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Today’s festival, whilst being considered a venerable Buentoilliçan custom, is technically not conducted in Buentoille, but in Droptown, a small section of Sleade Yard on the banks of the Moway where most of the raw materials for the district’s pottery industry is unloaded from the quarrying operations upstream. Today, however, the boats and porters will have to dock elsewhere, taking the long way around via another district.

To all intents and purposes, Droptown is simply a section of a district of Buentoille, and shows as such on any given map you care to produce, save perhaps those which are hung in pride of place in the Droptown Hall, a large wooden construction alike in appearance to an upturned boat. On the Droptown map, Droptown is marked in separate colour; pink instead of the orange of Buentoille. Next to the map, in a glass cabinet, is the Droptown Certificate of Independence, which was signed by the then mayor, Dermovytch Asaan in 1666. The space for ratification was never signed by the monarch of Buentoille, because this would have effectively meant that the Droptowners were exempt from paying tax, and could make its own laws.

Droptown is one of the many small communities which was swallowed up by the rapid expansion of Buentoille, and whilst many of these places became culturally subsumed as well, Droptown maintains some level of separation. Droptowners are, for example, very fond of boating, and each member of the community is taught how to build their own craft as part of becoming an adult. They go out in these boats at least once a week, and much more frequently when the weather is good. This is possibly spawned from the fact there is no bridge across the Moway for a few miles, so Droptowners have always operated their own ferry services, though many have argued that it is the other way around; the ferry services obviated the need for a bridge.

The Hall is also listed as the official residence of the Mayor of Droptown, a now mostly ceremonial position, though it does retain certain rights and responsibilities. One such privilege is the final say over whether outsiders can marry into a Droptown family, although nowadays it would be technically illegal for the Mayor to attempt to stop the marriage, so they instead act as an announcer of new engagements. Besides these occasions, the most important responsibility held by the Mayor is the organisation of the Enclosure Ceremony which happens on this day each year.

This organisation begins long before the festival itself, when the barriers are inspected and ordered to be rebuilt if necessary. Woodworking is a skill honed by almost all the community, and custom pieces of fencing are made to measure, then affixed today onto special blocks that protrude from the Droptown houses, forming a perimeter that differentiates the town from the City. Most of these are actually put in place yesterday, as are the blockade of boats by the harbour, those coming-of-age boats built by each resident, laid end-to-end (not side-by-side as this indicates that the boat owners, differentiated by their woodworking style and family carvings on the prow, are married) and attached by ropes so no craft may pass. At the strike of midnight last night, or this morning, depending on how you look at it, the final fence piece and boat are put into place, and will remain so for a full day, until midnight strikes once again.

For Droptowners, being outside the fences today is a cardinal sin, tantamount to giving up citizenship, of becoming a mere Buentoillitant. This is not to say that it has never happened; the play Mattenda and Hillea is about two lovers, one a Droptowner one a Buentoillitant, who are forbidden their marriage by the Mayor. When she hears that Hillea has been hurt, Mattenda scrambles over the fences to be with her, surrendering her citizenship. The play is thought to have been based on various real-life, similar instances.

This geographic determination of citizenship is not merely a petty symbolism on this day, but a matter with legal weight. The reason the barriers go up today is because in order to retain its recognised position as a ‘culturally distinct geographical zone’ of Buentoille (rather than a ‘culturally distinct community’, which carries less legal weight), no Droptowners must enter or exit Droptown for a full day, and no others can enter. Therefore, those who leave or are trapped outside the town must surrender their citizenship, and anyone who contrives to enter are granted citizenship. The upshot of all this is that Buentoille as a City cannot impose construction of any sort in Droptown without the consent of the residents, but this isn’t really the point; the point is pride, and that most Buentoilliçan of values: tradition.

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Other festivals happening today:

• Quebmaner Stawn’s Day of Discount Elixirs
• The Graphic Festival
• The Injunction of Amrinte Festival

A lot of work goes into today’s festival, by a lot of children. Don’t worry, this isn’t child labour in any meaningful sense; no adult coerces them into preparing The Glorious Pile, in Tripe Eater’s Square at the end of Moorfolk Boulevard, and all participation is strictly voluntary. The Children’s Union looks after their members well. In any case, today is a big day in the calendars of Buentoillitant children.

There are several ways of anticipating the Festival of the Glorious Pile: firstly, there is the end of summer, the bite that is drawn into the air and the increase in wind speeds. It always comes after the Anguished Howl, which normally knocks a few more leaves from the trees. When you start eating pumpkins and squash and root vegetables; that’s when the Glorious Pile must be formed. Children from all over start turning up to their Union’s headquarters with baskets and arms full of leaves. They are then deposited in a special room, where they are dried out prior to their deployment today.

It’s after school today that the room is emptied by hundreds of children, each with their own sacks and barrows, leaving little trails of leaves that their littler siblings gather up dutifully behind them. The procession lasts only a little time, as the Square is only a few streets over from the Union headquarters, but it is quite a sight to behold, and the City authorities ensure that, for safety reasons, the streets in-between are closed to automobile traffic. The older children bookend the procession, carrying not leaves but parts of the ladder and diving board that they then carefully construct in the Square.

The reason they chose Tripe Eater’s Square over 200 years ago when the festival first started, other than for its silly name, is that the square and all of the adjoining Moorfolk Boulevard are lined with plane trees. Plane tree leaves are particularly good for playing in, as they are large and dry out quickly, providing excellent bounce and crunch. They also fall very quickly, towards the beginning of autumn. At one time the children would wait for a long spell of dry weather before commencing the festival, using only the leaves on this street and square, but nowadays things are more organised, and everyone would be very disappointed if it were too wet all Autumn, and the freshly fallen leaves turned to wet sludgy leaf litter before any fun could be had, as is often the case.

By 5:00pm, things are normally set up, ready for the festivities to commence properly; a large queue forms and children from all around the City wait patiently for their turn to climb up the large ladder, then throw themselves from the diving board into the frankly enormous pile of dried leaves. Once they’ve waded their way out (specially trained adult medics from the Orderlies of Good Health are on hand for any rare accidents), the next child jumps in. Normally there is enough time for every child in attendance to have at least three jumps, which takes until about 10:00pm. In the queue they throw leaves at each other and buy toffee apples with their pocket money.

At ten the festival finishes, and the somewhat compressed pile of leaves is kicked all around by the children. It will be cleared up tomorrow by the district’s public works officers, but for the meantime, Tripe Eater’s Square is a sea of leaves, and anyone who wades through tonight will be heard for miles around.

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Other festivals happening today:

• The Festival of Brazen Disappointment
• The Festival of the Last Woman
• Deer Day

There is a story in western Buentoille, that has been told since time immemorial. It pops up here and there in textual form throughout the ages, and it would seem, from these sources, to have ebbed and grown in popularity with the progression of time, at some points being almost forgotten before it was once again revived. As an oral tale, it has certainly changed in some regards over time, but again, from the textual evidence we have, it changes only in incidental detail, such as the name or profession of the old man. Perhaps it is a reflection of modern preoccupations that the most recent iteration of the story seems excessively concerned with dates and times, placing emphasis on the fact that it was today when the babe was first found.

One thing that never changes in the tales is the location of the tale: Luck’s End forest, specifically a rabbit-mown clearing on the western edge. It begins with an old woman, one of those old women that everyone has known as an old woman for their whole life, who seems to have outlived innumerable generations. She’s ever-present, but as such blends into the background. Not that she is ignored; she comes to all the weddings and blesses the couples, on Pea Day or any of the other days when the community gets together, she tells excellent stories about your father when he was young, or about the toy shop that used to be where the bakers is today. Even in her stories she is ancient.

It’s important that she is not forgotten, because in the story she goes missing one night, after a short period of illness, the only one that anyone can remember her having. One of the local ladies comes to bring her some medicine, or a book or some fruit, and discovers that she is gone. The community spends a little while looking for her in the local area, but she cannot be found that night. In the morning, one of the children admits that they know where she is going, but that they promised not to tell until the next day. They all head off to the forest, for that rabbit-mown clearing.

Whilst the woman in the story seems not to have any relatives (perhaps she has outlived them all?), it is mostly grieving relatives who make the journey to Luck’s End forest today, to that same clearing with its rabbit holes and scattering of leaf litter amongst the short-cropped grass. Those who have recently lost an elderly mother or father head out, with a token that represents their relative in some way; a lock of hair, a photograph, their favourite book. They head out in the early morning, fresh dew wetting their boots, fox cries and the first rays of the sun carrying through the mist, which still has not been lifted by the time they reach the forest’s edge.

Or at least, those are the weather conditions in the story. It’s likely that they’ll be repeated come this morning, given the time of year, but not certain. It’s important for the story to emphasise these elemental signs of a new day just come, but real life is not always so neat. In the story, when the people get to the clearing there is, at the centre of a faerie ring (a ring of mushrooms, in this case wood blewits, which sprout in places like this) a newborn baby. The Babe in the Woods. The child is taken in by one of the searching families, but the old woman is never found, not that they keep looking after they find the babe. In some versions of the story, it carries the same birthmark as the old woman, though quite what it looks like is seldom specified.

It’s unlikely that any of the folk who’ve walked to the wood today expect to find a child, although there will almost certainly be wood blewits in uncanny rings scattered across the clearing. Around these rings, which they are careful not to enter into, they place the tokens they’ve brought with them. There is some magical logic to this action, some impotent call for the reincarnation of passed parents, yet for most this is not what it is about; this is simply another way to grieve, but also to acknowledge adulthood in its final form. For all their lives until recently, these Buentoillitants have had someone older, more experienced, than them to look up to, to ask advice of, to go back to when times are tough. Now, like the people in the story, they have to take up that role for their children, to be the final generation as new life is brought into the world.

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Other festivals happening today:

• The Festival of the Red Train
• The Feast of the Quickening Dark
• The Festival of Calling Time

Despite the attempts to make the Skeleton Dance seem like some ancient tradition by linking it to church and graveside iconography, it is actually a comparatively modern celebration, with little behind it but a desire to enjoy the spooky, the spectacular. The idea of the ‘Macabre Dance’ as it was known, stretches far back into Buentoilliçan history, predating even the Chastise Church. The painted and carved images of skeletal figures leading the newly deceased away to the afterlife via death that adorn some of the older Churches are probably an attempt to co-opt old forms of belief into the Church.

In their modern format, these images and ideas were once again co-opted into new form by Weller Delwet, inventor of the zoetropic carousel lamp, in what proved to be a successful attempt to sell his inventions. This is where we get the modern association between dancing skeletons and this date from; Delwet identified October the 21^st as the best date to sell his lamps, which at once captured the creepy elements of autumn, when the luscious life of summer begins to give way to death and rot, and the attractive glow of fire which has not yet become tired as it can be towards winter’s end. In order to raise sales, Delwet hired thirteen historians to fabricate stories of a ‘sadly lost festival’ which took place on that auspicious day, upon which all lost souls would be gathered and led to the afterlife by dancing skeletons.

According to these hired historians, the primary way in which Buentoillitants would celebrate this festival was by dancing around a huge bonfire and watching their elongated shadows, which would be joined by similarly elongated skeletal examples, the only mark the dancing skeletons made outside the spiritual realm, as they passed by. In the adverts he bought in the Daily Buentoillitant, Delwet extolled readers to ‘Treat the family to a SKELETON DANCE SPECTACLE, from the comfort of their own home! By INGENIOUS MECHANISM, watch the skeletons dance the light fantastic around your living room! DELWET’S SKELETAL CAROUSEL OF LIGHT is sure to delight and amaze family members of all ages!’ Quite often these adverts accompanied articles on the ‘ancient’ festival itself, where the links to the past and Buentoille’s preoccupation with festivals were also levered.

This ‘ingenious mechanism’ functions in a manner which is, as the name suggests, similar to both a zoetrope and a carousel lamp, in effect projecting moving images of dancing skeletons onto the surrounding walls, when spun fast enough either by hand with a special pulley or by clockwork, as with some later designs developed for richer clients. While the lampshades spin very fast, the skeletal figures appear to move around in circles much slower, capering and high-stepping as they go. An oil or gas lamp is in the centre, with a diffuser placed upon the naked flame to shield it from the updraft and to spread the light more evenly. Much as they were instructed to do in the adverts, many Buentoilliçan households bought one of these contraptions and spun it up on this night, the whole family gathered around, looking at the projected figures on the walls. Delwet made his fortune.

Of course, this is Buentoille, so things had to become a little more communal and take to the streets. Since 1871, just that has happened; a giant lamp is constructed in Taleventer’s Circle, where all the local houses become something of a canvas for the skeletons dancing around, their lost souls in tow. Since the nineteenth century there have also been some other changes; electricity has obviously come into play, and modern zoetropic carousel lamps are far more complex and automatic, although those families who still retain their originals are wont to bring them out for the night. In many windows all around the City you will tonight see various light displays, inspired by Delwent’s creation. Children often make static scenes, light boxes where various layers of paper are shone through, creating a sense of three dimensions. Special white curtains are hung in some houses for the night, onto which short, spooky films are projected, extended versions of those which entertain the families inside and out. For the amount of effort that goes into tonight’s celebrations, you’d think people actually believed they were participating in some great, ancient tradition.

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Other festivals happening today:

• The Monochrome Expression Festival
• The Festival of the Fanned Flautist’s First Symphionetta
• The Festival of the Sunken Biscuit

Fire, that most human of the elements, has many meanings. Fire brings warmth on quiet winter days when rabbit prints are visible in the snow; fire is kindled, nurtured to perfection by bakers in their enormous ovens. Buentoillitants celebrate around fires on many a festival day; learning to make a fire safely is an important milestone of mid childhood. Fire is an illusive hope for campers on wet days, and yet there are those times when fire is the enemy, such as the Great Fire of 1362, when three hundred homes became charred wreckage. For the Water Brigade, fire is a respected adversary, a dance partner trying to trip you up.

Beyond these obvious meanings and associations, there are other, more spiritual aspects to fire. According to Malchard the Troubadour, the Waegstallasians stare into fire to see the past, to try and spy the ancestors who made the enormous, empty city around them. There was once a sect of Catrosondian nuns who believed that anything burned was transported to heaven; what a terrible end their sinking must have seemed. One, somewhat spiritual meaning that fire has in many societies around this corner of the world, is that of cleansing, of purification. It is a meaning that witches know all too well, and it is the most generally agreed upon reason for today’s festival.

Preparations for the festival are going on all day; readying the boats and rafts takes up most time, as they are arrayed with stacks of wood doused in tar and other flammable liquids. By low tide, there is a veritable armada in the docks, which is dragged out around the bay by tugs. At the entrance to Blackened Grotto, a low arch only visible when the tide is well out, they pause briefly, and three guns are fired into the dark depths. Presumably this is to scare out any birds that might be hiding inside, but nothing has lived in the Grotto besides anemones and the like for many many years. Some have suggested this gunfire was originally supposed to be a signal to others, or a remembered fragment of battle, echoed and distorted through time.

The tugs, with their high-powered lamps, drag and shunt the flotilla of flammable barges deep into the abyss, which extends back for quite some distance, before the stalactites, like spiny teeth in this enormous maw, block the way. They retreat out long before the tide comes back in; this is not a place you want to be trapped, especially not tonight. The rest of the festival waits until nightfall, when a convoy winds its way up to the cliffs above that fearful seaside mouth, coalescing around a black hole in the rock. If Blackened Grotto were some great toothed whale, this would be its blowhole; the cavern lies directly beneath, and on wild and stormy nights you can sometimes see a spurt of seawater rise out from this funnel, such is the pressure that builds up beneath.

By the time they reach the hole, it will be high tide once again, the cave’s mouth once again closed by the sea. Oddly enough it is a priest who heads up the congregation; the task has always fallen to the priest of the Church of Saint Pillont, though they know not why, it doesn’t pertain to any Chastise Church text or dogma, nor is it linked to their saint. There has always been something of a fearful hush around this festival, and yet it always has a sense of necessity to it. Is it guilt that drives this hush, or genuine fear? It is a festival of purification, they say, but what requires purification? Perhaps there is some clue in the words of the priest, as they drop a flaming torch into that dark hole, ‘I commend this grotto, and all its inhabitants, to fire.’ Braver, or perhaps more brazen, Buentoillitants speak darkly about these ‘inhabitants;’ what could have inspired such destructive fear? Surely whatever lived there long ago could not have been human; it is not a place for humans to live.

Nobody stays, after they ensure that the torch has done its work, and that the smoke and then flames have begun to reach out of the hole. They walk home in silence, occasionally glancing back over their shoulders at the red light on the clifftop. It will burn all night.

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Other festivals happening today:

• The Festival of Quick Drinking
• Saint Yel’s Day
• Ron Freethy’s Night of Missed Chances

To be entirely honest, there aren’t many people who participate in today’s festival any more. It’s deemed to be a bit old hat by the younger generations, and seems somewhat rude, cruel even to a lot of people. The dwindling number who do participate point out that their actions aren’t intended to be cruel, but are instead a form of collective memory, a way of building their identities. As Simmonde Owenii said in 2011, ‘it’s another way of saying: I was there, I grew up when you did, we experienced the same things! It’s a kind of in-joke.’ Perhaps this is the real reason behind the waning number of participants, though some critics say simply that it is inane, a banality not worth remembering or celebrating.

In defence against claims of cruelty, there is no reason to believe that Loane Allendis, the Buentoilliçan Broadcasting Service (BBS) news presenter around whom the festival is based, thought it was at all hurtful. Each time she commented upon it in interviews about her long and distinguished career, Allendis seemed only to find it funny, if a little tiresome toward the end of her life, reacting with characteristic good grace and poise. There was no suggestion otherwise from her friends and family after she died that this was not the case; when her husband Terrance was questioned about whether it privately affected her he simply said, ‘Loane was a woman for whom the truth was sacred. She couldn’t lie even if she’d wanted to.’

Allendis, who covered the morning television shift on BBS1 (the primary official Buentoilliçan televisual channel) from 1953 to 1987, was a striking woman with a professional-yet-warm manner and an excellent, somewhat avant-garde, fashion sense. She was the woman who made jumpsuits popular again, and who was famous for the graphic designs, often involving eyes and ears, that she hand stitched into her dresses and shirts. Allendis was a pioneer, and usually, in the weeks following a new ‘look’ that she sported, you would see plenty of other Buentoillitants attempting to emulate her. When, however, she stepped out on-screen on October the 23rd 1978 wearing two very odd shoes, it was obvious something wasn’t quite right.

Quite why they didn’t pan the camera up slightly for the three hour shift Allendis worked that morning was the question on most folk’s lips. Some people thought it was on purpose, that it was some new fashion she’d developed, others recognised that it it was a mistake, or thought that she was cynically testing the extent of her power in the fashion world; surely if she could get people to walk around with one platform shoe and one flat shoe, she was capable of almost anything. Later, Allendis admitted that it had been an accident in the changing rooms. ‘My daughter got engaged the previous night, and we’d stayed up too late celebrating,’ she revealed to the Buentoillitant Gossip in November, ‘I was very tired and I didn’t notice until the camera was on me.’

Almost all the folks shambling around today with severely mismatched shoes (some prefer a less intrusive approach of using two shoes that are on the same basic level) were those who watched Allendis that morning. Some were big fans of the presenter, and found the mix-up a heart-warming moment that made her seem all the more human and approachable, or commended her ability to keep calm despite the interruption, which was even pointedly stared at by one of her guests. The most common reaction was, of course, laughter.

Terwenne Vent, a veteran of the festival which spontaneously appeared the following year, remembered being in stitches in front of the TV: ‘The longer it went on, the funnier it got. She just pointedly refused to acknowledge the issue, that was what got me. It’s not like anyone would have minded if she’s just taken them off, but she kept them on and even had the bravery to cross her legs when sitting on the sofa, drawing attention to them further! I remember there was one of the guests, a Litanchan I think, who kept staring at them and then looking guiltily up again. His mouth was opening and closing like a fish. I couldn’t breathe.

Whilst there won’t be a tremendous amount of folks out there today with odd shoes, they certainly won’t be easily missed. There is no official congregation point for this festival, no march or bonfire, but those involved might stay on the train for an extra stop on their way home from work, hoping to bump into a fellow odd-shoe-wearer. When they meet they nod and smile in recognition. If they’re sitting next to each other, they might even trade stories about themselves, what they were up to in 1978.

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Other festivals happening today:

• The Festival of Walker’s Pride
• Saint Ephram’s Day
• The Falsetto Festival

Surely as a child you played under a sycamore tree, throwing the whirligigs into the air and watching them slowly tumble down? Or did you split them open and stick them to your nose, pretending to be a unicorn? The seeds of the sycamore, also known as ‘fairy wings’ or ‘samaras’, to give them their scientific name, can keep children amused for hours in this manner, one of the many excellent toys that nature brings at this time of year.

For those children who live around the eastern Patrimony Delanik Atmospheric Rail station, the exhaust chimney there has always provided an excellent opportunity for fun at this time of year. The top of the chimney is covered in a wire mesh, to stop leaves and the like from gathering in the turbine system, so instead, on days when the Atmospheric rail isn’t running, the leaves and the like gather on top. When the air in front of the rail carriage below is then pumped out at great speed, propelling it along, these leaves fly into the air. It would be quite spectacular, if many leaves settled there, but unfortunately the chimney reaches above all the nearby trees, and only a small selection of wind-blown leaves reach that high.

Out of the three Atmospheric Rail stations (western, central and eastern), the eastern station is the only place where the chimney is directly overlooked by another structure (other than the station semaphore towers). The chimney runs up beside Lighterwoman House, a block of flats constructed in the 1960s, which has a community garden on its roof. It didn’t take long after the flats were constructed for the children living in the block to work out that is you gather a bundle of whirligigs from the trees that lined the streets, and throw them into the chimney at just the right moment, then you would have a rather spectacular display, the whirligigs flying far up into the sky and then tumbling slowly back down over a much larger area as they were caught by the wind. At this time of year the local children do little else, and the streets are clear of whirligigs for several miles.

When Inari Masque went to university in 1982, she was pretty lonely. De Geers felt like an alien place to her, and even though it wasn’t long on the train to go home and see her parents and local friends, she felt that it would have been a defeat of some sort. She stuck it out, but was constantly yearning for someone to reach out to her, to disturb the sediment she’d built around herself, in her pond of misery. It took until third year for her to realise it didn’t have to be this way, that there is no shame in contacting your parents, that you don’t have to completely reconstruct yourself and cut yourself off from your old life, just because you’re going to uni. She was on her way out of Lighterwoman House, after visiting her folks, that year, and she saw the children throwing the whirligigs into the chimney, and she had an idea.

Normally, the prevailing wind over Buentoille runs from the north west to the south east, as it comes in from the sea. However, at this time of year, from about mid October until December, the prevailing direction changes, with faster, drier winds cutting in from the east, originating from the Great Expanse that lies in that direction. This is very important in the formation and timing of today’s festival, because it means that anything thrown into the chimney by Lighterwoman House gets carried well over the City toward the west. When she got back to university in 1984, where she was studying art, Masque set about making several capsules, in a design based on the whirligigs that the children throw into the chimney. Masque’s whirligigs, still made today, are larger than their natural cousins, and where the seed pod would be they instead have enough space for a small, tightly folded letter.

It was words of encouragement that Masque chose to write on those first letters, which were dispersed all across the City, rising high on the gust of air and then being whipped west as they fell, spinning. They landed in the streets, in parks, they got clogged in guttering, trapped in trees. They were almost all found, around forty six of that first batch of fifty. To some people they meant the world, to others they were a curious oddity, or a nuisance. Only eight of the forty six turned up to the party they were invited to the following week, but in fairness many didn’t find theirs until after it was over. Nowadays the party is held a month from today, and about five hundred are released, by Masque and the other residents of Lighterwoman House.

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Other festivals happening today:

• The Festival of the Priest’s Failure
• Greenhorn Day
• The Last Warning Festival

If you are from Litancha and visiting the City, today’s festival might not be quite what you expect. Similarly, if you tell a Buentoillitant about Litancha’s depiction of mermaids, they will be equally perplexed; these saccharine cartoons of girls with beautiful, sparkling fishes tails are nowhere to be found in Buentoille. Take one trip to the fish market, take a look at the bulging eyes, spiny backs and hideous teeth of some of the fish there, and you will be getting a better idea of how Buentoillitants view mermaids. It is another world underwater, where the very firmament threatens death, and who knows what darkling horrors wait in the inky depths of a deep pool?

As is the way with old stories, the tale of Saint Bertasy has changed somewhat over the years. At one point he was thought to be a fairly pedestrian figure in the Chastise Church canon, and garnered little more than the official recognitions during church services on this, his festival day. It continued this way for many years, until Eauna Cause drowned in the pool that borders the Church of Saint Morstead. She’d become tangled in some weeds growing at the edge of the pool whilst playing nearby with her friends, dying, tragically, at the age of seven. The priest of the Church, now known as the Church of Saints Morstead and Bertasy, Helenia Walthemsore, was devastated. She ordered the pool cleaned of its weeds, and even considered filling it in, but then she had a better idea.

In Buentoilliçan folklore, the mermaid is not some beautiful maid of the sea, but a terrible monster that haunts pools of stagnant water, with awful grasping hands and a rapacious desire for the flesh of children. There are, of course, some disagreements over the exact origin of the creature, but it’s generally agreed that it first appeared in Traccea’s Maid’s Lament, in which a vain young woman becomes convinced that she has been turned ugly because when she goes to the pool (or ‘mere’) to see her reflection, she sees a ‘meremaid’ waiting beneath the surface instead. Having previously built her entire self-worth on her good looks, she throws herself into the pool and drowns in the meremaid’s embrace. Whilst Traccea presumably intended the meremaid to be a creature symbolic of the maid’s internal ugliness of character, it became a monster in its own right, dropping an ‘e’ and being used by parents across the City to scare their children away from playing at dangerous bodies of water.

By Walthemsore’s time, the early seventeenth century, the mermaid-as-warning had begun to slip from common usage, and this is what the priest saw as the driving factor behind Cause’s death. Had she grown up in a time (as Walthemsore had) when pools like the one by the Church were fearful places, full with monsters waiting to grab you, then she would not have drowned in it. This at least was the argument that the priest put forward to herself, and was the reasoning behind the creation of today’s festival. Walthemsore remembered reading about Saint Bertasy long ago; he had gained his sainthood by Attuning to the rocking motion of his fishing boat, and had used this attunement to foresee the drowning of a similar young girl, who he saved. In order for the Church authorities to approve the festival that the priest had in mind, she had to connect it to a saint in some way. The answer, of course, was to bend the story of Saint Bertasy to her ends.

Today, by that same pool, a parishioner will dress up in a gruesome outfit, adorned with pond weeds and fish scales, and will wrap up some of the local children in long weeds, generally terrorising anyone who comes near. This ‘mermaid’ will at times submerge themselves in the pool, and then burst forth menacingly when people walk past. Then, after some time, she will begin to drag some of the wrapped children toward the water. It is at this point that Saint Bertasy (or rather, another parishioner playing him) appears, casting their fisher’s net over the horrid creature and slaying her with a golden sword (this last detail seems to have been added in more recently) and setting the children free. The actor will then proceed to give a short lecture on the dangers of water, and what any children should do if they or their friends get into trouble whilst playing in or by it. ‘I won’t always be here to save you,’ they say, ‘so be careful, or a mermaid might get you!’

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Other festivals happening today:

• Hammer and Tongs Day
• The Questioning of Hermod Festival

Have you been having trouble sleeping recently? Are you troubled by dark dreams, menaced by nightmares, stricken with insomnia? Perhaps you need a new bed, more specifically a very special bed, a Royal bed, even. Whilst such monarchical terms are generally looked down upon in Buentoilliçan society, here ‘royal’ denotes a certain overt lavishness of style, an exuberance of comfort, and is not intended to be derogatory in any manner. The term does, however, give a clue as to the monarchic origins of the ceremonies today.

Before the Revolution, many industries, small and large, centred around the monarchs and their lavish lifestyles. Whilst some of these were destroyed along with the monarchy, others were repurposed, the bad, the inequality and prejudice, stripped out and the good retained in that familiar Buentoilliçan manner; never let it be said that tradition is not valued in the City. Much of this reorganisation was done by the Council of Logistics and its various provisional forms, but in the case of The Order of Somnolent Luxury, it was self-imposed, led by entrepreneurial spirit and fear of losing traditional skills passed down through many generations.

Despite their grand name, the Order was really a single family who made ornate beds. Yet ‘ornate’ is perhaps underselling things a little; these beds took an entire year to make, and are still considered the best, most comfortable sleeping places in Buentoille. The family, the Driddiams, were once simply another, very skilled, bed making company, but during the rule of Queen Immas they took on a royal contract, and were afforded all the pomp and circumstance that entailed. The Queen was a strange woman, who believed that if you sleep for too long in the same bed, then your nightmares would begin to seep into the wood, and would feed back to you, forever troubling your dreams. The Driddiams offered her a new product, the Royal Bed, to solve this issue; a perfect bed that would take a year to make, and then would be burned at the end of its year-long lifespan, so as to destroy the bad dreams.

The Royal Bed has various other perks and quirks of construction, which make it seem worth associated time and cost. The mattress was once filled with feathers taken only from birds which were killed whilst they slept, though the modern forms of the mattress use more comfortable, synthetic options. The four posts are ornately carved with images of sleeping people and animals, curled up together in intricate interlocking patterns. The canopy is heavily embroidered with similar scenes, as well as moons and stars above, picked out in silver thread. Inside the mattress and pillars various charms thought to produce good dreams are hidden. All through the production process, the workers constantly sing lullabies to further imbue the bed with sleep-inducing properties.

Today has always been the day that the new bed was presented and the old burned, in the courtyard outside the palace. It was the birthday of Queen Immas, but after she was deposed the next monarch never bothered to change or cancel the contract with the Order and eventually it became a tradition. After the burning, all the local ‘psychics’ alleged to be troubled with the monarch’s bed-contained bad dreams for a few days, and would be visited by members of the court looking to gain some insight into their psyche, so as to gain the monarch’s favour or better plot against them. Nowadays no such burning takes place, because no king or queen receives the bed that the Order make; the bed is awarded to whoever won last year’s lottery.

The tickets, which went on sale for a small cost ten days ago, can still be bought from any participating newsagents until 11am today, should you wish to try your luck at getting a new bed made especially for you. This, of course, is the reason that it is the winner of last year’s lottery that today receives the bed in a ceremony at 12pm in Revolution Square (it will later today be delivered to the winner’s home, and installed there); it is made to order, seeing as most people don’t have the same available space in their homes. The overall design, however, is usually very close to that made each year for the monarch, so as to keep those traditional skills alive. After the presentation of the bed to last year’s winner, the tickets are then all deposited into the tombola, and this year’s winner is announced. Possibly to make the year-long wait until they receive their prize more palatable, the winner is today given an exquisitely comfortable pillow. Ironically, the winner will probably be too excited to get much sleep tonight.

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Other festivals happening today:

• The Festival of Ample Care
• River Dredge Day
• Flight of Fancy Festival

It was a cold, damp morning in 1710 when the Faute family apple tree was chopped down by their next door neighbour, a Mrs Adewene Ustanzor. There had been something of a quiet feud between the two parties which had been going on for several years, culminating in this wanton, destructive act. According to Ustanzor (whose husband, Reichard, was on good terms with their neighbours), the tree blocked out the light to her vegetable patch, where at the time of the felling she was unsuccessfully attempting to grow cauliflowers. On the other hand, the Faute family patch was overflowing with all manner of brassicas; cabbages, cauliflowers, even some (rather exotic for the time) broccoli. It seems that Ustanzor was one of those people who is always willing to blame others for her mistakes.

In fairness, we only really have the Faute family side of the story, but it does seem to be truthful. The Fautes admit that their ancestors did make a nuisance of themselves somewhat; Egenie was known to practice her horn outside (she wasn’t allowed to play in the house) at unholy hours, and they were wont to have fires out in the garden whilst Ustanzor had her washing on the line. It’s not clear whether Reichard was forgiving, mild mannered, or simply milk-livered, but his wife certainly wasn’t. The trouble really started when she decided to put out a fire in their garden that summer with a well-aimed bucket of water. Nobody seems sure whether the ball which went through her dining room window was intentional or not, but either way the Fautes were pretty sure she deserved it. Things went quiet for a bit after that. Ustanzor was convinced that they were throwing all their slugs over into her vegetable patch, but again, nobody from the family seems to know whether they actually did or not. And then, on this day, seemingly out of the blue, the tree was gone.

It seems that, in her anger, Ustanzor not only cut down the tree, but removed it from the premises entirely, save a low stump. She never revealed where she had taken it, not even in court when it may have reduced her fine. Ustanzor seemed happy to pay; she knew that the blow she had struck was vital; for the Fautes, no amount of money could have made up for the loss of their beloved apple tree, which was said to have the best eating apples in all of west Buentoille. The tree had been owned by the family from as long as anyone could remember, grown from a pip spat out by a Chastise Church hierarch during a visit. According to family lore, the hierarch was choking on the pip and their life was saved by Julian Faute, an enormous bear of a man who slapped them on the back with great force.

The loss of their apple tree was too much for the Fautes to bear, and it wasn’t long before they moved from this home, where they had lived for many successive generations. The decision was taken by Annie Faute, the family’s matriarch at the time, who couldn’t go out into the garden without crying at the sight of the stump. It was on the day they were moving out that her son, Ignam Faute, realised that perhaps not all was lost, and began an obsession which continues to this day. Ignam found an apple which had rolled under one of the nearby bushes. It was a little slug-eaten, but most importantly, all the seeds were intact. At their new home in the east of he City, Ignam planted eleven new trees.

Now, anyone who knows anything about apple horticulture will probably be screaming that it doesn’t work like that; you can’t simply plant seeds from an apple and produce the same type of apples as before. There is such a wide genetic variation between apple trees and their seeds that the fruit are highly unlikely to taste the same. Normally a cutting is taken from the tree you want to reproduce the apples from, which is then either grown into a tree of itself, or grafted onto another apple tree. Obviously this normal method was not possible with the Fautes’ apple tree. Ignam knew how it worked when he planted those trees, but he had a hope that there was a tiny chance that one of the seeds would be genetically similar enough to produce similar fruit, or that he would be able to cross-breed various trees until he had one that tasted the same as that delicious fruit he had grown up with.

The Fautes’ tree was a late-harvesting variety, and this seems to be a trait that all the trees Ignam grew inherited, so it was today, the day the original was felled, that Ignam chose as the tasting day when he decided whether to keep each tree or to fell it and grow another in its place. Obviously it takes around ten years for an apple tree to grow sufficiently to begin producing fruit, so this was a slow process at first. Nowadays the family have an entire orchard dedicated to the process, and there are usually one or two trees which are ready for tasting each year, as the process has been staggered somewhat. None of those first eleven trees remain any longer; they have all been replaced with better varieties over the years, as the endeavour was passed down the generations. Nobody has yet hit upon the perfect apple, but apparently they are getting close.

Quite how these new generations of Fautes know what they are looking for, when none of them have ever actually tasted the original is presumably the next question burning your lips. The answer is a thickly bound book, which describes, in exquisite detail, everything about the Faute Apple, as the mythical variety has come to be known, and which includes many colourful illustrations. Most of this is taken from the memory of Ignam Faute, but he also wrote several pages of tasting notes whilst eating small pieces of that final, miraculous apple. These notes are a family secret, and taught to all children as soon as they turn seven years old, but in layman’s terms, the apples were deeply fragrant, in both taste and smell, with a thicker-than-average skin, an enormously satisfying crunch, and a sweet nectar which seemed to almost explode as soon as the skin was broken.

Apparently the originals won every competition they were entered into, but the family always refused to allow commercial growers to take cuttings from them. As the latest generation of apple-growers delivers a respectful basket of apples to adorn the tree trunk which resides in their old garden still, or bites into a potential candidate today, and weighs it in their mind against the complex guidelines, as they sit together and deliberate its pros and cons, the likelihood of breeding a better apple from it, they will perhaps secretly curse their ancestors for their pride, their foolishness in not allowing any cuttings to be made whilst they could.

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Other festivals happening today:

• The Festival of Gratuitous Gifts
• The Festival of Her Healing Spirit
• The Festival of the Weathered Sole