Helm doesn’t know when Helm was born.

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Or brewed.

Conjured or conceived.

First formed above the highest mountain. First blown into the valley.

Long before humankind – that brief, busy interlude.

Time happens all at once for Helm, more or less, relative to longevity. A blink of the eye, universally. (Warning: Helm loves clichés, typical for English weather.) Something of a disorder, some would say.

Of what fantastical, phenomenal and calculable things Helm is made! Maleficence and data and lore. Atmospheric principles and folktales, spirit and substance, opposites and inversions. So many identities and personalities; it makes Helm’s heads spin.

In the beginning, there was no Helm. Boring for the world, obviously. There were aeons before Helm arrived. The necessary arrangements had to be made, on the planet, and in the sky. It would take Ages for Helm to be recognised, let alone named. During which Helm suffered loneliness, inconsequence and ignorance – an original and terrible fugue state. Or Helm didn’t care; Helm was just on standby.

But in the beginning nothing else had a name either, or a pronoun, or a preference. There was no godly language. There was no creative designer or clerical administrator. No titler of the things. It was all serious planetary business. A tremendous collision making Earth

and its moon. Sun shrinking and getting hotter; everything bilious, oxygenless, not great for living. Earth was hot and cold, hot and cold, et cetera, for billennia. Fevers and chills, blah blah.

Huge continental arguments occurred, with fire and grinding, geological upheaval, smashing, subsidence, seas and lost seas; it was very dynamic. In amongst this, a little island was produced, with a forced-up, folded-together, eroded-down spine – a ridge of cross-bedded, water-laid, glacier-carved stones. The Pennine mountains were formed, across which forests and grassland, aurochs and wolves, Neanderthals, Normans, glampers and ramblers could come and go. Note: the biggest fell, its gradient and shape – geological cuvette, to be accurate – is most important in this scenario.

Or. Fossils are the devil’s trick; some benign deity sneezed to make the world.

Or. Artisanal aliens left their play-dough behind. Or. Balancing act – elephants and turtles.

Or. Any other creation theory – hollow Earth, flat Earth, mud collection, hanging cord, corpse reuse, dreamtime, biosphere as gemstone in the ring of a galactic giant, please insert alternative here.

Helm doesn’t care which story is true. So long as there is Helm.

Also, Earth’s atmosphere had to stop fucking around and calm down. Stratospheric forecastable order obtained – that is a climate. One was needed with a narrow temperature range; in Helm’s case, inglorious British maritime. In brief – Atlantic thermal capacities, a Gulf Stream, six stable air masses, including (something of a future issue) polar. Wet and dry fronts, prevailing winds, moisture and vapour, meeting, as luck would have it, exactly at the top of that big mountain on the little island.

Cue, a wind-appropriate domain.

Cue, at some point, Helm.

Cue, afterwards, lots of identity politics, superstitions, bonkers rituals and boffin theories about Helm. All of which please Helm. Helm is nothing if not solipsistic, narcissistic even. Fear, devotion, inquisition, obsession, admiration – all attention is good attention.

A poetic birth moment would be nice. Perhaps, curled inside the turbulent virginal atmosphere, Helm dreams of being a storm, has a prophetic vision of destruction, feels a natural calling. The foetal beat of air beats all around Helm like a beating heart (must elegantly variate). Or the sky, a bit bloated, lets one off. Helm loves a fart joke.

The top of the mountain, also as yet unnamed, is the perfect spot from which to observe evolution. It’s all kicking off below. Lavic displays and dramatic columns of ash. The rearrangement of rivers and lakes. Meltwater. Spores. Vegetation. Creatures crawling out of gunk, their legs extending, their toe-webs rescinding, amoebic eyes getting harder. Fast-forward to: creatures becoming other creatures, eggs, bugs, pedes and pods. Lovely greenery sprouting. Mixed oak woods, pine and birch, upland rowan. For a while there are big, lugging animals, impervious to the sky and its inhabitants as they hunt and graze. Everything is without self-consciousness, and adapts and adapts, and just is.

Meanwhile, Helm practises Helm’s skills. Studying the topography. Reading the mood of the incoming sky. Orientating on the mountain. Helm gets ready inside the big dome of cloud (let’s call it the Helm cloud), waiting for an instinctive, brave, enabled feeling. Ready, steady, blow! Tries a first flight from the escarpment, a learner breeze across the valley, and realises – wow! – Helm has abilities. Helm has or is a second cloud too, on the other side of the valley, an exciting rotoring one (the Bar). Tricky to explain/visualise; additional info to follow, stay tuned. For now, imagine a skater launching off a quarter pipe two thousand feet high, then somersaulting. Again. And again. And again.

It’s a crazy coming of age. Helm enjoys the feeling, of agency, of urgency, so plays with Helmself to arouse the feeling: desire for great, wreaking, havoc-making release, surging from a sky orifice, down the mountain and – yes, yes, oh yes, there’s Helm . . . Flooding the valley with noise and velocity, making an impressive mess – smash-up of trees, shrubbery, and unballasted creatures. Or, it’s uncontrollably random.

Still no witnesses, though, which is a shame. Also, the Helm-show is transitory. Only when Helm manifests does Helm really exist, and afterwards Helm isn’t anymore. The dumb, lumbering beasts don’t care: they fold their ridiculous necks, shelter behind each other’s armoured rumps, and the airborne ones fly away, alighting in the dense canopy, drawing creepy, bloodless lids over their eyes. Helm’s a little envious – these beasts are a bit duh, but at least they’re always embodied, able to kill and eat and rut each other until they die.

So begins the inevitable existential dilemma of who/what/why am I? Heavy, especially for one so aerial.

Between manifesting, Helm sees stuff happen, or not happen. Sometimes a tree falls. Sometimes lightning hits the mountainside and splits or burns a tree. Big animal eats a tree, poops. Small animal eats the poop. Helm’s valley, though it is being grazed by herds, hunted across by packs and stooped upon from above, seems a bit – dull.

More aeons.

Comet, ash cloud, mass extinction, redo.

Helm waits around for the skies to clear. The remaining animals have a changing phase, becoming slightly different, then very different: swimmers, flyers, crawlers, runners, hoppers. This is bloody and chaotic, and reasonably interesting. But still, it’s like, hello? The birds – nearest similar entity – don’t hang out with Helm; every time Helm wants to play they leave. Sometimes hawks rise above Helm’s whirling bar cloud – opportunists. River life is inaccessible, a closed world, the flicker of silver fin, a plopping frog. Helm can’t see into the growling squawking forest to know what’s occurring in there. The aurochs are quite nice, right below Helm on the mountainside, their coats riffling in the wind, their horns jewelled with ice in winter: dark, pretty eyes with long curling lashes. They turn towards the wind, acknowledging, but not really comprehending.

Then – boom!

It is when humans evolve that things become interesting. Because humans become interested in Helm.

Helm sees smoke rising on the other side of the forest, without lightning or lava’s arson. Helm rises too, goes as high as possible, gets a little giddy (there are upper limits to Helm’s domain). Far away, across the tops of the trees, is a group of dark-bodied, long-haired up-monkeys. They are scavenging along the shore of a big, shimmering bay. They are picking molluscs from between rocks, sucking the shells clean. Humans, organised and habitual – they go to the same places, nuzzle their favourite others, hold grudges if one finds a bigger crustacean and doesn’t share. More promisingly, they act in accordance with the weather, retreating in the rain, sheltering under leaf umbrellas, sheltering the orange embers they use to start fires. They look up at the sky, have feelings related to its condition.

Smoke rises oftener, closer to Helm’s mountain. They are burning away forest, making inroads. Helm catches glimpses of the humans. Flickering flames. Deer being dragged. Bears dragging them. Skin tents. Badly fitting pelts. Bums, and two types of frontage (in-y, out-y). Have they seen Helm?

They make flint factories nearby. They bind flints to sticks, make tools, spears, toothpicks. They swap sharpened stone heads for antlers, seeds and – trinkets.

Trinkets!

Helm is enchanted. Trinkets are either very helpful or very pointless. Trinkets are desirable and valuable; they mean something that Helm cannot understand; they are items Helm cannot hold.

The forest smokes closer. Noise of trees crackling and sap hissing, branches thumping down, timber being dragged and chopped. Sounds of loud trilling shouts after silent hunts, and singing. They are definitely coming, across the hills and bogs and the willow-filled broadlands, over waterways on canoes; they lay stones in the shallows for others to cross, bridges – clever. They cook meats and smoulder herbs. Oh! Heavenly. Cue, predilection: Helm’s love of smoke – campfires and coppicing, rushlights and paraffin, wacky baccy.

Then one, two, three of them step out from the arboreal shadows, into a clearing in the valley. Number one carries a child (four) slinged against her breast. Two has grey paws across his shoulders: he’s inside a wolf. Three is bent and gnarly (could be either an in-y or out-y) and holds the fire-making equipment wrapped in moss. Eyes not on the sides of their heads, and a quick, macular gaze that isn’t like other animals’. It’s computerish, has guile, and some other quality Helm can’t quite fathom yet. The old, wrinkled one looks up at Helm’s mountain, at the sky above its summit. He/she points, draws an outline around nothing, circles his/her hands over each other, sucks in scarred cheeks and blows hard, shaking a head.

Here it is! Identification!

For Helm: elation. Helm is understood to be a feature, a concept. Today, absent. Tomorrow, possible. Returning. Powerful. Patterned. (And lo, meteorology is born.)

For the humans: error, danger, proximity to a bad oogabooga. They disappear into the forest. Cue, Helm’s first rejection, abandonment, difficult emotions. Ouch. Helm smashes some trees and things.

But they do come back, cautiously, in little volleys, and with what can quickly be ascertained are tendencies. Skirmishing, partying, carving cups, draping themselves in fur, making smart headgear. Reproducing, carking it, burying their dead with vessels and trinkets, as if they will continue to drink and dress up underground (confusing: Helm blows away the grave soil. Nope, dead).

They speak, complicated babbles registering somewhere between a mammoth and a mouse. Helm learns some of their sounds. No, milk, go, hurts. They have words to differentiate things; to individuate selves. They grunt and moan when their different bits join together; watching this is strange, exciting, makes Helm feel—

Very cold, violent weather arrives. It renders Helm sluggish and unable to do business for a while. The valley floods and freezes. The humans leave. Lots of the animals leave as well, or perish, or evolve to be whiter.

Solitude and boredom again.

When the humans return, there are only a handful, better clothed, hair braided and combed, new fashions. They come with a proper survival kit: some cows that are less aurochsy, and a lot more trinkets. This mob seem serious about staying in the valley, regardless of Helm. They make settlements, piling up middens, using latrines. They are very influential. They consume the forest and deer and boar and fish. They gain dominion over predators using spears, torches, collectives and friendship – they convert wolves into dogs, neat trick! Grass grows, and there’s pollen everywhere; it blooms through Helm’s air. They dig over plots of land, plant grain; they build homes from stones, thatch the roofs with ferns. Their trinkets are elaborate, crafted. In spring and autumn they leave trinkets at the foot of the big mountain, or hang them from branches, and Helm makes them tinkle and rattle. Is this – a relationship?

These humans are very entertaining. They entertain each other. They ferment drinks that make them silly and aggressive and lusty; they biff and boff and booze. Fantastic theatre.

Helm demolishes their shelters, kills one or two of them, not on purpose, but they seem to take it personally. They soon learn about Helm. Underneath Helm’s base and rotor clouds, it is safe, calm: a feather can be dropped and will float softly to the ground. Between Helm’s clouds is a ruinous, wrathful force where everything is cunted. They begin to treat Helm as a deity, like the sun, or the river. If Helm blows thunderstorms away and keeps the valley lightning-proof, they thank Helm. They kneel. They hold their arms up towards the mountain, which is very pleasing.

Helm begins to have favourite humans – the ones who pay particular attention, the ones with Helm-related opinions and ambitions, even oppositions. They want to define Helm. They make pictures: shape and substance like cloud and wind. Not quite right – Helm does not have jug ears like that. Then other ideas. Spirit. Attributes that are magical, abstract, woo-woo. Still not quite right, though understandable. Later: numbers, energies, bit reductive, but whatever. It’s a problem of qualia, really. Show me me, Helm thinks. My whole.

Still, they’re aware. They’re contributing.

The settlers begin work on an impressive structure in the valley. Massive stones, rolled, dragged and shunted in; it takes them ages (not by Helm’s standards, by theirs). It is actually indestructible, which is disarming for one so destructing. What is it for? A gift, maybe, a gewgaw, a puzzle? Wonderful, thank you. They congregate there, many more of them than Helm thought there were. Hmm.

Their making improves. Furnaces. Farms. Roads. Medicines to heal wounds and sadness and the shits. Baths. Wheels. Helm topples trees, uproots crops, overturns feed stacks, steals loose blankets. They rebuild, reweave, reknot, renail: better designs, stronger glue, neater stones (Romans, very anal).

Metals. A whole new range of shiny trinkets! Coins, bracelets, cutting devices for manicures and butchery, projectiles. Tombs, anvils, boats, villages, guns, portraits, fiddle toys. So many things, dropped and lost and mislaid, twinkling all over the place like a museum/ junkyard.

Everything human complicates. Behaviours. Ceremonies. Personalities. Jokes. Sex . . . Confession: Helm really likes watching sex. The touching and mouthing. The fitting of parts together. Strange breathiness. A process that seems both mindless and physical, loving and animal. This voyeurism will later be held against Helm during the puritanical trend (big misunderstanding).

Human-fucking-beings. They are so fun and terribly worrying. When they cooperate, they can learn, improve, create extremely nice things. At worst, they’re ruinous, dumb as mud, making mistakes over and over again. Lives as fast as fireworks too. Crackle, fizz, pop, extinguished. Curious model.

The humans change constantly, but want permanence, evidence of being and having been, it seems. Their language mimics the essence of things, evocations of items and experiences. River, tree, sorry, adder, stink, future, plughole. They name Helm’s mountain. That name is forgotten and they name it again. That name is wrong and they name it again. The valley – after some Christian–Pagan bunfighting – is Eden. Seriously? OK, it is quite pretty.

More to the point, they have names for Helm, and those change too. Fine, Helm can be whatever they want Helm to be, so long as there is Helm. Until, in and around an unspecified aeon, approximately between longship and flea-plague eras, one name gets reused – stability, suitability, memory or legacy, doesn’t matter, it sticks. Enough of them keep saying the same word, a title that is spoken, spoken, spoken, spoken, spoken, spoken, spoken, spoken, spoken, written down.

Got it. Helm.

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Excerpted from Helm by Sarah Hall. Reprinted with permission from Mariner Books, a division of HarperCollins Publishers. Copyright © 2025 by Sarah Hall.