or wooden legs and the owners they were attached to, tales about the legendary appetites of hogs are, for the most part, gross exaggerations. However, pigs shipped to the Porkery from the mainland are often starved for more than a week by the time they’re offloaded, and after seven turns with naught but air to eat, the sight of a chopped-up Vaanian who owed a little too much money to the Wrong Sort of Chaps would look like a five-course meal to you too, gentlefriend.
There’s a famous yarn among Itreyan sailors about the Beatrice—a pork ship bound for Godsgrave—blown off course during a storm-washed truedark, and wrecked on an isle in the Sea of Silence. Twelve sailors survived the ruin, and yet, over the course of the next few weeks, the sailors mysteriously disappeared, one by one. Only a single mariner was rescued when the suns eventually rose. He was a cabin boy named Benio, who, when recovered by a passing Dweymeri trawler, swore that the rest of his fellows had been eaten by another of the wreck’s survivors—a ferocious sow who stalked the nights, devouring the hapless sailors one by one.
The mariners had apparently dubbed this pitiless porcine “Pinky.”
Upon his return to civilization, poor Benio lost his mind over a mornmeal of bacon and fried pork rolls, and spent the rest of his turns in Godsgrave Asylum. It’s said Pinky still roams the island, feasting on stranded sailors and baying at the sky when truedark falls.
Whether any of this is true, of course, remains a matter of drunken speculation on the decks of various pig ships. What is true, is that after learning from Mercurio what exactly went on at the Porkery at age thirteen, a young Mia Corvere swore off eating ham for the rest of her life.
5. Apothecaries theorize the imbalance of light and dark in Itreya is the cause of many public health issues, such as the increasing numbers of “dreamsick” sufferers cramming Godsgrave Asylum, and rising addiction levels to sedatives such as Swoon. Azurite spectacles are one of the few accepted remedies. The lenses are glass, tinted blue or green by arkemical processes, offsetting the glow of the dominant sun in the sky and sparing well-to-do citizens the worst of Aa’s fury.
There have been several state-sponsored commissions into broader-reaching health initiatives, but since it is almighty Aa’s will that his wife be banned from his sky for years at a stretch, even acknowledging the issue of light-related maladies can be construed as heresy. Thus, efforts to combat the issue are continually stymied by church loyalists in the Senate, not to mention lobbyists in the employ of the extraordinarily powerful Guild of Itreyan Curtainmakers.
Ah, democracy.
6. The tallest bridge in Godsgrave, originally known as the Bridge of Towers. Its new name and popularity as a suicide spot arose in 39PR, when the mistress of Grand Cardinal Bartolemew Albari—Francesca Delphi—leapt to her death from it during truedark Carnivalé. She was clad in full Carnivalé regalia, including a jewel-encrusted golden domino worth more than a small estate in upper Valentia.
Once news of her suicide spread, the search for her body, and more important, the mask she was wearing, led to several drownings, at least four stabbings and a minor riot. The rumor mill whispered that Albari had promised to abandon his position within the church and wed his paramour before the truedark of 39 fell. When Albari failed to live up to his promise, the girl had dressed in the jewels he’d given her, written a note to her parents explaining the sordid affair, then leapt to her death.
Unfortunately for Cardinal Albari, Francesca’s father, Marcinus Delphi, was at that time a consul of the Republic. The scandal led to Albari being defrocked and publically scourged, and the former cardinal ended up leaping from the very same bridge his mistress had died beneath. Over time, the story evolved into a tale of tragedy—two lovers, torn apart by society and consumed by their forbidden passions. Lovesick teenagers have been flinging themselves off the bridge ever since, and control of the riverbanks around the Bridge of Broken Promises (and thus, first right to loot their lovesick corpses) has been the cause of more than one gang war between local braavi.
Incidentally, Francesca’s mask and body were never found.
Not by anyone human, at any rate.
7. One of the oldest tavernas in Godsgrave, the Queen’s Bed was built and named by a particularly daring publican, Darius Cicerii, during the reign of Francisco XIII. Francisco’s queen,