For those who cared to see, Caliphas was obviously cursed. From dusk to daybreak some seaborne leviathan exhaled its chilling breath upon the city, filling the night with a haze of clinging fog and sour dreams. From daybreak to dusk the residents took their turn, a thousand blaspheming chimneys pumping burnt offerings to choke the heavens while the people clambered and cried in a cacophony to rival fabled Dis. So foul and bleak ran the course that when true wickedness made the city its home, and when the sewers began to run and reek like a slaughterhouse sump, nary a soul took note, and those who did could hardly decide if the monsters were fiends or angels.
—Ailson Kindler, “Her Wounds Never Bled”
By day, little distinguishes the markets and streets of Ustalav from those of any other civilized country, only the occasional chain of garlic f lowers or lintelperched gargoyle hinting at the traditions and popular superstitions that possess the land’s ethos like mass dementia.
Although a haunted land, Ustalav is not consumed by its horrors. While numerous hamlets and backwaters fear menaces in the night, such worries are hardly unique to the Ustalavic countryside, and the land’s inhabitants often prove far better prepared to ward against and advise on the terrors that lurk nearby than the country folk of other realms. Yet while not an entirely cowardly people, the Ustalavs’ reliance on prayer and ancient superstitions means that most seek to ward off things stalking the dark rather than jeopardizing their lives and those of their families by confronting the supernatural head-on. Seemingly in every generation in every township, some young farmhand or proud champion takes it upon herself to liberate her people from whatever legend or bogeyman preys upon the region. Few return from their quests—and worse, some return as new menaces now in league with that which they hoped to destroy. Yet even that is not the worst outcome, as still others awake long-sleeping horrors, bringing total ruin down upon their neighbors. Thus, in the Ustalavic mind, heroes and fools walk the same path. Many villages prefer to suffer centuries of fear and hardship, as a shrieking death seems the most likely alternative. And even should some heroes totally scour away some ancient monster or persistent ghost, what happens then? Heroes move on and champions age, leaving the people defenseless against whatever new terror might come to fill the void of the last. And so, across the lonely moors and in hidden dales, Ustalav’s country folk live as they have for ages: grimly, piously, quietly, and always with an eye toward the coming night.
In Ustalav’s cities, rustic warnings and a host of practical traditions fall away, relegated to the realm of superstition and ignorance by the supposedly more enlightened city dwellers. Behind city walls, pride, familial traditions, and skepticism gird the people like a rusted suit of armor, suggesting protection, yet shattering should a powerful enough blow ever fall. For those who’ve never lived with only a thin door shielding them from all the beasts and nightmares of an ancient land, the stories of the land’s countryside sound like imaginative ramblings. Although monsters certainly exist in the wide and wondrous world, surely not in the numbers and ever-present proximity the stories of blathering dirt farmers suggest. But when terror strikes home and blood spatters the cobblestones, city folk have two choices: either accepting the unsettling truth that all they’ve ever dismissed as foolishness and imagination might indeed be real—that they truly inhabit a land of deadly mysteries and ravenous beasts—or self deluding disbelief. In all but the most exceptional cases, the latter proves the unsettlingly popular choice. And so, from lavish salons to raucous public houses, city folk scoff at tales of ghouls and witches, dismissing most as the work of charlatans and madmen, in the same breath wondering over the mysterious disappearances and unexplained happenings that occur around them every day.