Today’s lesson is Xoxo. Yet another squalid little tragedy out in the wilds off the Isle of Word. It’s a wonder any of those little islands are even left, given all the misery that’s been inflicted on them over the centuries. But then, I assure you they deserve it.

The problem with history is that when memories become sufficently long, no one’s hands are clean of blood. Today’s victims are yesterday’s murderers, and today’s slaves once held the whiphand. If it was not their current enemies whom they wronged, so much the worse; the story of the Mother Countries, the story of civilization, is the story of angry hateful people smacking each other with rocks and words. You would have arrived at this conclusion yourself, if you had bothered to do the reading.

This does not excuse any particular act of violence, but the Pelagic Master taught us to take the long view. When someone does something bad to you, chances are you deserved it, and chances are that they’ll be punished for it down the line. What crime, then, might the city of Xoxo have committed to deserve the tragic event called the Xoxo Saltern Loss? Was there somewhere another, finer city, one which the people of Xoxo had covered with scorpions and mocked and written cruel songs of?

The short answer is that it does not matter. One way or another, the Xoxo saltworks exploded on the morning of the Sixth of Sixthmonth, DY 1215. The wash of elemental salt caused drydeath over the whole of the city, and the few survivors perished soon after, buried under tons upon tons of activated salt. One poor sibeccai lived for nearly six months in an underground vault its master had constructed for a wine cellar, living off supplies stolen from its late master’s house and waiting a rescue that never came. We know this thanks to the perservative effect the activated salt had on the truenames of its victims; their memories were encased and maintained almost as if by memory-stones.

The long answer is that witches did it. Any questions about that? I thought not.