Building Gossamer, Part 4 – The Wilting Quarter

After a couple of months of sporadic work, the Wilting Quarter is now complete, making Gossamer 25% done. Next up will be the Withered Quarter, Arawn’s domain, the wintry section of the city directly east of the Wilting Quarter, across the osseous Spinebridge. In upcoming posts, I’ll also be detailing how I populate districts with additional details; below is just a rough outline of the major landmarks and purpose of each neighbourhood.

Link to a more detailed image.

The Wilting Quarter is the section of the city ruled by Queen Mab, the Autumnal Sovereign, and thus lies in the realm of Logris. Its districts are dedicated to pleasures and skullduggery, dark delights and forbidden knowledge. Practices the Seelie Court find unsavoury can be celebrated openly in the Wilted Quarter; the laws are few and enforced but rarely by the Queen’s rancid guards, with most disputes being settled with jocular duels which become yet another form of public entertainment.

The Brambles

Originally grown as a defensive fortification to repel invaders from Mag Mell, the Brambles have become a den of iniquity and vice. Poisons are openly bought and sold throughout the district, most notably from the garden of Caprice the witch, which sprawls at the neighbourhood’s pungent heart – a verdant grove of hemlock and nightshade. Blades for hire and assassins can also be found throughout the Brambles, including the near-mythic Nettles, an ancient guild of professional killers whose opulent, temple-like headquarters lies just a few blocks east of the imposing towers of the Thorn Gate. Most infamous of the Nettles are the twin sprite assassins Hellebore and Belladonna, known for such gruesome escapades as the Pigeon Pie Massacre, in which the pair hid themselves in the hollowed-out ceremonial pigeon pie at a banquet in Mag Mell, only to spring from the crust and slay half a dozen elfin nobles before the wine was poured.

Goblin Town

As a rule, the Fair Folk shun most modern technology, scorning the steam-engines and clockwork used by mortals. Goblins, however, are a notable exception, and their shambolic ghetto in the midst of the Wilted Quarter is a seething, stinking swelter of acrid smoke and hissing machines. Though far short of the industrial capacity of cities like Hex and Erubescence, the factories of Goblin Town churn out all manner of strange devices, from repeating crossbows to fireworks to crude pistols to mechanical traps to clockwork toys. Many of these are built from scrap metal and other oddments salvaged from the junkyard in the southern part of the district, the city’s garbage-tip for inorganic waste. The west side of Goblin Town also features a number of fighting pits and monster-gardens, populated with creatures from the wilds of Elfhame and beyond; many such creaturea are bought and sold in the Beast Market.

Grosscastle

The Fomorians used to number among Mab’s favoured peoples: giants, originally hostages in the Enormity Wars between Elfhame and Jotunheim, become the soldiers and servants of the Unseelie Court. They lost their status when their chieftain, King Balor, sought to depose Mab herself and claim Logris for his own, a plan foiled by Mab, resulting in the exile of Balor and his people to the mortal realm. Their ancient fortress of Grosscastle, once the primary military fortification in the Wilting Quarter, now lies empty and moss-eaten, for Mab cursed the castle such that any who slumbers in its depths will be driven mad with nightmares, waking in a frenzy and attacking those about them as if they were monstrous imposters; such was the fate of many Fomorians who succumbed to the spell on the eve of Balor’s would-be coup. Though the fortress remains ungarrisoned, adventurers sometimes venture into its shattered halls in search of the forgotten treasures of the Fomorians, for the giants were renowned for their craftsmanship and magic, and many of their wondrous creations can still be found within the cyclopean bowels of Grosscastle.

Horripilation Circus

Elves and Demons have never quite seen eye to eye, not because of their differences but rather their similarities – a narcissism of small differences often intrudes on relations betwixt Faerie and Hell, and due to the Truce and the Tithe of Souls Elfhame pays the Archdemons, the two are largely content to ignore one another, save for the occasional bickering between Annwn and infernal psychopomps over the fate of certain shades of the dead. Of the various Elfin realms, however, Logris maintains the strongest relationship with the Netherworld, as evinced by Horripilation Circus: a demoniac carnival, put on as entertainment for Queen Mab, a kind of gift to the Lady of Logris from Hecate, one of the dethroned sovereigns of Hell usurped by the Commonwealth of Pandemonium. The circus is a multiversal menagerie involving conjured horrors, otherworldly delicacies, surreal magical specatcles, and a panoply of other pleasures both subtle and gross. Many of the performers are demons; others are damned souls, mortals who have made pacts with the fell powers, and other outcasts, grotesques, and oddities culled from the dark corners of the cosmos.

Rotting Hill

Queen Mab herself is often found in the Wilted Quarter. When Her Moldy Majesty is present in Gossamer, she dwells within the Putrescent Palace, a grotesque fortress perched atop Rotting Hill – a reeking mass of lichenous rock, fruiting bodies, and decomposing vegetation. The Palace itself is a madhouse: crazed corridors loop and twist at impossible angles, packs of wild dogs roam from room to room in search of carrion, inscrutable clocks count the hidden hours of Elfhame, and the mad, laughing, blood-stained Queen herself presiding over it all, along with her numerous fetches, supernatural doubles through whose eyes she sees. The dungeons of the Palace are said to be a labyrinth of impossible depth and complexity, a warren of oubliettes and torture chambers in which prisoners and gaolors hunt one another in bizarre cat-and-mouse chases, sometimes seemingly changing roles and identities as all sense and sanity break down.

Shroomsbury

A district of alchemists and physicians, Shroomsbury is absolutely infested with gigantic fungi of every conceivable variety (and several inconceivable ones), their spores used to produce medicines and potions, as well as many of the poisons sold in the Brambles and the drugs sold in Wormwood. The district is notable for Napping Nog, a giant attacker who was laid low by soporific spores, fallen into a seemingly eternal coma; fungi have grown over his slumbering body, which has also become the centre of its own small neighbourhood. A stonesthrow from Nog lies the Collegium Gargantua, one of Gossamer’s few institutions of higher learning, founded with the mission of studying the sleeping giant; the Elfin enchanters at the Collegium have performed a wide variety of experiments on their softly snoring specimen, including entering the creature’s dreams to quite literally pick its brains for secrets of the primordial Jotnar. At the southern edge of the district lies the Red-Juice Sickhouse, a kind of hospital and laboratory where patients are treated with cures generated from the bodies of fungoid nurses – often with bizarre magical side-effects, to the continued fascination of the Fair Folk chirurgeons. Patients have been known to emerge from the Sickhouse with broken bones set or illnesses treated, while also beginning to age backwards, or acquiring strange phobias, or losing their shadows. Some have reported continuing to grow far beyond the heights typical of their species; others have complaned of developing “backup” ears and eyes; of being afflicted with wereslug therianthropy; of losing their childhood memories in exchange for those of others; of discovering the physicians have produced clonal copies of their bodies for disreputable purposes; and a myriad of other complaints. Still, there’s no arguing with results.

Wormwood

Little remains of the enchanted forest of Wormwood that preceded the Wilting Quarter, but one small neighbourhood preserves something of its eerie charms. Gossamer’s pleasure district, the place is home to numerous theatres, most notably the magnificent open-air Grove theatre, where plays older than some planes are regularly performed with elaborate ceremony, along with the latest bawdy satyr-plays and other lewd comedies, often skewering Faerie’s elites. Taverns, drug-dens, and cafes also abound, many serving absinthe, the signature drink of the district, in honour of the Green Fairy, an ancient member of the Fair Folk who can often be found roaming the verdurous streets, bewitching passersby with intoxicating illusions. Undoubtedly the centrepiece of the district is the gorgeous Nymphaeum. To call this temple of sensuous delights a “brothel” would almost be slanderous, for it is a shrine to hedonism, run by the descendants of the nymphs and satyrs who once dwelt in the ancient wood and have now adapted to city life; the overgrown pleasure-palace is an opulent world unto itself, as expensive as it is decadently luxurious. Finally, Wormwood is also the location of the Nest, a wyvern-aerie. The beasts have long ago been tamed by the locals, becoming far smaller in size and less ferocious in demeanor than their forebears; indeed, it is practically a faux-pas for a well-to-do Elf not to own a jewel-scaled dwarf wyvern, used much as mortals do a hunting hawk.