Author: admin

Sometimes it’s difficult to fit in at school if you stand out from the crowd, but what people forget is that it’s equally, if not more, difficult if you are very quiet, shy, small or forgettable. You end up getting pushed to the back of the queue, kept on the edges of friend circles. It has its advantages; you get a lot less attention from bullies than the ‘weird’ kids who stand out, and you are the last one the teachers look at when they’re trying to find the source of disruption at the back of the class.

Bili Warrendor was one of these unfortunate children. She was very quiet and forgettable, as she had a nervous disposition and a speech impediment that meant she spoke as little as possible, to so avoid ridicule. Warrendor was a model pupil, as far as her grades were concerned; she was one of the brightest pupils in the school, but she had little to show for it. The other children had been given various awards and certificates for doing well, but nobody seemed to notice her, not even her teachers who would often glide past her desk in favour of the noisier, more troublesome children, who required more support. In October 1972 she decided she’d had enough.

Warrendor spent a long time preparing. She saved up her pocket money for four weeks, performing all sorts of odd jobs around the house to earn enough for her purposes. Her parents were pleasantly surprised, and forgot about it soon enough; they never asked her what she needed the money for. Then again, the ingredients of her plan were fairly innocuous, nothing that would cause alarm.

In the centre of her school, Bannever Street Secondary, is a fountain with a statue of the school’s original benefactor in the centre, Mrs Itenna. It is a very flattering composition, of Itenna as a young woman, children gathered at her feet staring up lovingly, her arms outstretched, holding a pile of books. When everyone came outside for their lunch break on November the 7^th 1972 there fountain was a sight to behold: draped over the books and arms of Mrs Itenna was a large banner which read: ‘MR MORHAN SUX’ (Mr Morhan was the headmaster), and out from the fountain itself mountains of foam were spewing forth, covering everything for metres around.

Of course, all the children who saw this immediately ran straight into the foam piles and started throwing them at each other, making an almighty mess even messier, much to the dismay of the teachers and caretakers. It was at this point that from on high came a fluttering of hundreds of leaflets, all printed on nice card so they wouldn’t run or disintegrate in the foam. The children screamed and laughed and caught them. At the top of the leaflet were the words ‘IT WAS ME’ in red, below which was a photograph of Bili Warrendor, alongside a short paragraph; ‘This piece of artistic prankery was brought to you by the wonderful, the loveable, the ineffable, the one and only BILI WARRENDOR of Class 12.’

On the roof was the young girl, throwing off leaflets and standing proudly. Her teacher hadn’t even noticed her leaving class before lunch, sneaking off to carry out the prank, but Warrendor didn’t have a lot of trouble getting noticed after that, especially since the children of the school have been re-enacting the prank every year as a gesture of respect.

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Other festivals happening today:

• The Festival of the Giant’s Due
• The Reaper’s Hand Festival
• Pottery Refinement Day

The Foundry of the New Lord has a strange and imposing edifice. It towers over New Culvet Road, an otherwise unremarkable residential street in Ranaclois district, with its townhouses and housing blocks. It is built to look as if the whole thing was cast from iron, although this is of course only the front, a facade stitched on to a fairly normal brick building behind. There are two great black towers on either side, imitation radio dishes topping them off, pointing straight upwards. Between the two complex arches of metalwork, as you might find inside a railway station, holding up the roof, frame a great oval stained glass window. The window is not representational or finely wrought – it appears more industrial than religious, with great panels of amber glass being supported by more black-painted iron edifice, which instead of remaining flat, undulates like a low-poly computer image of a ripple caused by a stone thrown into the centre of a pool. The wrought iron double doors, through which many folk will enter today, slide back simultaneously at the press of a button.

As you may have guessed, this is no foundry in the traditional sense, although there are several pieces of specialised metal-working equipment inside; there are no great furnaces or crucibles manned by burly Buentoillitants. Foundries are normally noisy places, but here there is a quietness that comes with respect, and whilst this is not officially a place of worship, it’s the closest thing to it. The workers who come to this factory every day are well turned out, as if they were going to church, and they work with meticulous patience on intricate parts. The quality of the metallurgy produced at the Foundry of the New Lord is unmatched in Buentoille, it has to be. They are making a god.

Or, at least, that is the as-yet unrealised hope. There are about fifty workers in the Foundary, and a further two hundred who work for it in other locations, creating unrelated metal products which are sold to fund the operations at the Foundry and to train up new masterworkers, as the highly skilled workers there are named. Every one of these masterworkers helps to produce ‘black iron’, a very strange and unstable form of iron that appears matt black under almost all forms of light. As this iron is easily oxidised and destabilised into less complex forms by common contaminants, it must be produced and worked in low-oxygen, sealed environments which have been scoured of all contaminants. As such, it takes a long time to get to the point they are at today, when the ‘god’ is complete and ready for ‘activation’; in this instance it took three years two months and five days.

That it can happen this quickly is a testament to the skill and speed of the workers, many of whom are driven to work long hours by their religious devotion (the Foundry has been the subject of investigation by the Council of Fair Practise, who found the overtime to be the result of ‘genuine choice and enthusiasm,’ and not coercion). Here again the boundaries between workplace and place of worship seem unclear, to say the least, but according to the management council of the Foundry, they are indeed a place of ‘work and scientific study,’ and that the religion of the workers is their own business.

This distinction can be perhaps better understood by understanding how the Foundry came to be. It was a scientist, Sirileth Magoonan, who first discovered black iron in 1881, and she set up much of the Foundry to study and produce the illusive material. What she was most interested in was the strange behaviour exhibited by black iron under the influence of intense ultraviolet light: firstly it suddenly appears very shiny and iridescent, almost like crude oil, and then it starts to move, as if alive. The seemingly solid substance begins to warp and bend as if it were suddenly a very viscous liquid, but when handled it feels solid and does not ‘give’. At first these movements were only possible when under the direct influence of the light, but quickly Magoonan worked out that she could ‘activate’ the black iron with a quick combination of flashes at specific frequencies and intensities, at which point it would seem to come ‘alive’ for several minutes, after which it would stop moving, become matt again, and be entirely unresponsive to any form of UV light.

When word reached Canaring of a form of iron which can be brought to life, many travelled to Buentoille to see it. It is a foundational belief of that city that humans were first made of metal, with each class being formed from different types. Iron is the metal of the working classes, and it was therefore they who came, seeking some evidence of their creation. Many of these folk were disappointed, seeing the movement as a cheap parlour trick and not ‘life’ as they had hoped. Yet there were those, The Fellowship of the Holy Cycle, Canarings who believe in the cyclical nature of the world, and who maintain that one day, as Triglaw, their god, created them, they must one day create him. It seemed that this radical sect, outlawed in their city, had found a new home.

For a long time, these Canarings lived with Magoonan and learned all they could of the substance under her tutelage, as part of the Black Iron Foundry. Later, when she died and the Revolution came, these workers gained unprecedented amounts of control over their workplace, and they decided it was time that they started making a new Triglaw. In law their Foundry is not a religious site, but in practise it certainly seems that way.

Today there will be a certain pregnancy to the air today in the Foundary, as the intense ultraviolent lights are turned on. Yesterday each piece of the New Lord, as the assemblage of black iron is termed by the workers, was carefully slotted together so that there were no gaps between each section of its body, meticulously modelled on the human anatomy, from the lungs and skin right down to the ear bones and hair follicles. Today he is placed on slab, still matt black but entirely naked. The hope is that when the light flickers on, he will get up, walk, talk, and not phase out, but it’s most likely that he will remain lying down by contort and move in strange formations, slowly becoming less visibly human, and then stop, frozen in some half-melted form, the once handsome face stretched out or caved in or simply changed in some indefinite way. One time the hand clenched and unclenched. One time it fell off the bench and a great arch formed out of its stomach. One time it sat bolt upright, opened its mouth and inverted itself, its organs spilling out. Who knows what will happen today.

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Other festivals happening today:

• The Festival of Spurious Allegations
• The Festival of Sweet Succour
• Drink Ye Spirits Day

Forests are strange things, they change and shift identity over time. Everyone knows that all the forests of the Buentoille Bay region were once connected up, but now they are fragmentary they’ve taken on new names and characteristics. There is Hope’s End, the largest patch of forest that is close to (but not bordering) the City, Dunmonii Wood, to the south, is smaller but closer still, filled with its characteristic fast-growing Dunmonii trees. Closer to Buentoille, however, things get smaller and more fragmentary still, being mere strips of trees only remembered as something greater before the humans expanded their homes outward. Bordering, or even enveloped by the City there is Calewynch Forest, and that strip of trees in Iglow’s Garden district simply termed ‘the forest’. All of these trees would once have been connected, or so the theory goes.

Yet there are new forests, too. Down south, around the Municipal Paper Mill is a new forest of pine and other fast-growing trees, neatly regimented into lines. It replaced an ancient forest there, certainly, but that does not make them the same. And down the way, past Logger’s Rest, where the forest becomes more natural, is a mound that overlooks the surrounding forest, entirely covered on its crown with tall, thick trees of various breeds; oak and maple and many-branched yews, elm and beech and walnut and apples, all spaced nicely out, irregularly with moss growing between, their canopies intermingling but trunks distinct, so the ground beneath is cathedral-like, but still enclosed, private. As you get further into this space, the trees get more tangled, larger and older.

An old stone wall, moss covered and crumbling, bounds the hilltop off from the surrounding forest. It has holes and gateways here and there, and on the north side is a small stone hut attached to it, with an old firepit outside and a partially-collapsed wood store leant up against it. It’s derelict now, but for a very long time it was inhabited by an old man called Jasper Kettlerow. He moved there from the City in 1737 as a hermit, and lived there until he was 106, dying in 1794. For most of his life he survived on donations from pilgrims who came to sit in the wood and experience the sense of tranquillity and peace it gave them, but he also sold blessings if he was in the mood. Most people assumed that he built the wall and hut, ignoring the obvious age of the construction; the fact is that nobody really knows who put it there, but it is assumed to be of ancient Escotolatian origin.

When he started to go blind from cataracts in the 1770s, the hermit claimed that he had been given ‘second sight,’ and was able to see the spirits of the little contained forest that he watched over. He began whittling their forms at his hut, and selling them to the pilgrims, a remarkable feat considering his blindness. Slowly this became an obsession and Kettlerow built up quite the collection of these ‘Little Folk,’ as he called them, who remained for most of the year scattered around his house, and sat along the wall. They looked (and look, as various original examples still survive) almost like little eggs with spindly arms and legs, deep-set holes for eyes, bark capes and bushy eyebrows, and they sat or stood in various poses. Apparently the ‘real-life’ Little Folk would sit for their portraits; each had its own peculiarities.

When Mack Rowe came by to visit the old man in November 1786, the hermit’s works had disappeared. He’d been told to expect a whole wall of them, but they were all gone. The old man was there, though, and Rowe, an amateur historian, asked him where they’d all gone; he wanted to buy one (they were starting to become very popular amongst the City’s middle classes). ‘They’re all busy today,’ said Kettlerow, who was at that point boiling some tubers in a pan, and seemed distracted. Eventually Rowe got some more information; in the night some men from the paper mill had come and cut down one of the trees on the hill. Kettlerow had argued with them on several occasions, telling them to steer clear of the trees within the wall, but they seem to have bypassed him this time. The Little People were probably ‘doing sommin about it.’

Rowe went along the perimeter to check for himself, and there, by a very large hole in the wall, a tree stump, and a furrowed track where it had been dragged off, were various Little People, unmoving, posed as if he’d just caught them. They were Kettlerow’s models, of course, but how had he known to make ones sitting and crying on the stump, or shifting the stones of the wall back into place? It was all very strange, but stranger still was the fact that the next morning the two young men who’d cut down the tree brought it back and grovelled at Kettlerow’s feet, pleading with him to ‘call off’ the Little People who had allegedly been causing havoc in their homes overnight.

Kettlerow replied that he had no power over the Little People, they did what they wanted, but that if they wanted to get on their good side, they should bring them gifts, and leave them on the stump of the tree they’d slain. ‘Once a year should do it,’ he said, ‘starting tomorrow. Bring them something new and interesting, tell them you are sorry, and they might just decide to leave you alone for another year. But don’t ever forget, mind! They’ve got long memories.’ Kettlerow died a few years later, so the folk who’d looked to him for blessings had to look elsewhere; the yearly gifts left by those two young men suddenly became a rather popular tradition.

Today there will be various models of the Little People scattered all across the little circular hilltop, sitting on low branches and around the roots and even sitting on the walls. They tend to gather around the old stump, too, where the gifts are laid, although a large stone has now replaced it as the original eventually rotted away. Apparently there were human bones found tangled in amongst the mouldering roots, crushed bones that had almost disintegrated themselves. This has led archaeologists to suggest that the site may be an ancient Escotolatian burial ground, where each body is buried with a tree seed in its mouth or held between its cupped hands. Perhaps these trees really do have spirits within them.

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Other festivals happening today:

• The Festival of the Lonely Quadrangle
• The Depths of Cool Festival

The greatest sport in Buentoille is undoubtedly Streetball, but it is not all-encompassing; there is also flipflop and volleyball, charge and all manner of races and endurance sports. Catchout is a curious mix between an endurance and a ball sport, played in the summer months when the light lives longer, on large grassy areas like greens and well-mown fields. As such, the season is now over, and it won’t be played much except for perhaps in shorter form by overenthusiastic children. If they were to play catchout properly, they could be there for days.

Yet despite the lack of organised matches, for the catchout community today is a big day, a day of honouring past heroes and making new ones. Catchout can be, at times, something of a spiritual experience for its players, who in the latter stages of a game will inevitably be suffering from extreme exhaustion and possibly hallucinations, helped along by the chewing of coortool roots. These starchy roots aren’t actively hallucinogenic, but they do have plenty of sugar and a mild stimulant in them that keeps most of the body active but has less effect on the brain, meaning that players are often pushed past normal fatigue boundaries into a place where hallucinations and altered sleep states are more common. With the players often venturing into this more suggestible, possibly spiritual, state of mind, it’s perhaps not surprising that there certain aspects to catchout and its associated traditions that border on religious ceremony.

Today’s festival is a prime example of the pseudo-religious characteristics of the community surrounding catchout. It centres around the historic, heroic figure of Yattam Ongolae, the fabled catchout paddler, who famously won every match he played through skill and sheer endurance. He was only ever caught out twice in thirty matches; in all other instances he either helped to beat the final score of the opposing team, or kept playing until they all passed out. Besides his winning streak, Ongolae is so famed because he personally won the longest ever catchout game, remaining in the post of paddler for just over half of the eight days of continuous play, a tremendous feat of self-control and athleticism.

There are six ‘rounds’ to catchout, where the ‘pitcher’ stands precisely three metres away from the ‘paddler’ (so called because they use a short wooden rowing paddle to hit the ball) and throws the ball to them, which is then thwacked (this is the technical term) as far away as possible. For every second it takes the ‘catchers’ (comprised of seventeen players, the entirety of the opposing team) to bring the ball back to the basket next to the pitcher, the paddling team scores a point. Making the job of ‘catching out’ the paddler more difficult are the ‘jostlers’, the rest of the paddling team besides the paddler and pitcher (who work together), who push around the catchers but are not allowed to touch the ball or to use their arms, which are tied behind their backs. Once the paddler is ‘caught out’ they and the pitcher rotate for another team member, until all seventeen players have paddled, and then the teams switch sides and the round is over. There is no other way (besides passing out from exhaustion, or simply leaving the grounds) for the paddler to be deemed ‘out’.

It is for the high bar to ‘catching out’ a player that the matches tend to continue on for so long. Every year there seems to be a new movement within the sport that advocates for the rules to be changed, or another form of the sport started, which has timed rounds, or that players are deemed ‘out’ when other conditions are fulfilled (such as committing too many ‘faults’ such as missing the pitched ball), arguing that the extreme levels of endurance required put off new players to the sport, which remains somewhat niche as a result. So far, however, the traditionalists have always won these arguments, and the game has remained somewhat ascetic, although some concessions have been made; there is now a maximum score from any one ‘hit’ of three hundred points (five minutes), for cases of lost balls, and the ball is now coated in a glow-in-the-dark substance to enable better location during the night.

As it turned out, the longest ever game was also the final game for Ongolae. Generally, because of the sleep deprivation endured, the first thing catchout players do when finishing a match is to go straight to bed, assuming that they have not already passed out and been carried off the grounds on a stretcher. When Ongolae finished that longest ever match on July 24^th 1672, he turned to the gathered crowds who, having been rested themselves, cheered tremendously as he bowed. He then walked out of the grounds and went on a walk, ending up on a small grassy piece of open ground called Barrowman’s Hill. At the top of this small hill he allegedly planted his paddle deep into the ground so that it stood upright, and lay down to go to sleep. Unfortunately for Ongolae and his fans, he never woke up again, falling into a deep coma.

It’s generally believed that the coma may have been worsened by the sleep deprivation that Ongolae endured, but not caused by it outright; there was presumably some other illness at play. Whatever the reason, he remained in this state for many months, force fed each day through a tube. Finally, on this day, November 10^th, the legendary player died, and his mother, Trittine Ongolae, went walking to visit the place they had found him lying. Nobody had ever bothered to take his paddle with them; it was wedged deep and they had more pressing concerns to attend to. Now, when she came across it in the cold November air, she saw that it had miraculously sprouted small shoots.

Whilst this story maybe somewhat apocryphal, given that plants tend not to sprout in the autumn, it is nevertheless believed by a great many catchout players, who will today walk up the hill in their best clothes, a kind of pilgrimage or procession. The willow tree, for that is now what it is all these years later, that stands atop the hill is protected by law, and its use is governed by the Trust of Yattam Ongolae. This is because the wood of the tree is said to create legendary catchout paddles, imbued with the strength and endurance of the man who accidentally planted it. Every year a limb of the tree is assessed for severance to create a few of these paddles, but, despite the festival’s name, it is unlikely that it will actually be cut; this generally tends to only happen about once every fifty years. Instead, measurements will be taken, along with some willow whips which are wound around player’s paddle handles for good luck. The players will also pour a small quantity of coortoolee, a drink made from a solution of powdered coortool root, around the base of the tree, as a mark of respect but also in the belief that it helps the plant grow.

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Other festivals happening today:

• The Festival of Semantic Tomfoolery
• Wood Pigeons are Fantastic Day
• The Festival of the Immovable Boulder

Pet ownership is not particularly common in Buentoille, at least compared to Litancha and the late Catrosondia, where it is and was far more prevalent, especially in regard to dogs. Perhaps it is that Buentoillitants are simply too busy preparing for the never-ending gamut of festivals to walk, feed and generally care for a dog; there are people that need caring for, after all. Cat ownership is certainly more common in the City, but still not by comparison to other cities; it’s likely that Buentoille’s high vegan population is the overall cause. Regardless of the low numbers, Buentoille is still full of domestic animal lovers, many of whom will be out on the streets today.

Along the streets (or to be more specific, the street) upon which these folk will be showing their respects today there was once a cable railway, the tracks of which may still be seen, now embedded in the surrounding asphalt. This railway used to run in both directions, helping to ferry folk up and down Ranaclois Hill, connecting at the bottom with more conventional rail and tram services. As the street they went up and down was very busy at all times of the day, the cable which pulled the trains up and down the sharp incline was embedded in a sheath in the road, so that it would no cause injury to pedestrians or obstruct the movement of other vehicles. The train service was owned by the son and daughter of Getter Muldragh, the infamous rail tycoon of the early 1800s, a ‘venture’ that they were lent money to set up as part of their ‘training’ to fill the shoes of their father then he died.

There were two major flaws with this set up, both managerially and physically, in terms of the location of the cable. Firstly, the two siblings, whilst perfectly sensible apart, became feckless when working together, quickly becoming concerned with the application of drink to their bellies rather than the application of funds within the business. This meant that workers often went unpaid, and as a result there were many strikes and pickets that had to be cleared up by their father’s ‘muscular’ contacts. As a result the rail was constantly understaffed, and went without a single maintenance worker for three months. Combine this with the secondary flaw, that the cable, in it’s concealed underground pipe that often filled with water, could not be seen and casually assessed for damage, rust or wear & tear, and it was a disaster waiting to happen.

The disaster eventually arrived without warning (besides the occasional low creak considered normal by the untrained workers) on this day in 1835, at precisely 4:28pm. The cable, long overstrained by excess loads and corroded by water in the pipe, snapped whilst dragging a train up the hill, sending it hurtling back down again. A handcart had been pushed over the tracks on the busy street, and had become wedged in front of the train, wedging in so that even more strain was exerted upon the line. Due to various cost-cutting oversights, there was no secondary cable, and whilst there was an emergency break in the driver’s cabin, there was no driver in said cabin to save costs (the engine was located at the top of the hill). The passengers (of which there were around sixty) weren’t able to enter the cabin without first leaving the train, a feat which became neigh-on impossible within seconds of the snap, when the carriage had picked up speed. The bottom of the hill, and the end of the line, were getting closer by the second.

Thankfully the cry went out and all the pedestrians who were downhill from the train managed to get out of the way in time, some by barely a whisker, throwing themselves into the gathered crowds on what was then the cobbled street. After that day, so many had witnessed the disaster that this street became popularly known as ‘Runaway Road’. One of the pedestrians there that day was Mister Eelham Decker, an elderly gentleman of notoriously poor hearing and eyesight, who relied on his fifteen dogs (all of whom he was regularly out walking with at once) for navigational purposes. These dogs, all of various breeds and ages, had all been saved from various animal sanctuaries over the years, and he treated them all as individuals, pampering them and essentially letting them do as they please, a fact that meant a short walk to the shops was likely to take half a day. The speed with which the animals moved that day was uncharacteristic, to say the least.

Many people, including most of those attending the ceremony on Runaway Road today, claim that what the dogs did that day was intentional, that they knew how they must save the humans careering towards certain doom. For others, even those who love domestic animals, this is a ludicrous suggestion; they claim that the dogs, being shorter than humans, could not see the train coming, and that they were scared into running by the sounds of screaming and distress coming from the crowds. They naturally ran to where the crowds were thinnest, ripping their various leads out of Mister Decker’s hands, straight into the path of the train, which at this point was going very fast. Unfortunately for the dogs, only one of them survived, but the bodies of those who died caught between the wheels in such a way that it progressively slowed it down, ensuring that the most significant human injuries that day were a broken wrist on Mister Decker and a few bruises on the passengers in the carriage. It was a terrible, bloody miracle.

In recognition of the sacrifice the dogs made, unwittingly or otherwise, in service of human lives, the gathered dog lovers will leave various dog treats and toys at the small shrine by the roadside. Descendants of those who owed their lives to the canine intervention are also expected to attend, leaving similar gifts. The shrine, a bronze statue of the fourteen hounds, has a bowl by each dog for this express purpose. Together, they are commonly known as The Good Boys, possibly because this is what Mister Decker called them when he visited them each day at the end of his life, refilling each of their bowls with fresh food every time he came. Their noses and foreheads are shiny where the generations have petted them.

Before they leave, those who leave the gifts today will pour a small pail of red paint down the street, beginning from the plaque set into the asphalt where the cable broke. It cascades down the road as it did that day, the horrified onlookers today watching with an expression of sadness instead. This rather macabre end to the official festival is a precursor to the gathering that happens later in the night, when occultists from across the City will attempt to record or make contact with the spirits of the hounds, which are said to run along the remaining rails tonight, like electricity along a cable.

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Other festivals happening today:

• The Festival of Quickening Hearts
• The Festival of Dannik’s Dive
• The Reedshaw Jackson Handbook Appreciation Day

Today is a good day to cycle or drive slowly, or to step carefully if you are walking or taking public transport to get around Buentoille, especially if you are in the north of the City. This is because, unlike your average commute to work, today’s journey may feature some added obstacles that have the potential to make your tyres very flat and your heart very heavy if you run over them: hedgehogs.

These snuffly little creatures, which can today be found out and about in small groups and alone, are not normally seen during the daylight hours, given that they are nocturnal beasts, a rule to which today seems the only exception. At places in the north where the roads converge, the streets can often be full of hedgehogs, all travelling in the same direction, in broad daylight. Some of them have been walking since late last night, making slow progress through the wee hours, trying to avoid the various hazards (late-night trams, urban foxes rats) that line their pilgrimage. At these intersections and convergences, the sense of direction within the hedgehog crowds becomes immediately clear to any onlookers, as they all shuffle onwards like a little prickly conveyor belt. It’s clear as they coalesce that the hedgehogs are not rudderless travellers, but that they are all going to one very specific location – a party, to which they’re all invited.

Whilst folk have been leaving out food for hedgehogs for many hundreds of years, the first documentary evidence of something like the Annual Hedgehog Tea Party was in 1853, when the early wildlife photographer Milsom Wetflannel staged a set of photographs which later became a triptych called ‘More Tea, Billy?’ These three images, which still grace the front of many a greetings card today, show four small hedgehogs clambering over, eating and drinking from a fine porcelain tea set which had been laid out especially for them. Unlike those free hogs who make their journey today, these had been captured for the shoot, which took place just before the hedgehogs went into hibernation, when they were a hot topic across the City. It was in part thanks to the timing (but mostly to do with the cuteness of the images) that the triptych kick-started Wetflannel’s career and turned him into an influential figure in the wildlife image industry.

When these captive pricklepigs were freed after the photoshoot, they presumably told their friends, because the next year, after they’d bedded down for the night, there were fifteen hedgehogs snuffling around in Wetflannel’s back garden, where the shoot took place. Obviously hedgehogs, like many humans, have an excellent memory for places they got a good meal. Wetflannel was certainly one of these people (he remembered the layout of the Buentoilliçan districts by the restaurants he ate at in them, much to the frustration of his wife), and perhaps it was for this reason that he took pity on the little spike-bearing-intruders, and decided to feed them in much the same way as before, filling the cups with mincemeat, dried fruit, nuts and water. Of course, the next year twenty more turned up.

It was a good job that Wetflannel had friendly neighbours, and a large communal front garden and play area between their houses; it was certainly something he needed by year ten. By this point people had started coming from all over the local area, bringing their children to watch the curious little creatures have their tea party on a long rug laid out in the centre of the communal garden. Nowadays folk come from all over the City, standing at the sidelines, and pointing, chatting with their young children or holding them back from trying to pick one up, carefully stepping over a small rivulet of hogs and hoglets that stoically head towards the banquet laid out for them. Much of the food on offer these days is bugs and the like, captured for them by local children, and refilled periodically by the ‘waiting staff’.

When a hedgehog has filled up all the corners of its stomach, it readies itself for hibernation, usually in the immediate vicinity; the garden and all the back gardens of the housing development (Collafield Crescent) are peppered with little hog homes and readily available leaf litter. These are usually similar to a birdhouse, but at ground level, but some are intricately constructed things, with chimneys and extensions and little terracotta roofs. The hedgehogs do switch houses some years, but normally they stick to the place they lived before they went off into the wider area for the spring and summer, and as such many have names written above the doors. In recent years the garden has come to look more like a model village. The hedgehogs here are all the hedgehogs from miles around, which obviously think that the feast and safe housing they receive is worth the effort of walking throughout the day. This pilgrimage inevitably leads to some deaths each year, and as such criticism is often levelled at those who live in the Crescent, but the defence they always give is that it wasn’t their idea – it was the hedgehogs’!

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Other festivals happening today:

• The Clash of the Westhall Teeth Day
• The Festival of Mystic Mead
• The Yobbish Sparrow Festival

The Bright Guildhouse, the headquarters of the Guild of Tallow and Wax Merchants is famously bright, as its name suggests. At night, it is quite a spectacle; the thousands of electric lights, oil lamps and candles which burn inside cast great swathes of warm light through the huge windows onto the cold street, and it’s a good job there are few residential buildings close by because they’d need very thick curtains to sleep at night. All along the street are similarly hundreds of lights, hanging from cables between the buildings in long strings. There is always a small fire-fighting team on hand in the Guildhouse, ready to jump into action at any moment.

Today there will be more lights added to this display, although these will be more mobile in format, and only hand around for a short while. At 7:00pm tonight the Hottop Parade will file out of the Guildhouse and into the surrounding streets. The paraders are all members of the Guild, which in the modern day functions more like a worker’s union than a mercantile lobbying body, as it was initially conceived; this was, unsurprisingly, one of the many effects of the Revolution. Despite these changes, the workers have chosen to retain the organisation’s name, and many of the traditions that it carries out.

Various titles are handed out to guild members, as per these traditions, with each title conferring different status and function within the Parade tonight. At one time, various insular political machinations would accompany the granting of the titles, but now they are simply handed out with seniority; the longer you’ve been a guild member the more advanced your titles become. At the back of the procession are the Novice Lightbearers, and at the front there are the Keepers of the Roaring Flame, and the Master of the Inferno, the current most senior member.

Hottops, or as they are variously called, lampheads, tallow hobs and wick goblins, are an old Buentoilliçan house spirit, one of the varieties that is said to be very helpful, if treated right. They were originally a very small element of the pantheon of house deities, getting only a side note in Tichaw’s Homelee Spyrett Gyde when mentioning candle pushers, a type of malevolent ghost that can burn down homes when angered. According to the Gyde, the hottop (so called because its head is made of flame) was a tallow or oil eating spirit that snuffs out unattended candles or lamps, taking a little of the fuel savings for its services of fire prevention. This creature became well known across Buentoille not because of this book, but because of the Guild, who made it their official symbol. You can still see the original carving above the main doors of the Guildhouse: cut out of the marble is a small childlike figure with their legs crossed and a flame for a head.

It is because of these household spirits that ginger-haired folk are actually statistically more likely to join the Guild of Tallow and Wax Merchants than any other union or guild; in Buentoilliçan lore, the spirits feel an affinity for redheads, and grant them luck, protection and sometimes labour in all matters light-related. As such there will be a slightly higher percentage of redheads amongst those taking part in the procession that winds around the Catathon district today (along a route which has avoided the Mackmara Distillery since the Tragic Whisky Explosion of 1701), not that you would notice; you won’t be able to see the heads of any participants because they’ll all be dressed as hottops.

The classical hottop outfit, which will be worn by many of the paraders is fairly simple, consisting primarily of a special hat which is strapped to the head. It has two ‘shoulders’ which jut out to either side, and on top a small brazier with a protective ash-plate below it. Paired with a suitably long shirt or dress, the outfit makes the wearer look, in a fairly convincing manner, as if they have a flame for a head. As this outfit necessitates poor visibility the wearers generally tend to hold hands, which, combined with the absolute silence of the marchers, give the spectacle a somewhat disconcerting edge.

There are, however, various other versions of this basic costume, worn by various Guild members, regardless of rank. With the advent of electric lights there are some hottops that have light bulbs for heads, or bulbous heads made of tissue paper and willow, their moulded faces smiling sweetly, lit from within. Some have lampshades over them like hats, others are capable of spurting flame high into the air (and are appropriately given a wide berth), or feature under-lit columns of steam, or even laser displays shooting out from a neck cavity. Each year there is always something new to see, alongside the old classics, in this mobile display of seven hundred years’ lighting technology.

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Other festivals happening today:

• The Ischiri Duggawe Festival of Foul Medicine
• The Festival of Well Behaved Children
• Truthteller’s Day

For a long time, Etole was a disputed saint, and whilst she had many who quietly celebrated her, it was an underground worship, not outlawed but certainly frowned upon by the Chastise Church authorities. She was originally canonised by Hierarch Rebbem, but has since been disqualified and re-confirmed many times; Rebbem is now generally considered to be forward-thinking for his age, but at the time he was embroiled in claims of sexual licentiousness, and was actually put on trial by his rivals in the Church, then imprisoned for the last half of his life. The saints that Rebbem canonised during his time as a Hierarch were therefore discredited along with him, Saint Etole in particular, due to the undeniable sensuality of her life and Attunement.

The exact nature of the sensuality that Saint Etole is said to have engaged in was long brushed over or avoided as a subject in less sexually liberated times than this, and as such she is often confused with Saint Hursuite, who Attuned with the world via orgasm. Whilst Etole’s method was certainly sensual, it was less overtly sexual than Hursuite’s, yet even now there is still a taint of the taboo that clings to the festival today, which may account for the fairly low turnout at the Trellow Walled Gardens where it is held.

Not a lot is known about the life of Saint Etole, probably due to the suppression her story faced over the years. It is known that she lived as a servant in the home of a rich Buentoillitant, and that she was a wrestler and possibly a woad grower, too. The specific type of wrestling that Etole, who’s original name has been lost, engaged in was a niche form that seems to have started in Tender Bract district when it was home to the City’s dying industry. Indigo was a popular and easily produced colour of fabric, and is made by processing the woad plant into a paste or liquid which the fabric is then bathed in. Woad is also excellent at dying skin, a fact that the workers producing it would have found out very quickly. Quite how these workers turned to wrestling as their main form of entertainment is a mystery (perhaps it all stemmed from an argument?), but eventually the sport became honed and developed until it resembled the form by which Etole gained her attunement.

Tender Bract wrestling, or Etoleian wrestling, as it is often known is performed naked or almost naked, by participants of all genders who have been intricately painted with woad in strange flowing patterns. Waves seem to rise and crest across the body, like ripples in a pool into which a stone has just been thrown, making way for strange symbols like eyes placed haphazardly across the skin. All of this serves to disguise the human form, obscuring its topography with a new, strange one implied by the lines. The actual wrestling is performed by four or five wrestlers, each painted in a similar manner, and it mostly takes place on the ground, the bodies entangling in such a way that it is difficult to tell where one ends and another begins. If you unfocus your eyes, the swirling implied topographies leap out, making some great seething ball of flesh, more similar in form to eels than humans.

It’s thought that there was once a complex rule set that accompanied this sport-cum-art-piece, but due to the suppression of Etoleian wrestling this has been lost by successive generations. The wrestlers who will perform outside in the bracing cold at the Trellow Walled Gardens today will be mostly trying to create a spectacle worthy of Saint Etole, rather than trying to ‘win’ the bout. To further aid the strange visuals that the crowds are presented with, a ‘pit’ of mirrored glass is constructed for the festival, with raked seating for the spectators circling it. The Gardens are the traditional home of this celebration, which had been happening in one format or another since the thirteenth century. This is possibly due to their ‘intimate’ feel, the high walls keeping proceedings fairly private, but also because the gardens grow many plants used for dying cloth, in particular the woad plant.

For what is now an official Chastise Church festival, there is a curious lack of Church iconography or ceremony on display, and indeed whilst the Church now provides some funding, it is organised by The Followers of Saint Etole, a once-persecuted group who’ve now been brought back into the fold. Since 1938 the Church sends the priest from the nearby Church of Saint Rabbole as their official representative, who performs a small, quiet liturgy and the start and end of the performance, mostly to themself, seeing as they are roundly ignored by most of the assembled spectators.

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Other festivals happening today:

• The Festival of the Symbolic Crust
• The Festival of Deep Creatures
• The Bitter Nose Festival

The way in which Breiad Offat is remembered across Buentoille, if he is remembered at all, is as a bore. If you lived in Buentoille in the 1960 and 70s and you turned on your television late at night, you most likely would have seen him, droning on about some complex element of mathematics or physics that went well over the heads of most watching. He probably became most famous as an insult used amongst school children, his name becoming a byword for lessons that they loathed, or teachers who sent them to sleep (‘Mrs Pollock is so Offat’). This usage of the name persisted long after the man died, and indeed still does, although now it is falling out of use, in part thanks to the good work put in by today’s festival, which has been happening every year since 1998.

The issue that the festival’s organisers (the children, grandchildren and friends of Breiad Offat) have with the pejorative use of his name is that, in person, he was actually a very engaging and interesting man, nothing at all like the dry academic he appeared on television. Within his extended family he was known for his great sense of humour, his doting, kind nature towards everyone he knew and loved, and his great generosity of spirit. Offat was the kind of man who would always get you a birthday present, even if you’d never got one for him, and somehow you wouldn’t feel awkward about it. He made treehouses for his daughters, his marriage proposal to his wife was an intricately planned treasure hunt, when he told stories everyone went quiet to listen, even if they’d heard them before. He was the kind of irrepressible man who made life seem full of domestic magic.

Reconciling these two personalities might seem a difficult task; was he afraid of cameras? Did something about the physical proximity of this man change the way he came across? The answer lies in his job; for most of his life, Breiad Offat worked at Benetek University researching and teaching sleep science (where everyone taught by him naturally corroborates his fantastic personality and engaging presence). In the course of this employment, whilst he made some less obvious and more complex discoveries, Offat realised the true extent of damage that sleep deprivation has on the health and personality of a person, and the benefits that could be gained from regular, fulfilling sleep. Because of this, he always had a special sympathy for those who, unlike him, found it difficult to sleep, especially insomniacs. In 1962, when he was eighty seven (and still active as if he were forty) Offat decided he’d try to put his research to good use, and began recording his television show.

Called Offat’s Educational Oration, the programme was shown between 12am and 3am, and it mainly consisted of Offat reading from a mathematics textbook in the most boring way he could muster. The aim was, clearly, to send any watching insomniacs to sleep, but in order to achieve this, Offat realised that he had to avoid drawing any attention to this purpose, as thinking about sleep tends to make the sleep-deprived frustrated and perversely more awake. In the background of his speech, Offat included subtle synthesised tones that his research had found were conducive to sleep, and he kept his voice as soft and boring as possible without falling asleep himself (Offat recorded the episodes ahead of time so as not to disturb his own sleeping patterns). Offat even ensured that the colour scheme of the sparse set was tweaked to the most sleep-inducing shades.

After his death in 1980, as per his dying wishes, the Offat family chose to keep showing re-runs on television for many years, but when they received data showing that repeated exposure reduced the effectiveness of the programmes (and could even have the opposite effect), they decided to close the station down (in 1992). This was also no doubt in response to the fact that their family name had become an insult, and they wanted the great legacy of Offat to be remembered properly. Tonight, from 12 to 3am, the family will air a special show celebrating Offat’s life, with interviews from themselves and the students he taught over the years, as well as some of those who suffered from sleep deprivation who he helped. A physical gathering is also held in the studio where Offat recorded his shows, where many of the same people will come to eat, drink and tell stories of the man they all loved. This gathering, however, won’t be continuing quite so late: in accordance with the great man’s advice they’ll be in bed by 10pm.

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Other festivals happening today:

• The Gathering of Silema
• The Festival of the Fastest Ungulate
• The Festival of Nascent Victory

Every Buentoilliçan knows not to go down to the coast in mid-to-late November at night. The sounds of ghosts are unmistakable, their strange hoots a squeals echoing off the cliffs and being cast out across the bay. There are little flickers of light, bright blue flickers here and there, barely noticeable; perhaps they are the energy that comes off these ghosts as they bump into each other? According to Buentoilliçan folklore these are all the unsettled spirits that inhabit the City, clamouring as they petition the boatman to take them to the Other Shore. Quite why the boatman is on the Buentoilliçan shores for a couple of weeks, starting tonight, is a matter that has never been settled; perhaps he is on holiday? Perhaps he awaits a special passenger?

If you were of a brave, foolish, or merely sceptical and curious disposition, you might choose to walk down to the coast, to see these ‘ghosts’ for yourself. Many have done this over the years, and few have come back with anything interesting to report; it seems that as soon as a human presence enters the coastline, the ghosts fall silent and hide away, yet from afar you can see their faint blue lights in the dark, and hear their voices, a chilling call often rising in unison, that strikes straight to the heart of any normal Buentoillitant.

There is no centrally organised response to the haunting tonight, no mass exorcism or ghost-laying, thought this is not to say that these things haven’t been tried over the years. There have been hundreds of attempts to lay the shoreline spirits to rest over the years, but none have ever succeeded; each year the ghosts are there once again, causing an unholy racket. There are, however, certain protective rituals undertaken by the City’s seaside residents, and by any fishers who are brave enough to venture out on the sea tonight. Above the windows, doorways and fireplaces of those in earshot of the terrible noises that emanate from the shore are placed wreaths of dried chilis or (more traditionally) thyme, both of which are thought to protect against errant ghosts. Others like to place mirrors in their windows, or hang black cloth behind them so that they appear to be mirrors from the outside. Another common trick is to place lines of salt beside routes of entry, or to rub lamb’s fat into door and window frames.

The edges of fishing vessels are specially painted with red zigzaging patterns before fishers set sail. These patterns allegedly confuse any ghosts trying to climb aboard, keeping them circling the boat, recursively looking for an entry point. Fishers are also known to sing special songs, such as ‘No Way Through’ designed to deter any ghosts from mistaking them for the boatman. A common tale told in the pubs that surround the Buentoilliçan seafront features a fisher who sings the song wrong, and sees three sets of ghostly hands grip the side of the boat. She grabs the oar and begins hitting them, but only succeeds in capsizing the boat. Then, in a comic twist, she is mistaken for a ghost herself when she tries to board her friend’s vessel in a similar manner.

The issue with all of these ghost-warding measures is that they are entirely pointless; there are no ghosts, only birds, spectral curlews to be precise. There is nothing truly ‘spectral’ about these migratory seabirds, and the name only came about because they’d been mistaken for ghosts for many years. The curlews are nocturnal creatures, which are excellent at hiding behind rocks and the like when approached by potential predators, rather than flying away like many other species. It is in this manner that they remained undiscovered for so many hundred years; it was only in 1822 with the invention of the electric torch that they were first discovered. Before, with simple hand lamps, those searching for the source of the noise had to get very close, and the spectral curlews heard them coming and managed to evade notice. The occasional bird may have been seen, but as they go deathly quiet in the presence of people, the connection may not have been made. As torches cast their light much further, the birds could be spotted together and watched whilst they made their strange calls.

And what of the flickers of ghostly light? Do these birds glow-in-the-dark? This was something of a mystery to scientists for a long time, as dead specimens didn’t exhibit any bioluminescent characteristics. This cast enough doubt on the bird theory that many maintained, and still maintain, their belief that the sounds and lights were ghosts. The birds must simply be attracted to their ethereal presence, folk thought. It wasn’t until the beginning of the last century that the flickers were explained, when it was discovered that the primary food of the spectral curlew was the piddock, a common clam that burrows into the rocks of the Buentoilliçan seashore, and which emits a faint glow when plucked out of its shell and squashed between the curlew’s long beak. Spectral curlews are specialised in digging the clams out from their burrows, a feat that few other animals are capable of. As such their diet is almost entirely comprised of piddocks, and they have to move on once they’ve depleted the population in any given area.

Still, tonight is the first night they’ll arrive on, and they usually stay for about two weeks before moving on. If you are the superstitious type you may wish to stay indoors for this time, away from any potential malign spirits. If, however, you are a bit more adventurous, you may wish to join the school science clubs that gather by the shore after nightfall with high-powered torches, trying to catch a glance of the shy spectres.

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Other festivals happening today:

• Ferris Wheeler’s Day of Fun
• The Blinkered Ape Festival
• The Festival of Icy Water Wading