FESTIVAL VOLUNTEERS WANTED!
Help required at the Pilgrim's Wife. Lodgings and a hot meal offered for stablehands, servers, cleaners and labourers. Honest and hardworking folk only - meet Mistress Cornelia at the Forum desk at sun's down. Merry Midsummer to all.
As the year draws to a near and the heat of summer bares down hard, the people of
Illium are congregating for the annual Midsummer Festival.
The city of
Marmella is crowded to bursting. Farmers and peddlers have come to sell their wares. Excitement and merriment fill the air, with the savoury smells of roasting mutton and smoky trout, fresh honeycomb bread from the bakehouses and fragrant lavender wreaths over doorways. Minstrels, jugglers and poets roam the streets, tuning their voices and instruments for the upcoming contests. Children braid flowers and grasses into crowns whilst the adults prepare long adorned tables in the streets and squares for the real reason strangers and neighbours alike are congregating... wine.
In Illium the Midsummer is marked with the ruckus "cracking of the barrel". On the first night of the five day festival the wealthy
Depperi family bring out a cask of their best season's vintage, break its seal and serve it to the townsfolk of Marmella. Though mixed in with the revelry is a sense of foreboding.
With the city so busy and
the Duke's garrison departed there is an anxious undertone to the celebrations - though more concerning events have punctured the festivities, with the Church having decreed effigies of the Green Man to be ungodly. Though technically a pagan spirit he is a favourite of Illium's country folk, with his likeness said to signify great luck. Many are indignant at the outlawing of their provincial Midsummer tradition. A fire-spinning magician had also travelled to town to work his tricks for an audience, and was said to have disappeared a day later after Imperial agents had come knocking on his tavern's door in the dead of night. Marmella is a keg of black powder, waiting to go off...
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