Black Hallows, Clivilius

Origins

Black Hallows was founded on 7 September 1862 by a group of thirty-eight settlers from Grenzfeld, an agricultural settlement approximately 140 kilometres to the southwest. Grenzfeld had been established in 1589 by a Guardian from the Habsburg territories and had grown over nearly three centuries into a stable community of several thousand people, sustained by its fertile river valley and a long tradition of livestock husbandry. Grenzfeld's last Guardian, Matthias Eisler, had died in 1643, and the settlement had been without Earth contact for over two centuries by the time the Black Hallows expedition departed.

The expedition that founded Black Hallows was organised by Dr. Tobias Black, a botanist born in Grenzfeld in 1832 to a family of Scottish heritage — his ancestors had arrived in Clivilius from Edinburgh through Grenzfeld's Portal in the settlement's earliest decades. Dr. Black had spent his career studying the unusual properties of Clivilian soil and the accelerated rates of adaptation he observed in every species Grenzfeld cultivated. By the 1850s, he had become convinced that these properties could be harnessed deliberately — that a facility purpose-built in the right location could breed and preserve species on a scale that no existing settlement had attempted. His long-time collaborator, Dr. Emiliana Greyson, born in Grenzfeld in 1834 to a family of Austrian heritage whose forebears had arrived from Vienna through the same Portal, shared his conviction and contributed the zoological expertise that transformed his theoretical ambitions into a practical plan.

The two scientists spent four years scouting the region east and northeast of Grenzfeld, searching for terrain that could support a large-scale breeding operation. They required cliffs or cave systems for secure, climate-stable enclosures; open plains for grazing and expansion; a reliable freshwater source; and sufficient distance from existing settlements to avoid territorial disputes over the land they intended to transform. In March 1862, a scouting party led by Dr. Greyson located the site that would become Black Hallows: a dramatic formation of dark basalt cliffs rising sixty metres above a broad plain, honeycombed with deep cave systems, with a freshwater river running along the base of the cliff line. The dark colouration of the rock face — almost black in certain light — and the cavernous hollows that riddled the cliff gave the site its name.

Dr. Black petitioned Grenzfeld's governing council for permission to lead a founding expedition. The response was mixed. Grenzfeld's leadership recognised the scientific merit of Dr. Black's proposal but was reluctant to lose thirty-eight of its residents — including several of its most educated — to an unproven venture 140 kilometres away. The compromise reached in July 1862 stipulated that Black Hallows would remain formally affiliated with Grenzfeld, that it would supply Grenzfeld with breeding stock and botanical specimens in exchange for ongoing material support, and that any settler who wished to return to Grenzfeld within the first five years would be permitted to do so. Fourteen of the original thirty-eight exercised that option.

Early Settlement

The founding party arrived at the cliff site on 7 September 1862 after a seventeen-day overland journey from Grenzfeld. The group included Dr. Black and Dr. Greyson, twelve labourers experienced in construction and quarrying, six agricultural workers, four animal handlers, two physicians, and twelve others with mixed skills ranging from carpentry to metallurgy. They brought with them fourteen horses, a small herd of cattle, seed stock for twelve crop varieties, and a collection of tools and equipment that represented Grenzfeld's investment in the venture.

The first months followed a pattern familiar to any Clivilian settlement: breaking through the hard surface crust to reach workable soil, establishing a water supply from the river, and constructing shelter before the demands of the environment overtook the settlers' resources. Black Hallows had one significant advantage over settlements founded on open plains — the cliff caves provided immediate, defensible shelter that required modification rather than construction from nothing. The founding party occupied three large cave systems in the first week, using the deepest chambers for supply storage and the outer chambers as living quarters. Within a month, the settlers had begun widening and connecting the caves, carving out the first purpose-built spaces that would eventually become the nucleus of the breeding facility.

The plains below the cliffs presented a harsher challenge. The soil, once the surface crust was broken, proved fertile in the immediate vicinity of the river but thin and poor further out. Dr. Black's first major contribution to the settlement was a systematic programme of soil improvement, drawing on his decades of research in Grenzfeld to enrich the plains soil using composted organic matter and a rotation system adapted specifically for Clivilian conditions. The process was slow — usable agricultural land expanded by only a few hectares per year in the early period — but it established the foundation for the ecological transformation that would define Black Hallows over the following century.

Security during the lightless Clivilian nights was an immediate concern. The cliffs offered natural protection on one side, but the open plains left the settlement exposed to predators, including shadow panther packs that ranged across the region. The settlers constructed a perimeter wall of stacked basalt blocks — quarried from the cliff face itself — across the most vulnerable approaches, and maintained fire lines through the night hours. Two settlers were killed in a shadow panther attack during the first winter, an event that accelerated the construction of permanent fortifications and established a night-watch rotation that continued for decades.

Dependence on Grenzfeld

For its first thirty years, Black Hallows was functionally dependent on Grenzfeld for resources it could not produce itself. The settlement's small population and single-minded focus on the breeding facility meant that it lacked the labour force and agricultural base to be self-sufficient. Twice-yearly supply convoys made the 140-kilometre journey between the two settlements, carrying grain, preserved food, replacement tools, textiles, and — most critically — animals.

The facility's founding mission required a constant supply of new species, and in the absence of Portal access to Earth, every animal in its care had to be sourced from within Clivilius. This meant acquiring specimens from Grenzfeld's own livestock herds, from the handful of other settlements within trading distance, and occasionally from sources further afield through intermediary traders. Dr. Greyson maintained a detailed ledger of every animal acquisition, recording the species, origin settlement, condition on arrival, and price paid. Some entries in the ledger note acquisitions made "at considerable expense" or "under difficult negotiation," suggesting that not all trading partners were willing sellers.

The relationship with Grenzfeld grew strained over the first two decades. Black Hallows was consuming resources — particularly skilled labour and breeding-quality animals — faster than it was returning value. The breeding stock and botanical specimens that Black Hallows supplied under the original agreement were of genuine scientific interest but limited practical use to an agricultural community primarily concerned with feeding its population. By the 1880s, Grenzfeld's council had begun reducing the frequency and size of supply convoys, and the formal affiliation between the two settlements had cooled into a transactional trading relationship conducted at arm's length.

This growing distance forced Black Hallows to diversify its supply network. Dr. Black and Dr. Greyson dispatched trading expeditions further afield, establishing contact with settlements that Grenzfeld itself had limited dealings with. Some of these contacts proved fruitful. Others were exploitative — smaller, struggling settlements that traded away animals and seed stock they could ill afford to lose in exchange for promises of future returns that Black Hallows was not always in a position to honour. The ethics of these early acquisition practices remained a source of internal debate within the settlement for generations.

The Facility Takes Shape

The Black Hallows Breeding Facility was formally established on 10 March 1865, though in practice the facility and the settlement had been inseparable from the beginning — Black Hallows existed to support the facility, and the facility gave Black Hallows its purpose. The formal founding date marked the completion of the first dedicated research and administrative spaces carved into the cliff face: laboratories, specimen preparation rooms, a veterinary surgery, and archive chambers, connected by a central corridor with controlled ventilation shafts cut through to the cliff top. The cliff complex provided the facility's operational headquarters — climate-stable, secure, and expandable deeper into the rock as needs demanded — whilst the animals themselves were housed on the plains below in open-air enclosures built from locally quarried basalt and timber traded from Grenzfeld.

Dr. Greyson designed the early enclosure layouts to provide each species with as close an approximation of its natural habitat as the plains allowed, using the river for freshwater access, planted windbreaks for shelter, and fenced grazing areas that expanded as Dr. Black's soil improvement programmes made more land viable. The approach was simple by necessity — the facility lacked the resources or technology for anything more sophisticated — but it established a principle that persisted throughout the facility's history: animals belonged outside, in conditions that respected their behavioural and environmental needs, whilst the cliff complex served the humans who studied and cared for them.

The facility's early collection was modest. By 1870, it housed breeding populations of eleven animal species — primarily livestock and domesticated birds sourced from Grenzfeld and neighbouring settlements — along with Dr. Black's expanding botanical nurseries on the plains below the cliffs. The ambition, however, was anything but modest. Dr. Black's founding vision, documented in a manuscript he titled A Catalogue of Necessity, described a facility that would eventually house and breed every known species of animal and plant from Earth, preserving the full breadth of terrestrial biodiversity within Clivilius. At the time, with eleven species in six cave chambers, the vision bordered on the absurd. Dr. Black maintained it without apology for the rest of his life.

The Black and Greyson Families

Dr. Tobias Black married Anneke Vos, one of the original thirty-eight settlers and a former teacher in Grenzfeld, in 1864. Their son, Maxwell Black, was born in Black Hallows in 1867 — one of the first children born in the settlement. Maxwell grew up within the facility's walls and inherited his father's passion for conservation, eventually assuming leadership of the breeding programmes in 1903 following a period of apprenticeship under his father. Tobias Black died on 12 February 1965 at the age of 133. His longevity was remarkable even by the standards of Clivilian settlers, though not unprecedented — those who spent their lives working closely with Clivilian soil, flora, and fauna appeared, in some cases, to benefit from the same accelerated vitality that the dimension conferred on other living organisms. Whether this represented a genuine biological effect or simply the consequence of an active life in a clean environment remained a matter of debate within the settlement's scientific community. The settlement and the surrounding region had been formally named in Dr. Black's honour by a unanimous vote of the community council in 1901, on the occasion of what was then his sixty-ninth birthday — a gesture he accepted with characteristic reluctance.

Dr. Emiliana Greyson never married but was instrumental in recruiting and training the next generation of the facility's scientific staff. Her particular focus in her later decades was the documentation of what she termed "Clivilian divergence" — the observable differences between species bred at Black Hallows and their Earth counterparts. Her research journals, spanning nearly ninety years of continuous observation, remain among the most valuable scientific documents in the facility's archives. Dr. Greyson died on 3 August 1953 at the age of 119.

Maxwell Black married Clara Richter, the daughter of a Grenzfeld-born stonemason, in 1893. Their daughter Helena Black, born in 1896, would become one of the most consequential figures in the facility's history, pioneering genetic research that fundamentally changed how Black Hallows understood the accelerated evolutionary processes at work in Clivilius.

Growth and Self-Sufficiency

By the turn of the twentieth century, Black Hallows had grown from its founding party of thirty-eight to a population of approximately nine hundred. The settlement had expanded beyond the original cliff caves, with stone-built structures extending along the base of the cliff line and out onto the cultivated plains. A second generation had been born and raised entirely within Black Hallows, and a third was beginning. The settlement's character had shifted from a scientific outpost dependent on Grenzfeld to a self-sustaining community with its own identity, governance, and traditions — though the breeding facility remained its defining institution and primary purpose.

Agricultural self-sufficiency had been achieved gradually through the 1880s and 1890s, as Dr. Black's soil improvement programmes expanded the cultivable area and successive generations of Clivilian-adapted crops produced increasingly reliable harvests. The settlement maintained trade relationships with Grenzfeld and a small number of other settlements, but these were conducted on more equal terms than in the early decades. Black Hallows exported specialist knowledge — veterinary expertise, botanical specimens, breeding advice — in exchange for raw materials and animal specimens that the facility required to expand its collection.

The physical settlement developed a distinctive character shaped by its geography. The cliff face served as the settlement's spine, with the breeding facility's enclosures, laboratories, and archives occupying the upper chambers, residential and administrative spaces in the middle levels, and storage and workshops at the base. The plains below hosted agricultural land, grazing pastures, and the growing network of outdoor enclosures and nurseries that Dr. Black's ecological programmes required. Visitors to Black Hallows frequently remarked on the unusual vertical orientation of the community — a settlement that grew upward into the rock rather than outward across the land.

The Hallows Academy and the Greyson Institute

The Hallows Academy was established in 1921, growing out of an informal tradition of practical education that had existed within the breeding facility since its earliest years. Dr. Greyson had trained apprentices from the settlement's founding, and by the early twentieth century the facility's accumulated expertise in animal husbandry, botany, veterinary care, and land management represented a body of knowledge that warranted formal structure. The Academy was initially housed within the cliff complex itself, occupying chambers adjacent to the facility's laboratories, and its curriculum focused on the practical disciplines that the facility and the settlement required: animal handling and care, agricultural science, ecological management, construction and quarrying techniques adapted for Clivilian conditions, and basic medicine.

The Academy served a critical function beyond training: it ensured the continuity of knowledge across generations. In a settlement without Portal access and limited contact with the outside world, the loss of expertise through death or departure posed an existential risk. The Academy formalised the transmission of knowledge that had previously depended on informal apprenticeship, creating a structured pipeline of trained workers and specialists who could sustain the facility's operations regardless of individual circumstances. For broader or more specialised education — law, advanced medicine, engineering, the humanities — Black Hallows residents travelled to Grenzfeld, which maintained a more comprehensive educational tradition accumulated over its longer history.

The Greyson Institute was founded in 1948, named in honour of Dr. Emiliana Greyson who was still alive at the time and gave the institution her reluctant blessing. Where the Hallows Academy trained the practical workforce that kept the facility running, the Greyson Institute focused on research — genetics, evolutionary biology, ecological theory, and the study of Clivilian adaptation that Dr. Greyson had pioneered. Helena Black was instrumental in establishing the Institute, which formalised research programmes that had previously operated as extensions of the breeding facility's day-to-day work. The Institute attracted the settlement's most talented students and produced the scientists, geneticists, and ecologists who drove the facility's intellectual development through the second half of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first.

Isolation and Its Consequences

For most of its history, Black Hallows existed in profound isolation. The settlement lay 140 kilometres from Grenzfeld, its nearest neighbour, and approximately 950 kilometres from Cranbourne, the nearest settlement of significant size to the west. To the east and north, the terrain was largely unexplored — open plains and sparse geological formations stretching into regions where no known settlement had been established. The overland journey to Grenzfeld took over two weeks in good conditions and was impassable during the worst weather. Contact with the wider world of Clivilius was infrequent, unreliable, and dependent on trading caravans that came when they chose to come and not before.

This isolation shaped the settlement's culture in ways both productive and damaging. On the productive side, Black Hallows developed a fierce self-reliance and a depth of specialist knowledge that few communities could match. By the early twenty-first century, the settlement had grown to approximately 6,500 residents — large enough to sustain a functioning economy, the Hallows Academy, the Greyson Institute, and a breeding facility of genuine scale, but small enough that the community retained the character of a specialist enclave rather than a general-purpose town. Its residents became expert problem-solvers by necessity, improvising solutions to challenges that better-connected settlements could address through trade or external assistance. The breeding facility's scientific programmes advanced steadily, driven by researchers who had no option but to work with what they had.

On the damaging side, isolation bred insularity. Black Hallows became a closed community in which the same families — the Blacks, the Richters, the Vos line, and a handful of others — held influence across generations. New arrivals were rare and not always welcomed. The settlement's governance, nominally democratic through its community council, was in practice dominated by the families most closely associated with the breeding facility. Dissenting views on the facility's direction or the settlement's priorities were tolerated but rarely acted upon. Several families departed Black Hallows for Grenzfeld or other settlements between 1890 and 1940, citing the community's narrowness and the difficulty of building a life that was not defined entirely by the facility's needs.

The insularity also affected the facility's scientific work. Without regular contact with other centres of knowledge, the facility's researchers operated in an intellectual vacuum, developing theories and methods in isolation that sometimes diverged significantly from approaches being pursued elsewhere in Clivilius. Some of these divergent methods proved innovative. Others proved mistaken, and the mistakes persisted longer than they should have because there was no external perspective to challenge them.

Connection to the Clivilius Global Rail Network

The completion of the Black Hallows Express Rail Line in 2022 ended over 160 years of isolation. The line, running 950 kilometres from Cranbourne to Black Hallows, was one of the most ambitious projects undertaken by the Clivilius Global Rail Network — a programme driven by the Bixbus Rail Authority as part of Bixbus's broader strategy of connecting settlements across the region and integrating them into a unified transportation and trade infrastructure.

The decision to extend the CGRN to Black Hallows was not primarily motivated by the settlement's size, which by 2022 stood at approximately 6,500 residents. It was motivated by the breeding facility. Bixbus, founded in 2018 with active Portal access to Earth and an aggressive programme of territorial expansion, faced a fundamental challenge: the vast regions it was claiming and developing were ecologically barren in the manner typical of uncultivated Clivilian terrain. Transforming these blank-canvas landscapes into habitable ecosystems required exactly the kind of expertise that Black Hallows had been accumulating for over a century and a half — breeding programmes, ecological restoration knowledge, and a deep practical understanding of how introduced species adapted to Clivilian conditions.

The rail connection transformed Black Hallows almost immediately. Construction materials, scientific equipment, and — for the first time since the seventeenth century — goods sourced directly from Earth arrived via the CGRN link to Bixbus. Researchers from Clivilius National University in Bixbus established collaborative programmes with the Greyson Institute. The breeding facility, which had spent its entire existence working within the constraints of limited resources and local supply chains, suddenly had access to a network of support that its founders could not have imagined.

The transformation was not without friction. Black Hallows had survived for 160 years by being self-contained, and the arrival of outside influence — particularly from a settlement as young and assertive as Bixbus — disrupted established hierarchies and assumptions. The facility's leadership welcomed the resources but was wary of the expectations that accompanied them. Bixbus did not invest in a 950-kilometre rail line out of academic interest in conservation science. It invested because it wanted results: species bred and prepared for deployment across its expanding territories, ecosystems designed and delivered on a timescale that matched Bixbus's ambitions rather than the patient, generational pace that Black Hallows had always operated at.

The Bixbus Era

The four years following the CGRN connection reshaped Black Hallows more profoundly than the preceding century and a half combined.

In 2023, the first consignment of Earth-sourced animal specimens arrived at the facility via the rail link from Bixbus — thirty-seven species that had never been present in the Black Hallows region, including several that no one in the settlement had seen outside of illustrations in centuries-old books inherited from Grenzfeld's archives. The shipment represented the most tangible fulfilment of Dr. Tobias Black's original vision in A Catalogue of Necessity, and it forced the facility to expand its infrastructure at a pace that strained both its physical capacity and its staff. New research and quarantine chambers were carved into previously untouched sections of the cliff face. Temporary holding enclosures were erected on the plains. Bixbus dispatched construction crews and engineers to assist, but their presence — and their expectations of progress — added to the tension between the two settlements' operating cultures.

By mid-2023, Bixbus had formally proposed what it termed the Clivilian Ecological Seeding Programme: a systematic effort to use the breeding facility's expertise and stock to introduce functioning ecosystems into the barren regions that Bixbus was claiming for development. The programme called for Black Hallows to breed species in sufficient numbers for release across multiple sites, to design ecosystem packages tailored to specific terrain types, and to provide ongoing advisory support as introduced populations established themselves. The scale of the proposal dwarfed anything the facility had previously undertaken. It required not only a vast increase in breeding capacity but a fundamental shift in the facility's purpose — from preserving species within its walls to producing them for deployment beyond them.

The community council of Black Hallows debated the proposal for three months. The facility's senior staff were divided. Some, particularly the younger researchers who had trained at the Greyson Institute and welcomed the influx of resources and collaboration, supported the programme as a natural evolution of the facility's mission. Others, including several members of the founding families, argued that Bixbus was treating the facility as a factory and that the pressure to produce species at industrial volume would compromise the careful, generational approach to breeding that had defined Black Hallows since its founding. The compromise reached in September 2023 accepted the broad framework of the Ecological Seeding Programme but imposed conditions: Black Hallows would retain scientific authority over breeding protocols, release schedules, and species selection, and Bixbus would not dictate timelines that the facility's staff deemed unsustainable.

The compromise held, though it was tested repeatedly in the months that followed. Throughout 2024, the facility and the settlement scaled at a pace that bore no resemblance to anything in Black Hallows' history. Bixbus committed resources on a level that treated the Ecological Seeding Programme not as a research collaboration but as a national infrastructure priority. Thousands of Bixbus-recruited specialists — veterinarians, geneticists, ecologists, engineers, construction workers, logistics coordinators, and administrators — relocated to Black Hallows. Construction crews broke ground on residential districts across the plains south and east of the cliff complex, erecting housing, services, schools, hospitals, and administrative centres at a speed that only Bixbus's combination of Earth-sourced technology and near-limitless ambition could sustain. New enclosure complexes, each designed for specific biome conditions, spread across the plains in a grid pattern that dwarfed the facility's original cliffside chambers. The rail terminal at Black Hallows, initially a modest platform built for the 2022 connection, was expanded into a full freight and passenger hub handling dozens of arrivals daily.

By the end of 2024, the population of Black Hallows had surged from approximately 6,500 to over 100,000. The original settlement — the cliff complex and the cultivated zone that had sustained the community for 160 years — now constituted a small historic core surrounded by a rapidly expanding urban footprint. Long-standing residents described the experience as disorienting. The community council, which had governed Black Hallows since its founding, found itself administering a settlement that was growing faster than its structures could accommodate. In November 2024, Bixbus proposed the establishment of a joint administrative authority to manage the settlement's expansion, a proposal that the council accepted with considerable reluctance and significant conditions regarding the preservation of the facility's scientific independence.

The arrival of Earth-sourced specimens continued through 2024 and into 2025, with Bixbus's Portal providing a conduit for species that the facility had previously been unable to obtain. The scale of the intake was staggering. Entire breeding populations of mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, fish, and invertebrates arrived by rail in climate-controlled carriages designed specifically for live animal transport. The facility's collection grew from the several hundred Clivilian-adapted lineages it had maintained for over a century to an inventory that, by early 2025, included over 3,000 distinct animal species and several thousand plant varieties — with acquisition lists that ran to tens of thousands more. The ambition outlined in A Catalogue of Necessity — to house and breed every known species of animal and plant from Earth — had shifted from historical curiosity to active operational goal, backed by the resources of the most aggressively expanding settlement in the region.

The infrastructure required to house this collection transformed the landscape around Black Hallows beyond recognition. Enclosure complexes extended across hundreds of square kilometres of previously barren plain, each designed to replicate specific Earth biomes — tropical rainforest, temperate woodland, savannah, tundra, freshwater wetland, marine coastal, and dozens of more specialised environments. The construction programme employed tens of thousands of workers and consumed materials shipped continuously along the CGRN. Purpose-built water management systems diverted and channelled the river to supply the aquatic and wetland enclosures. Power generation facilities — a mixture of designs sourced from Earth via Bixbus and adapted for Clivilian conditions — were constructed to support the climate-control systems that the biome enclosures required. The cliff complex, which had housed the entire facility for over a century, became the administrative and research headquarters of an operation that had long since outgrown it.

In 2025, the first coordinated release under the Ecological Seeding Programme took place in a region approximately 80 kilometres west of Black Hallows, along the route of the CGRN line. A team from the facility introduced a designed ecosystem package comprising soil organisms, ground-cover plants, insect species, small mammals, and a suite of bird species selected for their pollination and seed-dispersal roles. The release site had been prepared over several months using techniques derived from the ecological restoration methods that Dr. Ivor Galloway had pioneered at Black Hallows in the 1960s. Early monitoring indicated that the introduced species were establishing themselves, though the accelerated evolutionary pressures of Clivilius made long-term predictions unreliable — a caveat that the facility's staff emphasised repeatedly and that Bixbus's planners tended to underweight. Three further release sites were prepared along the CGRN corridor by the end of 2025, with dozens more in the planning stages.

The Ecological Seeding Programme also prompted the facility to confront a question it had debated internally for decades but never resolved publicly: the role of Clivilian-unique species. Over the thousands of years that Earth species had existed in Clivilius, some had diverged so dramatically from their ancestral forms that they constituted distinct species found nowhere else — the shadow panther being the most well-known example. The facility had historically focused on Earth species preservation, but the Seeding Programme created a practical demand for organisms already adapted to Clivilian conditions. In late 2025, the facility formally expanded its mandate to include the collection, study, and breeding of Clivilian-evolved species — a decision that opened new scientific and ethical territory that the facility had previously only explored in theory. Field teams were dispatched into the surrounding regions and beyond, tasked with locating, cataloguing, and capturing specimens of species that had evolved in Clivilius over millennia without human observation or intervention.

By early 2026, Black Hallows had a population approaching 400,000 and was growing at a rate that showed no sign of slowing. The Bixbus-backed development plan, shared with the joint administrative authority in January 2026, projected a population exceeding one million by 2030 — the target date by which the Ecological Seeding Programme aimed to have the facility housing and breeding representatives of every known vertebrate species from Earth, alongside a comprehensive collection of invertebrates, plants, fungi, and Clivilian-evolved organisms. The construction programme alone employed over 60,000 workers, with additional tens of thousands engaged in animal husbandry, veterinary care, ecological research, logistics, transport, agricultural production, and the expanding network of field operations that the Seeding Programme demanded. The settlement that had defined itself for 160 years through isolation, self-reliance, and quiet scientific persistence had become a city — one of the largest construction and scientific operations in the region, rivalled only by Bixbus itself in the speed and ambition of its growth. The negotiation between Black Hallows' institutional caution and Bixbus's expansionist ambition remained the settlement's defining tension — tested daily, managed imperfectly, and showing no signs of resolution.

Geography and Character

Black Hallows occupies a site defined by the contrast between its cliff formations and the open plains that surround them. The cliff line extends roughly three kilometres from north to south, rising to a maximum height of sixty-two metres, composed primarily of dark basalt that gives the rock face its distinctive near-black appearance. The caves and hollows that riddle the cliff — some natural, most expanded and connected by hand over the settlement's history — house the breeding facility's research headquarters, the Hallows Academy, the Greyson Institute, and the majority of the settlement's institutional spaces. The cliff faces east, sheltering the settlement from the prevailing winds that sweep the western plains.

Below the cliffs, the cultivated zone extends approximately four kilometres eastward from the cliff base to the banks of the river that provides the settlement's freshwater supply. This zone encompasses the original agricultural land, grazing pastures, and the ecological restoration areas that successive generations of researchers developed. Since 2024, however, the settlement's footprint has expanded dramatically in every direction. Residential districts, administrative complexes, hospitals, schools, and service infrastructure now extend across the plains to the south and east, housing a population that has grown from thousands to hundreds of thousands in under four years. The facility's enclosure complexes — hundreds of square kilometres of purpose-built biome habitats, each climate-controlled and environmentally managed — stretch across the plains to the north and west. The CGRN rail terminal, expanded repeatedly since 2022, serves as the settlement's logistical spine, handling hundreds of freight and passenger arrivals daily and connecting Black Hallows to the supply chains that sustain an operation of its scale.

Beyond the developed zones, the terrain reverts to the barren, uncultivated plains characteristic of undeveloped Clivilian landscape — dust, rock, and the hard surface crust that conceals the soil beneath. To the southwest, 140 kilometres distant, lies Grenzfeld, the parent settlement from which Black Hallows was founded. To the west, 950 kilometres along the Black Hallows Express Rail Line, lies Cranbourne and the broader CGRN network that connects Black Hallows to Bixbus and the expanding web of settlements beyond.