rather than a host, these creatures need shepherds, or tenders. And humans have always needed something to worship, so before all was well. These creatures are able to release immense bursts of destructive energy, but they are also relatively helpless trapped underground. Most destroyed everything around them and then perished, but a few (and now maybe just this one) evolved and survived. The right balance of destructive force and unearthly wonder created conditions of worship in the local human population. Like with a wrathful, Old Testament God, who needed appeasing, over many thousands of years a symbiotic relationship evolved. And this one developed a taste for the flesh of infants. If a child was born an albino, or blind, or with an extra toe, it was offered to the ‘god’. Then one day came the Holy Roman Empire, who drove out the old customs and religions and imposed Christianity. And the creature went to sleep for hundreds of years. It awoke again in the time of Victoria. It found that during its sleep humankind had evolved again, there were machines above now. But the creature was hungry and began to reach out with its telepathic energies. Mandeville was a devout man and a driven one and totally susceptible to the creature. This continued until Mandeville’s death, when the church closed again and the creature went back to sleep. It started to stir again when Crellick arrived, then woke fully during the Christening, roused by the sounds of the baby’s cries, an almost Pavlovian reaction. And it discovered that humans had once again developed. Even a religious man like Crellick questioned what he was confronted with as the creature reached out to him. He freaked and the creature began to turn on him. It detects negative energy and reacts aggressively. It thinks that Mark is a threat and tries to repel him. But in Deacon it may have found its new shepherd. A human who is looking for God, who is open and looking for a sign. It reaches out to Deacon. and Deacon responds, picking up on it. But then Deacon doesn’t react the way it expects and he calls in Calvino. At the reconsecration the creature hears something it hasn’t heard for hundreds of years, something familiar that coincided with the driving away of the Anglo Saxons and the building of the church - it hears the Latin of the Trinitarian Formula. The creature lashes out and destroys Calvino. And now it is the creature’s turn to evolve. Its old behaviour isn’t working any more but it can see that it still has Deacon hooked. It can use its ability to mimic voices to draw him further down, and if he won’t be the feeder he will at least be the meal.  Elliot Goldner 2012
December 27, 2025 at 10:01 AM