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There is a café at the end of Mokkard street, where the road comes to an end with a small roundabout (the road is very thin, and beyond that roundabout on the left there is naught but a cliff edge, so it’s helpful for folk to be able to turn around at this point). It’s called The Sprightly Balloonist, and was little known in most of the City for a long time, despite the fact that is has some of the best Buentoilliçan views you are likely to find. You can see pretty much over the entire western half of the City, across to the Buentoille bay and the forests to the west, on a clear day. Ranaclois is in the other direction, unfortunately, so it’s spires are not visible, but they are actually marginally higher up than Guilgamot district where Mokkard street is located, so would probably block the rest of the view anyway.

The reason for the café’s relative obscurity is that it resides in what has always been a working class area of Buentoille. Besides locals and the occasional bohemian, few knew about this little hideaway, which serves tea and coffee, with flaky butter pastries and suncakes (a lemon juice and honey saturated sponge cake, usually speckled throughout with poppy seeds, contained within a very short, sweet, pastry casing) as its specialities. The benches outside are a now sure to be packed on any day that is clear and sunny, as, since the loosening of social attitudes precipitated by the Revolution, The Sprightly Balloonist has become rather famous. Today these benches will be even more packed than usual – today is the festival of Hat Casting.

A little way along the cliff and up some from the café is the Clifftop Secondary School. It’s been there since 1867, when philanthropist Gregor Cartpin decided that the children of Guilgamot district who lived near the Grand Boulevard which he often frequented deserved to be properly educated. For Cartpin, education also entailed a strong deference to and respect for authority, which he often observed was lacking in the children of the district when shopping on the Boulevard. In an attempt to fabricate this respect in the children, Cartpin instigated a system of tiered hats which would denote seniority, with each tier acting subserviently to their elders. First form students would wear something akin to a skull cap, second formers would have a very small square attached to the apex of this cap, and by seventh form this would have morphed into a full-sized mortarboard.

Often these kind of divide-and-rule tactics are effective, as they give certain benefits to those ‘on top’ and in turn lever their good will to keep the others in check. It’s easy to see a situation in which this system perpetuated itself, even beyond the Revolution, as younger students anticipated the power they would receive as they got older. Older students were allowed to skip to the front of queues, and were given privileges to leave the school grounds at lunch break. This was, however, not the case. For one thing, students found the hats odious to wear; they were always slipping off their heads and causing itches and scalp pains if they were too tight, which they had to be to stay on, and if they fell off you’d get in trouble. These issues only got worse as you went on, with the board unbalancing things further. The other reason was that many of these children had played in the streets before they had a school to go to, in groups that generally discriminated by location rather than age; there was a great solidarity between students in different forms, a factor unanticipated by Cartpin.

There were, of course, those who were more than happy to be given power over their less senior schoolmates, but these folk were kept from too much mischief by the already well established ‘gangs’ of children from different streets who looked out for each other. The seniority system was always fragile at best, and in 1869, only two years after the school opened, a number of mass protests and speeches held in the school’s public spaces, eventually led to the system’s abolition in all but name. These protests began on September the 16^th, when students Umer Wellasi and Tyryan Calle took a chair each from a nearby classroom and sat down in the centre of the Forwyn Vestibule (named after Cartpin’s wife, Forwyn) at lunch time. Each time a student they knew passed them, they told them to get a chair and join in. By the end of lunch the vestibule was packed full of stoic seated students, chanting and refusing to move and return to class. Whilst this protest was eventually broken up by a team of more heavy-handed teachers, the unrest continued over the following days, culminating in the first Casting of the Hats.

Ringleaders were rounded up and suspended (although curiously the teachers failed to notice that Calle was actually one of the movement’s progenitors, and he continued agitating uninterrupted), but this did little to slow the protests. Eventually, however, the protestors realised that it was ultimately they who were responsible for upholding the ‘hat rule’ as the seniority system came to be known, and therefore they could bring it down by simply refusing to participate. This principle was agreed on by the protesters, who had assembled in that same vestibule on the morning of the eighteenth. They then elected a group of committed activists, five from each form, who would be responsible for ensuring inter-form cooperation and respect, and would ‘handle’ any students who tried to use the ‘hat rule’ to gain unfair advantage. The students also felt that there needed to be a final show of their strength; a final protest was planned.

Almost every student in the school followed Tyryan Calle out the school gates later that day, when he sent up the rallying cry. They poured down the hedgerowed ways, all the way along to Mokkard street, and right up to the cliff edge, which is far steeper and more impressive there than the slopes around the school. There they lined up on the cliff edge, along where the handrail and concrete blocks stopping cars careering off are nowadays, and counted down from five. On one, the children cast their hats over the edge, those more senior students projecting them to quite a distance as the board caught the air. The students behind them then stepped up and did the same, until pretty much all the school were rid of their hats. Those students too timid or lacking in solidarity who stayed back at the school, few as they were, hid their own hats pretty quickly the following day, when the rest of the students returned (they were all suspended so took the opportunity to have a day off but then came back the following day when it was clear there was nothing the school could do).

Today, the 238^th anniversary of that momentous protest, the students will re-enact this moment of victory won by their predecessors. Today, as the hats are no longer made, they use cardboard replicas, made in art class. The school continued to claim that the hats were an ‘essential item of dress’ for thirty one years after, issuing them to all students new and old, but as these too were swiftly cast over the cliff on this day every year, and otherwise not worn at all, they then gave up. Today a large crowd of parents and bystanders alike will come to watch this scripted moment of dissent, now factored into the school year, as the ‘hats’ of all colours and designs tumble down to the houses below. The elected student body exists still, although nowadays their primary task is to help clean Mrs Rolandson’s roof, which resides directly below the cliff edge.

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Other festivals happening today:

• The Festival of Screaming Mauve Murder
• The Festival of Askance and Gifting
• The Day of Ergonomic Realities

Tonight, if you are out late and you see someone watching you, standing stock still at the end of the road where the lamplight doesn’t quite reach, do not be alarmed; it’s probably just a scarecrow come to visit. Thousands of the things, their work now finished in the fields that surround Buentoille, will come to visit this fair City, to sample a life not spend protecting fields, before they are once more employed when the winter wheat is sown.

It’s mostly due to today’s festival that scarecrows are still used by the farming cooperatives that work the land around the City, as they tend not to be particularly effective, especially once the crows and other local animals have gotten used to their presence. And yet, most of the scarecrows who come to Buentoille today, and who number around two thousand, will be individually named, and well looked after by their owners. They might have had their straw replaced, their clothes darned or changed, the sticks that hold them up may have rotted away and new ones put in their place, but they remain the same scarecrows regardless. They say the human body entirely replaces itself every seven years.

Lampposts seem to be a favourite spot for these rustic visitors to lean up against, surveying the different pace of life in Buentoille, but then there are also those who engage in more active leisure activities; some are seated at cafés for the day, a single cup of tea or coffee growing cold, a bird perhaps helping itself to the biscuit laid out next to it. Some, perhaps looking for a better view, are seated atop walls or on roofs, or have got half way up a drainpipe and decided they need a rest. Some decide to spend their free time volunteering at the Wallmin Botanic Gardens, where they pose for photographs holding their watering cans and knelt down pruning the miniature trees. A few like to sit in boats chained to the pontoons on the Moway, perhaps with a glass of something or even a picnic hamper. There is one scarecrow called Andre who frequently visits the Jutêgarde Parish district, where he sits atop a church and dangles a fishing rod over the side. Nobody seems to think he’s ever caught anything, but he seems happy.

Whilst there is technically no group that has owned up to placing the scarecrows about the City in this manner, everyone knows that it is the Union of Reapers, Threshers and Allied Agricultural Workers (URTAAW) who stage these delightful intersections of the pastoral and urban. They officially deny any such suggestions, declaring that the scarecrows, who appear overnight and will disappear tomorrow in much the same way, make their way out of the fields themselves. The suspicion falls on the URTAAW primarily because of the circumstances under which the scarecrows first came to visit Buentoille.

The year was 1575 and the farm workers were agitating for change. At this point the URTAAW were frequently agitating and striking for better pay and conditions, and were winning various concessions. This state of affairs was obviously considered irksome by the landowners and the right-wing press who favoured their interests, and was constantly bemoaned by a Mr Killmore Ageb, in his Buentoilliçan Post column. On September the 17^th, the hack wrote a satirical piece designed to humiliate the strikers and devalue their labour. It was a fake manifesto from the ‘Stoik Yewenyon of Scayrekrows and Alyd Farme Tools,’ which, amongst other demands considered ridiculous by Ageb, advocated for and eight hour day and reasonable holiday and sick pay. The manifesto also declared a strike the following day.

The next day, when he woke up in the morning, Mr Ageb was probably quite surprised to see an unruly mob of scarecrows outside his door, holding placards daubed with the manifesto demands he himself had written only hours before. They had also chained themselves to the railings outside the offices of the Buentoilliçan Post, and the sight of them greeted him on his way there. From the incandescent, rambling piece published the next day, it’s easy to see how much this ‘protest’ got under his skin. It was a feeling he was not able to forget, either, as URTAAW created similar scenes on the same day every year after. There’s no evidence to suggest that Ageb ever saw the funny side.

Over the years, the festival acted as a good way for the URTAAW to keep their political aims in the public eye, even when they weren’t actively striking, and thus they kept bussing in the scarecrows each year, well after Ageb ceased to be a target. Besides, it was fun, and it made people laugh, which certainly helped to make the Union appear more friendly and relatable. Eventually, there was little else for the URTAAW to agitate for, as their demands were eventually met, and, since the Revolution, their political representation at work is assured through the cooperative structures. As such, the scarecrows have slowly become less political, although you may still see one or two demanding ‘fresher straw’ or ‘less yobbish birds’ to contend with.

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Other festivals happening today:

• The Festival of Delayed Satisfaction
• The Arch of the Empty God Day
• Moor Walk Day

Saint Bann was, reportedly, a very poor soldier within Buentoille’s Defence Brigades. He was constantly forgetting his equipment, not keeping his shoes shined properly, dangerously pointing his gun at other members of his regiment, or dropping it in the mud. One time he accidentally shot a hole in the side of the cauldron the regiment were cooking their dinner in, spilling the lot over. In normal circumstances, Jonathan Ionious (the Saint’s birth name) would have been kicked out of the Brigades, but his mother was a high-ranking officer, and she ensured that he stayed, believing that one day he would learn discipline and coordination if he kept at it.

The fact of the matter was, however, that Ionious’ mother knew nothing of her son, who showed absolutely no signs of improvement, regardless of the punishments meted out to him by his captain. At fist, these punishments involved a good deal of floor scrubbing, washing dishes, and other boring activities that others avoided. However, as he routinely made a poor job of these tasks, or even messed them up catastrophically (he once broke almost all the best china, and managed to gouge a hole out of the wooden floor of the bunk room) these punishments escalated to mere banishment for long periods, or the occasional flogging, if the captain thought the saint-to-be’s mother wouldn’t find out. These were the punishments laid upon him by the captain, but there was also an element of mob justice from the other soldiers, which the captain turned a blind eye to; the blanket toss.

If Ionious had done something particularly odious that annoyed the other troop members, they would wait until dark, and then take matters into their own hands. When they were all seemingly asleep in their bunks, the soldiers would quickly and deftly scoop up Bann, wrapping him tightly within their sheets. Then they would take him outisde and, with a much larger and stronger sheet which they procured from who-knows-where, they tossed him into the air repeatedly, standing in a circle around him as he was thrown high, still wrapped up tight, and landed down on the blanket at awkward angles, knocking all the wind out of him. With no time to recover, he would be cast into the air once again. They kept this up for at least half an hour, usually. Often when they stopped he would be quite sick. Sometimes he was sick mid-flight.

And then, on this day in either 1822 or 1812 (accounts vary), a miracle occurred. Bann had been seeking solace in faith, having made no friends in the Brigades, nor having made a man of himself, as his mother constantly urged him to. He was thirty six and had been in the brigades since he was sixteen. The men and women who bullied him had changed over the years, but the blanket-toss punishment remained the same. Being in church gave him a sense of calm that he didn’t get elsewhere, and he started skipping postings with his regiment (leaving others to deal with the heavy equipment he was supposed to carry) to attend services, but he was too weak and scared of his mother’s wrath to quit the Brigades altogether. When he got back one night, his regiment was particularly irked, so they blanket tossed him for three hours, switching out when they became tired. At some point toward the end of the third hour he achieved a state of Attunement, of sudden religious clarity.

From that point onwards, Bann was a changed man. This change firstly manifested itself in an ability to stay upright during the blanket-tossing, thereby reducing the sickness he felt. He exhibited this skill for hours on end outside the Church of the Holy Host, the primary Chastise Church building in Buentoille, as proof of his Attunement, and trained others to do so, and a few of these performers were even able to become Attuned themselves. He left the Brigades, ignored his mother when she inevitably unleashed her wrath (which was not nearly as bad as he had expected) and became a chaplain at the Church, where he was said to lose all his former deficits, his clumsiness, sloth and his poor memory. Today those who still retain the art of staying upright during a blanket toss will congregate outside the Church once again, to perform in his honour. Members of the public are encouraged to take a turn, but it’s unlikely that most will maintain their balance for more than a minute. The Master’s Ambulance Service will be on hand to handle any accidents.

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Other festivals happening today:

• The Festival of Disorderly Love
• The Falcon of Repora Day

Today, four small tents will be erected in Votive park, all arranged in the points of the compass around a small patch of darkened earth, over which the grass is never allowed to grow. The tents are little white things, simply adorned with a picture of one ingredient on their side; an ear of wheat for the western tent, an apple for the east, a fish to the south and the marrow of a bone for north. When midday has just passed a fire will be lit in the centre of this space, over the darkened earth, charring it once again.

The people who construct these tents, and who will today hold their festival in and around them, are the Symbolic Chefs of our Beneficent Lady, the worshippers of Ultimar Esplain, who was burned to death on this very spot for alleged crimes of witchcraft in 1585. According to these ‘Chefs,’ however, whilst Esplain did perform magic, this had only beneficent effects, and was gained by ‘leveraging the Deep Symbolism of the world’ rather than any witchery. Many witches and witchologists have also denied Esplain’s witchiness since, but for differing reasons. They call the Symbolic Chefs a ‘pseudo-religious movement,’ and a ‘transparent rebranding of an imagined and misunderstood idea of witchcraft.’

Deep Symbolism was a (frankly rather wooly) concept which was pioneered by Esplain, and written about in her book, Movynge Awaye frohm the Potte, which proposed various ways for Buentoillitant witches to become less reviled, to let their ‘arte aphear lesse feyrefulle’ to those who observed it. The primary methodology which Esplain suggested was, as the book’s name suggests, to ditch the cauldron, which had become one of the main things that people associated with witchery. She attempted to reconceptualise the role of witches as ‘Symbolic Chefs’ who merely fed those seeking their services certain symbolic ingredients, in the correct patterns and order, substituting the disgusting potions boiled up in cauldrons for the tasteful platters of food with similar symbolic power.

The book was generally met with ridicule within witch communities, as it not only completely missed the point of potions, but also seemed to believe that witchcraft was something entirely separate from the ancient arcane practise. Her ideas of what a typical witch did and looked like seemed to be based off a children’s book, rather than any experiences or observed reality. Whilst it may have had the good intention of attempting to save witches from further harm by angry mobs, it came from a place of privilege and presumption, rather than of solidarity and understanding. It was considered by most witches to be fairly offensive.

The other thing that has to be addressed here is that publishing a book on witchcraft at that point in time, no matter how well argued its points were that witchcraft was not actually as scary as it looked (and that its practitioners could make it a lot more welcoming), was an act of monumental stupidity. The Buentoillitants who were going around murdering witches were unlikely to actually read the text, just assume that it was written by a witch, and whilst Esplain is certainly not to blame for her death, nor did she deserve it, most other folk would have seen it coming from miles off.

Despite the fact that her book was roundly dismissed by almost everyone already involved in witchcraft, it did manage to attract a number of folks who found Esplain’s ‘rebranding’ far more compelling. Unlike traditional witch orders, these folk included men as well as women, and in the aftermath of her death, Esplain became something of a martyr for these dabblers in the occult. Thus the Symbolic Chefs were born. On this, the anniversary of Esplain’s death, these chefs will attempt to summon her image in the fire central to their encampment, by each performing a simple spell.

The central tenet of Deep Symbolism is that every major magical force in the world, from the winds to the power that keeps ghosts in the world and the ways in which our bodies radiate heat, has some basic gastronomical symbolic equivalent, and that by eating these in the correct order (as previously stated, Esplain was very clear that these should not be mixed together in a pot), a magical language could be created and spoken. In each tent a head of the Chefs sits and will stare straight into the eyes of whoever enters the tent to eat the substance printed on its side. The foods, which are symbolic of each cardinal direction, will dictate the direction of the summoning of Esplain’s spirit, which is called for by the other in individual in the tent, the Chef leader, by chewing liquorish root slowly. The staring apparently cements the symbolic connections, and amplifies the signal.

When all the Symbolic Chefs of our Beneficent Lady, of whom there are about sixty, have eaten each of the four ingredients, they will all sit in a circle around the fire, holding hands. They say that the four winds mould the flame, shaping it into the figure of a woman, specifically one Ultimar Esplain who will impart upon them words of wisdom from beyond the grave. Perhaps staring into a fire for long enough makes a person see things within it, or maybe, just maybe, the martyred not-witch knew what she was talking about. It seems unlikely.

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Other festivals happening today:

• The Preparation of Leaflathe Festival
• The Festival of Bringing up the Oars
• Golden Day

Today is the autumnal equinox; the last day of summer, or the first day of autumn, depending on how you look at it, and the day will be the exact same length as the night. After today the nights will be longer than the days, and folk will have to wait until the vernal equinox until long days return once again. Preparation for the winter has always been the key activities undertaken at this point of the year, and many see this as a sad time, when the heady days of summer already seem so long ago.

This is not to say that autumn has no delights to offer; the leaf fall in and around the City is beautiful, and the snows of winter are too. There will be the chance to wear lovely thick jumpers and to sit by the hearth, and in Buentoille there is always some celebration to look forward to. Nevertheless, today’s primary festival has a decidedly funereal air to it, and whilst it is indeed a celebration of what has passed, there is a sense that today is more to come to terms with its passing than to celebrate, so that folk may deal better with what is to come.

There are several groups who have their own festivals today, not least the Coven of Irah, who hold the coming of the dark in great esteem. It’s not known exactly how they celebrate today as their rituals are mostly performed in secret, but there certainly seems to be a lot of activity around their tower (which is actually fairly stubby, more of a short cylinder atop an old stone building) tonight. It is said to involve the mass killing of moths, who are attracted to light and therefore deemed traitors, but this has never been confirmed or denied by the Coven themselves.

The primary festival which happens today, however, is called the Snuffing of the Light Festival. This ancient ritual seems to have been celebrated in the City since time immemorial, and is thought to originate with the Escotolatian tribes, who saw the coming shortening days and the leaf fall as an intensely sad moment of the year; it is telling that the Escotolatian afterlife is said to be a place where, no matter the weather, the leaves never fall from the trees and the flowers are always in bloom. It seems fitting that they would wish to see off the summer in some symbolic manner, and this, rather than any real evidence, is what drives the theory that this is where the Snuffing Festival originates.

It happens in most homes across the City; after the sun has set today, the family will take out every candle that they own (sometimes buying in more for the purpose) and arrange them on their dining table or a similar surface. They then light the candles and leave them for half an hour, before taking a newspaper or a large piece of card or fabric with which they then create a great gust of air which blows out all the candles at once. Sometimes, obviously, this doesn’t work, and another try is needed, but contrary to what you might expect, this is thought to bring bad luck to the home. Quite why is again, unclear, but it is possibly linked to the Escotolatian belief that death must happen quickly, if it has to happen, and that leaving an animal alive which is clearly suffering a slow death will lead to the animal haunting you later. Similarly, if the summer must die, it’s best it was done quickly. Others claim that it is because Father Winter looks unkindly on those who delay his coming.

Since 1708 there has also been a much larger version of this yearly ritual held in the sheltered Milliner’s Square in Whight Hollow district. The whole square is covered in candles, arranged into a grid pattern with small pathways through it. At the allotted time, sixty individuals will carefully walk in amongst the candles with large, purpose made paddles. They must not prematurely put out a candle or, again, risk terrible personal bad luck. They do not speak, but all count down together, until the allotted moment, when they swing their paddles in unison. The spectacle is so well designed that nobody has ever failed to put out all their candles in that very moment. Suddenly plunged into darkness, the spectators all walk home quietly, saying very little.

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Other festivals happening today:

• The Festival of Brightness Gone
• The Festival of Darkening Shores
• The Festival of Welcoming the Dark

As we all know, Buentoille’s power supply is essentially vast but still limited, and certain decisions must be made about how it is allocated. Storage is a massive growth area, as there are often points of the day when excess energy is generated and this can be rerouted to enormous batteries and other such technologies such as liquid air storage (when needed, the liquid air is rapidly decompressed, driving a motor in the process). In recent years new sources of generation such as wind turbines and solar power are being developed, but these have not been sufficiently advanced to provide any considerable extension to the daily power pool. The burning of fossil fuels are generally avoided to stem the production of pollution which is known to reduce life expectancies.

One of the projects which is, every year, considered for energy supply reduction is the Immortal Bank beneath Dimitri’s Park of Bathing. The entrance is fairly easy to spot, although many will not know its significance; a large white marble triangle sloping into the earth with a hardwood door on one side, marked only with the letters ‘IB’ in gold. The door is flanked with two circular lamps of white frosted glass on golden sconces, which throw out a curiously cold light. For most of the year it is locked, and the only other evidence of the Bank’s existence are the baths heated from beneath by the hot air vented from within. It’s only today that the door is unlocked.

Since 1964, today has been a day in which anyone who wants to can delve beneath the park to see the bodies stored there in cryogenic sleep. Access to the actual room where the bodies are kept is still restricted, as it is dangerously cold, and the addition of the moisture from human breath and perspiration would lead to the build up of frost on the bodies, which could damage them irreparably. Instead, the bodies can be peered at through small glass windows in the observation tunnel, where only caretakers can usually venture. The Bank is some way down into the earth, and is accessed by a spiral staircase that eventually cuts straight into the bedrock, where it is easier to maintain the constant temperatures required to keep the bodies frozen.

There are a number of preservation techniques on show through the little glass portholes, ranging from straight-up freezing of human flesh in ice baths (which are strangely similar to those regular baths above) or liquid nitrogen caskets, to more complex attempts at dessication or chemical preservation, with the cold only acting as part of the process. In some instances there are trails of glass tubing piercing these fragile human forms, carrying salinated water that is pumped at sub-zero temperatures to avoid the formation of ice, and therefore the destruction of cells.

It is this last consideration, the formation of ice, which is thought to have irreparably destroyed most of the bodies beyond the facility’s stated aims of not only preservation but also resurrection. Except for those which have been dessicated by chemical and other means, all the bodies presumably cannot be saved at a later date, because the water in every cell in their body will have expanded and inevitably burst the cell upon freezing. This is, however, a controversial subject, as there are those who believe that Buentoilliçan medicine, the scientific area into which most research is poured, will progress to the point that ‘nanobots’ or other such means will be able to repair this damage.

In this is the central crux of the argument, which today’s viewing and subsequent debate and vote, are supposed to settle for another year. Usually, however, rather than being settled the argument rages on well over the apportioned limit, and the bodies are left as they are, given the benefit of the doubt in that the power supply that keeps them frozen is not cut. There are strong beliefs and complex issues on both sides, and it would be a mistake to favour one side or the other, without at least knowing something of the dispute’s context.

Regardless of whether or not we will be able to resurrect these bodies, all of which died very shortly before preservation, leaving the brain seemingly intact, the argument also extends to whether or not this is a desirable thing to do, or whether the Buentoillitants who legally died deserve such a feat of technology. With the exception of Accidental Charles, the body of Charles Yannae which was accidentally mistaken for that of his rich brother, who died in the same poisoning incident, the bodies contained within the Bank are exclusively those who were rich enough in life to afford the services of the Everlast Corporation, whose owners fled the City during the Revolution.

Some people argue that the Corporation had no intent to actually raise these folks from the dead, and simply wanted to gather large sums of money from the rich who were nearing their deaths, and that therefore we too should not be conned into wasting resources maintaining their sham facility. Others argue that the owners, the Barecast brothers, left instructions (which were ignored) to have themselves preserved at the facility when they died, and that therefore there was clearly at least a belief on their part that the process worked.

Similarly, some folk say that the industrialists and aristocrats do not deserve to have a second chance at life, given how they exploited others on their first run. Others argue that, not being children of the Revolution, they would make good test subjects for future attempts at waking more deserving cryogenic subjects, or that human life is sacrosanct despite political inclinations, or that it would be fun to gall these people used to having vast power over their fellow citizens with the new egalitarian society. Others say that the energy taken up by these rich folks could be put to better use elsewhere in the City. Some think that the place must justify itself, being opened to the public all the year around as a tourist attraction. The chances are that today, as with all previous years, the dispute will once again rage one beyond its allotted time, and the bodies will remain in situ, ready for next year’s viewing and argument.

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Other festivals happening today:

• The Festival of Sharpening the Claws
• Aaron Art’s Day
• The Festival of Energetic Magnetism

When the tomb of what was thought to be the religious leader Hawa Kantagir was breached in 1777, it was to great uproar from the Kris Grian Templemen who viewed Kantagir as something like a founding saint, a person that they called a ‘Fallen Star’. The Kris Grian Templemen were an exclusively male sect of ex-slaves from Strigaxia, who were granted their freedom in the latter part of the fourth century, travelling to Buentoille in search of safety. During their enslaved lives, these men had been forced to walk constantly in enormous mice wheels, turning some infernal piece of apparatus which, they were told, ensured that they stayed alive. They rarely, if ever, stopped moving, and found the transition to normal life very hard. It was in the nature of these men to keep moving constantly, and it took a great force of will to remain still.

Thus it was that, for the Kris Grians (which means ‘still wheel walkers’ in Low Strigaxian), being capable of remaining still for any large amount of time was a religious, revelatory act, one which garnered accolades from their fellow still walkers, as well as a personal sense of religious enlightenment. The greatest pioneer of this form of consciousness-altering meditation was Kantagir, who was so good at remaining entirely still that he could go for days without food or water. He was so good, in fact, that it was three days before anyone realised that he had actually died during one of these meditative sessions. Instead of removing his body, the other Kris Grians left it in place and built a wall around it, essentially entombing him in an airtight space. It was only when, in 1777, this tomb was broken into by an errant workman working next door who misunderstood his instruction, that the body began to properly rot away; it had been mummified during the many years without fresh air.

At this point all the original freed slaves had obviously died, but their descendants and followers of their religion, formed in the stillness of those early days in Buentoille, remained still, becoming the Kris Grian Templemen. They often rested themselves against the tar-painted bricks of Kantagir’s tomb, and when they saw the destruction they flew into a rage, severely beating the man who broke into the tomb and smashing up the tools on the building site he was supposed to be working on. Other Templemen sensed opportunity here, though; this was the first time the tomb had ever been opened, and it was seen as an excellent opportunity to clear up some of the finer details of the burial, over which several disputes raged frequently (what position was Kantagir seated in, what was he wearing, what grave goods were left near him?). There was certainly no consensus on what the inside of the tomb looked like precisely, but the Templemen surely hadn’t expected to find what they did find within. The body, sat naked and cross legged in the centre of the space, didn’t look right.

They were too in awe, had too much respect for the dead and their religion to pull out the body and lay it in the light for all to see; besides, it would probably have simply crumbled before them, even more swiftly than it did later that day when the moisture of the air melted the finely preserved figure. Yet despite the poor light conditions and potentially biased accounts, there was something deeply wrong with the corpse; for starters it looked more like a monkey than a human. Its flesh was ghostly white, and had various long dark hairs growing out of it at random intervals. The toes were elongated, the head oversized for the small body. In comparison, Kantagir was said to have dark skin and normal human proportions. On the arm of the corpse was a small tattoo of three diamonds arranged in a triangular pattern.

It was this pattern that which appeared on the front doors of the construction company’s shareholders and workers the next day. Three Templemen were later arrested for wilful intimidation, but all of them denied the crime. Regardless of their pleas, these men were convicted and imprisoned for murder when, three weeks later, the worker who owned the first home to be tagged with the mark was found dead from blunt force, and all three were linked to the scene by a witness. After that first year the markings started appearing more and more frequently, being painted onto doors and walls of buildings. Whilst the Templemen were arrested before any other murders took place, the chapter does not end there; the next year, on the anniversary of the tomb’s breaching and therefore the destruction of the corpse hitherto sealed inside, the markings appeared once more, this time on seemingly random houses scattered throughout the City.

There have been no further deaths linked with the markings (save one where an old man, coming out of his house one morning, suffered a heart attack on seeing his house daubed with the three diamond shapes), and it seems that the ‘triangle of death’ as the marking is now known, are placed around the city by pranksters alone, and not anyone wishing or seeking to bring about any real harm to the inhabitants of each building. The difference in ‘handwriting’ of each graffitied marking shows that much, but yet there are still those, notably from within the Guild of Conspiracy Theorists, who believe there is something dark and dangerous about the mark, that it is the symptom of some sort of psychic malaise leached out from the opened tomb; there is indeed evidence that the mark is some kind of Strigaxian slave’s identification mark, though jumping to the conclusion that the sight of the mark alone can influence human behaviour is perhaps a little too much.

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Other festivals happening today:

• The Festival of Blooded Wine
• Repeat the Little Code Festival

Have you ever been out in the woods at twilight, and seen some faint flicker of light amongst the leaves? The chances are that it was just the sky breaking through the canopy for a moment as you walk by, but then again, it might not be; twilight is deceiving. What you may well have seen was one of the Secret People, or rather, the ethereal light which marks their passing, the only sign of their presence visible to normal human eyes.

Of course, if it wasn’t on this day that you saw those briefest dim flashes in the treetops, then it probably wasn’t one of those shy forest visitors, who have only been ‘verifiably observed’ by a ‘true possessor of The Vision’ on this evening alone, specifically in the Luck’s End forest, in a spot where the chestnut trees grow amongst large mossy boulders. In fact, it was here that The Vision first passed on to the people of Buentoille, allowing them to see the eerie parade that passes through the canopy this eve in the moments just after the sun has set.

Caerwyn Oiser had run away from home earlier that day, the 25^th of September, 1924. There had been an argument; something about a boy she had been seeing. Fifty years later, when she came to tell her story, Oiser did not remember the details; she’d run away from home, for maybe the seventh time, and had decided that she was going to live in the woods. She was only sixteen, but had read plenty of survivalist books and was pretty sure she could hack it. She found a soft, mossy patch of grass in between two large boulders, and laid down a piece of oiled cloth she’s stolen from her mother upon it, before laying down herself. She used her backpack for a pillow and folded the cloth over herself to keep out the rain, which had been falling intermittently all day. The wind picked up, and sang through the stones, casting water collected on the chestnut leaves at her. It was funny, the wind sounded almost like someone crying, far off and faint.

Perhaps it was her own voice reflected back to her, she secretly thought, in some back room of her mind (as an older, wiser woman, Oiser found it easier to admit she had been crying), this sound of distant wailing. Perhaps the wind had blown the sound back, breaking her sobs on the stones like gurgling sea foam. She didn’t have long to think those thoughts, because then, very abruptly, a tear fell into her eye. Not that she knew it was a tear at first; she thought it was a drop of rain from the trees, but it stung something horrid and she sat up quickly, rubbing it like crazy. Both her eyes were red and puffy anyway, but now her left eye was particularly inflamed. She cursed and lay back down, covering her face a little with her arm. Everything looked a little fuzzy. She closed her right eye to test out the left and there, lying in the arms of the tree above her, was a girl crying.

Looking back, in her interview with Buentoilliçan Weird Weekly Oiser remarked ‘I’m surprised I wasn’t more surprised. I’d been looking up at that very spot, just moments before, and there was nobody there. No, she didn’t look anything like me.’ The girl was strange looking, as if she were elastic, boneless. She lay facing down with her head in her arms, but her body sagged, as if you had laid a slack hosepipe between the branches. The proportions were right, she just, well, was saggy. She convulsed slightly, as she cried, ripples sent through her body. Oiser couldn’t see her out of her right eye.

After a long moment, another person, of the same construction, peeled out from behind the tree trunk and sloped over the her, their hand stroking her hair in a comforting way. This other figure, a woman too, walked strangely and carefully, like a wobbly tightrope walker. Their weight didn’t seem to affect the branch at all, and she wavered on each leg, like a snake rearing upright. Her eyes were large and black, almost all pupil. They looked grey, only half there. Eventually they both got up and walked back over to the trunk, and plunged into it with a small, semi-visible pop of light.

It was a long time before Oiser told anyone what she saw that evening, before the moon rose on the forest. It was only seven years later, on the 24^th, that she told her newly wed husband, Batear, about it. When he realised it wasn’t a joke he agreed to go with her to the forest at the same time, to watch the creatures lope between the tree branches, extruding from knots in trunks here and there, before travelling some way across the branch and then disappearing back within the tree, accompanied by that familiar flash, just as hundreds had done above Oiser that evening when she was younger. To let him see them, Caerwyn transferred some of the tears from her left eye into a vial, then dropped then into Batear’s eye. They waited for the canopy walkers, the Secret People, to emerge, and were not disappointed.

After Batear it was her family and friends, and then a few others who’d heard tell of the strange experience, of watching those who couldn’t see in return, those secret people who listened strangely to hanging chestnuts at intervals between their loping walks, flashes of light and extrusive apparition. Some of these chestnuts they carefully touched, making them fall to the ground. Not many, though. After the interview many more joined them, and tonight this motley group will do much the same as they always do; share out their tears, their Vision, to newcomers, and sit quietly on the moss-covered boulders for the Secret People to arrive, each with a hand over their right eye.

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Other festivals happening today

• The Festival of the Honey’d Voice
• The Festival of Interested Parties
• Holly Berry Anticipation Day

The Warrens are a multi-dimensional maze of alleys, covered walkways, houses stacked on top of each other, tunnels leading into the earth. There are places where you’d think you’d been underground for some time, but then you come to the end of a path and are standing on a balcony, looking over the City. At midday the sun lights certain streets, managing, despite the odds, to reach down past three other stories of buildings, to where someone has placed a small potted plant next to their doormat. To increase the spread of natural light which works its way into the piled architecture, hundreds of mirrors are placed around, designed to brighten alleys and homes for a short period each day.

What with the mirrors and the lack of clear directional cues, the Warrens can be a maze-like space, even for those who live there; there are plenty of bawdy plays, performed at pubs, in which a warrens resident might, on their drunken way home, find their way accidentally into the bed of their neighbour. Understandably, this leads to a certain fascination by many of the other residents of the City, and now, since the Revolution dispelled the stigma, misconceptions and fear which existed around the Warrens, there are plenty of tourists roaming the tight streetways, trying to find that particular pub, or the little fountain that Saint Yernine was said to have Attuned to the trickling sound of, or simply to get lost.

The Warrens were an insular, tight-knit place for a very long time, and whilst tourists are tolerated the attitudes forged by centuries of stigma and isolation still persist, even now, over a hundred years after the Revolution. It was this animosity that first began the Festival of the Drunken Escape, although somewhat ironically it now acts as another point of interest to draw in the tourists. The festival begins, as you might expect, at a pub, specifically the Boxing Hare pub, which is located somewhere towards the centre of the north-eastern quadrant of the Warrens. The drinks taken there by the tourists are highly regimented, based upon the weight of each contestant. An old grain scale in the street outside is used to measure their weight, which is then written down on a chit that is exchanged for a sum of money. The contestants then hand this chit to the barman who exchanges it for the requisite number of bottles, usually of Draque’s Wicked Servant, a strong-flavoured, high strength stout that comes in a black bottle with the subtitle, ‘The Downfall of Many.’ They are given two hours to drink these before the festival continues, at which point they must hand over the bottle tops to show they are ready.

The festivals origins are the stuff of legend, now inscribed into a small wooden plaque that adorns the pub’s entryway, next to the carved image of the hare rampant that sits atop many of the doorways in this area, and after which the pub was named (this was the symbol of a self-defence league which ruled that section of the Warrens for some time). A tourist named Dratch Hornwell, who was by most accounts a highly obnoxious man, decided to visit the Warrens for his birthday party, which was today in 1921. He wound up, with a small entourage, in the Boxing Hare, and proceeded to get very drunk and boisterous. The locals, sufficiently incensed, considered simply beating the party up and tossing them out on the street, but this was the new Buentoille, and inter-class relations were supposed to be improving. Instead they introduced Hornwell to an ‘old and venerable tradition’ which involved blindfolding the man, taking him into the Labyrinth, spinning him around a few times, then leaving him for dead.

The Warrens weren’t always this big; they have been built progressively larger over many years, and in that time places have gotten buried. There are streets and whole blocks even, now, where no natural light reaches at all, even with mirror-aid, where the air is stagnant, where folk moved on from long ago, perhaps even building a new home atop the pile, widening this dead zone ever further. The walls of the buildings remain, as they support those higher up, but in many cases the doors have been removed to let folk get from one side of the Warrens to the other more quickly. The Labyrinth is the largest of these spaces, where building and street intermingle, tangle in a knot where it is even easier to get lost than the surrounding inhabited spaces.

Around this twisted zone, sound bounces strangely; there are places where it sounds as if someone far away is whispering in your ear, or where a friend becomes entirely inaudible, though they only rounded a single corner. It’s no wonder they call it the Labyrinth. It is the centre of this place where this year’s blindfolded revellers will be spun and left, just as Hornwell was in 1921, and then in ’22 and onwards when he returned for his birthday each year, declaring the ‘sport’ to be ‘one of the most exciting things a person can do whilst completely bladdered.’ Those who make it back to the pub in the quickest time (the record is 38 minutes) receive a badge and a complimentary hamper of Draque’s Wicked Servant, should they ever want to taste the stuff again.

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Other festivals happening today:

• The Harped Festival
• Yelem Chousmaid’s Dystopian Roleplaying Extravaganza
• The Bay Leaf Festival Feast

There are only a few horse chestnut trees in Buentoille proper, though there are plenty of them in the forests nearby. There is the Wizard’s Tree, that grows out of the side of the Guilgamot district cliff face, a venerable old thing, long-gnarled by the weather and, its roots well knotted to the precipice. There is the Starvom Yard horse chestnut, access to which is normally gained by climbing up the Yard’s wall, where the bricks have been chipped away, even now that the doors are left open to let the local children in. In the last few days there has been a flurry of activity around these trees, children combing the ground and branches for the best conkers, getting ready for The Annual Municipal Conker Championships.

There are a few other trees as well, each with its own adherents, believers in the strength of the conkers that their tree produces. These adherents form factions within the Championships today, groups who still compete against each other, but who, if defeated, will cheer on another person who sourced their conker from their tree. They each have narratives, spurious logic that explain why their chosen tree produces the strongest conkers; the Winery House Tree, for example, is said to have imbibed a great deal of vinegar (gone off wine poured out onto its roots by the Winery House staff over the years), a common ingredient used to harden conkers which is supposedly pre-infused into its harvest as a result.

Using vinegar and the various other ways of processing or treating conkers to improve their hardness are, mostly, allowed by the Championships; the rules are fairly loose, but they do disallow using varnish, shellac or other agents which form a barrier between the outer skin of the conker and whatever it is striking. There are other rules governing the material condition of conkers, too: ‘The body of the conker must be intact and not scooped out more than is necessary to pass the string through it, and no replacement of flesh should be countenanced.’ These rules were once absent, but had to be introduced when it was revealed that the winner of the 1882 competition had used a hard-setting resin peppered with ball bearings to improve their conker. There have been other such scandals; in 1729 there was uproar when the girl who had won the Championships for the last seven years admitted to using a stone which had merely been polished to look like a conker.

For those unfamiliar with this children’s game which pervades school yards for most of the autumn, the rules are generally quite simple: a conker is drilled or skewered through, a string or shoelace is placed through the resulting hole, and knotted at one end, and then, in turns, one player dangles their conker from the end of its string whilst the other swings theirs into it at great velocity, attempting to shatter it. If your conker breaks, you lose. There is obviously a certain amount of skill in the swinging, but the deciding factor is usually the strength of the conker, its ability to absorb, reflect and withstand the impact. The choice of conker is obviously a large deciding factor in the strength of each competitor’s arsenal, with shape, water content, size and thickness of skin all being considered by the adroit harvester.

The treatment of the chestnut is for some where most of the game’s skill resides, and there are family recipes which have been handed down through the generations, most of which involve some different combination of vinegar, oven-heating and ageing; there are no rules about the age of a conker and many of the children harvesting over the last few days will have had next year’s competition in mind (it seems that keeping a conker in a cool, dry place for a year does wonders for its durability). Some swear by covering the chestnut in glue for a year, forming an air-tight seal which is later peeled off. There is a very large conker in the Degglan family called ‘Baldy’ that has been used since 1911 and which remains undefeated, though it has not been entered every year as there have not always been children young enough to enter (The Children’s Union stipulates that entrants must be 14 and under). Legend has it that when the conker is finally broken, the family line will end.

The Championships will take place in Heyfall Square today, inside a specially constructed ring, and will be accompanied by several traditional songs performed by the children, such as ‘Hey Nonny Hit the Thing Straight, Sonny’ and ‘Ouch My Thumb!’. The winner receives a golden conker on a gold chain, and a basket of eating chestnuts to be eaten in the winter, roasted next to an open fire. This year there are lots of exciting rumours surrounding a child with the Vision, who claims one of the Secret People pointed out to her a Master Conker which can beat any who dare come against it.

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Other festivals happening today:

• The Festival of the Shoddy Painting
• A Festival of Obtuse Misunderstanding
• The Guild of Lichen Appreciators’ Autumn Excursion