Lacre

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"A tiny flask of utter sorrow. The touch of the corked flask provokes weeping. Consume it, and be fatally consumed by melancholy."[2]

Every Christmas, London is flooded with a substance that resembles snow, called lacre.[3] This odd substance has the air of ammonia about it, but there might be more to it than meets the eye...[4]

Snow?[edit | edit source]

"How does one manage a thing that is so patently not snow, and yet so resembles it? Does one leave it hygienically inside quotes? 'Snow'? Does one shrug and regard it as a blessing from the Bazaar? Does one lock one's doors and windows and hide quaking below stairs, while the servants build the fire high and stuff the window-cracks with rags?"[5]

Unusual Pail of So-Called Snow.

The snow that drifts through London remains a subject of speculation. Theories about its origin abound: some insist it is merely condensation falling from the cavern roof; others claim it is the shed chitin of vast, unseen insects; a few whisper that it is nothing less than the dandruff of a God with poor grooming habits.[6]

The lacre-snow that blankets the streets is not pure lacre[7] and is generally considered safe to handle.[8][9] Children even gather it to shape into snowballs and snowmen.[10] Pure lacre, however, is unmistakably different: oilier in sheen, and carrying a pungent scent reminiscent of both ammonia and rose-oil.[11]

Good-quality lacre is notoriously difficult to obtain, but the Urchins are known for peddling it,[12][8] and lacre is a crucial ingredient in the creation of a Noman.[13][14]

Properties[edit | edit source]

"There's a zee-captain down at Wolfstack Docks who claims you can render Neath-snow into white glim on any kitchen stove. I have tried it. I have a pan of goo to show for it. Three of my cats tasted the goo when I left it unobserved a moment too long. The one that lives is locked in the cellar now. I do not expect I will ever dare to release it. I have developed a dislike of zee-captains."[5]

Lacre smells of fish,[15] carries a faint glow, and dissolves only reluctantly in water.[16][17][18] Souls, when submerged in lacre, are known to explode.[19][20] On occasion, lacre even grants visions of the future.[21]

Lacre is emphatically unsafe for human consumption (please don't). For the unwary who do ingest it, the consequences may include vomiting, cryptic dreams, delirium, scarring, and unnatural bodily growths.[22][23] Its effects on other living beings are similarly dramatic: small animals usually die instantly, their bodies dissolving into more lacre;[24] medium-sized creatures tend only to lose consciousness and later awaken with a strange craving;[25][26] and in exceedingly rare cases, lacre transforms animals into spired crustaceans - miniature copies of the Bazaar.[27][28] Plants, too, respond unnervingly: soil infused with lacre produces mutated specimens,[29] such as arachnid potatoes, avian parsnips, and micaceous fruits.[30][31] In general, lacre seems to twist living forms toward the bizarre and monstrous.[32]

Lacre also acts as a form of liquid memory, and sampling its aroma can give mysterious visions;[33][34] and prolonged exposure may induce persistent hallucinations.[35] It never spoils; even old lacre retains its memory-inducing potency.[36] Inspecting lacre under a powerful enough magnifying glass will reveal flakes reminiscent of the Correspondence, as opposed to the hexagonal flakes of the Surface.[37] A most enigmatic substance indeed!

Concentrated Melancholy[edit | edit source]

This section contains spoilers for the following Fallen London endgame content and Fate-locked content: Destinies. Proceed at your own risk.

You can find out more about our spoiler policy here.

"The pale liquid catches the smoky lamplight of the stall. Within you spot a startling array of hues, exposed to the dull lantern flame. A milky richness that deepens to the colour of fog on the fens; a creamy lamb's-fleece texture that gives way to a snowdrop sickness; a cool frost that lurks in the depths of the bottle that melts into an ammoniac-smelling deposit. The essence of sorrow, forever changeable, but familiar as heartache."[38]

Vial of Tears of the Bazaar.

Lacre is the Bazaar's tears, its distilled liquid sorrow.[39] Merely brushing the cork of a bottle of these tears is enough to provoke weeping; drinking them drowns the imbiber in overwhelming melancholy.[40] Each Christmas, when Earth sits at its farthest remove from the Sun, the Bazaar sinks deeper into loneliness than at any other time of year.[41][42] In this despondency, it expels great quantities of lacre, which freezes and fall across London and even the broader Hinterlands.[43][44]

The Sundered Sea[edit | edit source]

"Sigils beat in the ceiling of these caverns – letters of fire, pulsing and fading, passing like glow-flies beneath the skin of the rock. Their light is reddish, but the lacre spuming below takes the red light and returns it, somehow, as purest white. Distance is difficult to judge, but this space would handily absorb a cathedral or two."

"It's a second sea, but a divided one. The lacre foams in cells and pits like a horizontal honeycomb. Pillars, curtains, buttresses of rock elaborate it into a maze. You pick your way carefully across, round the edge of lacre pits, through half-natural gates in flowstone curtains. Very carefully. It is unlikely that it would particularly benefit you to fall in."[45]

Nomen, simulacrum created from lacre.

Penstock's Land Agency, a modest office tucked against the eastern flank of the Bazaar, is far more than a simple land agency. Those who demonstrate to Penstock that they know the Sign are allowed access to Penstock's Wicket: an elevator of sorts that descends into the cavernous spaces beneath the Bazaar.[46] Below lies the Sundered Sea, an immense labyrinth of caverns illuminated by Correspondence sigils that burn on the ceiling.[47] Beneath them rest the Bazaar's lacre-vats, arranged in cells and pits like a vast, horizontal honeycomb. The caverns' halls, buttresses, and curtains of rock form a maze that supports the weight of the mass above.[48]

Lacre itself is corrosive, and the vats function almost like a stomach: in this subterranean Sea, the Bazaar's servants feed it stories,[49] sphinxstones,[50] and corpses infected with Heartmetal,[51] all of which serve to ease the Bazaar's perpetual melancholy. The Correspondence threaded through the lacre also serves as the medium through which the Bazaar speaks, conveying its intentions to its servants,[52] chiefly Penstock, who interprets its messages.[53]

The Stone Pigs[edit | edit source]

"The lacre-tide is unpredictable. One minute it might be desperately climbing the beach, wave breaking upon wave. The next it can be flat as a mirror but dropping rapidly, like some great beast is drinking it from below. Sometimes it fountains like a geyser, drenching you with spume, or churns with mysterious currents."[54]

This is not a Stone Pig.

Lacre has anaesthetic properties as well.[55][56] Through a system of lacre channels and tributaries beneath London,[57][58] the Bazaar directs it into the chambers of its living engines, the Stone Pigs, keeping them dormant as they drink.[59] This is why, during Christmas, Mr Sacks goes door to door collecting gifts of sentiment: the cheer helps soothe the Bazaar's seasonal despair,[60][61] so that the lacre reservoirs do not overflow and rouse the Stone Pigs.[62][63] Yet Yuletide is not the only time when lacre floods occur.[64]

The Lacre Floods[edit | edit source]

"Before each city fell, [...] the inhabitants of the one beneath slid into vats of lacre. They couldn't resist. Everything that was once them is in those pools."[65]

Before the purchase of a new Fallen City, most of the population of the previous one is compelled into the lacre-vats,[66][67] where they drown,[68] dissolve, and are made into more lacre.[69][70] Their memories are pressed for stories of love to feed the Bazaar, while their collective sorrow drives the lacre to overflow and inundate the city.[71] With the lacre drained from their chambers, the Stone Pigs awaken and churn the dying city into rubble[72][73] as a final tide of lacre washes away its remains and any who survived.[74] Only once the lacre flows back below to lull the Stone Pigs to sleep does it become safe for the new Fallen City to descend onto the cleansed remnants of the old.[75]

The Bazaar has been buying cities for a very long time. The dissolution of four Fallen Cities has enriched its lacre with an immense harvest of memories and sorrows.[76] At times, merely inhaling the fumes can evoke visions or emotions from the lives of long-lost citizens preserved in the Bazaar's vast and mournful collection.[77][78][79]

References[edit | edit source]

  1. ↑ Putting the Pieces Together: the Taste of Lacre, Fallen London "Neath-snow - or is it 'lacre'?"
  2. ↑ Vial of Tears of the Bazaar, Fallen London
  3. ↑ Sidebar Snippets: Snow in the Neath?, Fallen London "How does one manage a thing that is so patently not snow, and yet so resembles it? Does one leave it hygienically inside quotes? 'Snow'? Does one shrug and regard it as a blessing from the Bazaar? Does one lock one's doors and windows and hide quaking below stairs, while the servants build the fire high and stuff the window-cracks with rags?"
  4. ↑ Putting the Pieces Together: the Taste of Lacre, Fallen London "That taste has something of ammonia about it. But not only ammonia."
  5. ↑ 5.0 5.1 Sidebar Snippet: Snow in the Neath?, Fallen London
  6. ↑ Sidebar Snippets: Snow in the Neath?, Fallen London "The snow that falls in the Neath every December is something of a mystery. Condensation from the cavern's roof, the sloughed chitin of enormous insects, or the dandruff of a tonsorially careless God?"
  7. ↑ Unusual Pail of So-Called Snow, Fallen London "It's a little different from most of the gluey slush in the streets..."
  8. ↑ 8.0 8.1 Sidebar Snippets: Snow in the Neath?, Fallen London "In December, enterprising urchins sell bags of snow in Big King Square, even as the stuff lies in drifts around them. Ask them what's wrong with the snow on the ground, and they shrug. 'Pick it up if yer like,' they confide. 'Most of it's probably safe.'"
  9. ↑ Pay urchins to clear the path, Fallen London "The Fisher-Kings […] work slowly, breaking off for scuffles and snowball-fights. They sculpt […] the recovered mush into a fearsome effigy of (they claim) the Vake. One hands a pail of the stuff to you. "Don't feed it to anyone yer like," he advises."
  10. ↑ Sidebar Snippets: Snow in the Neath?, Fallen London "The snow that falls in the Neath is used to make snowballs, to roll snowmen, and to torment the kind of children who are always tormented at school. This may be safe. There may be no ill effects from handling the stuff that, in the Neath, they affectionately describe as 'snow.'"
  11. ↑ A Pail of So-Called Snow, Fallen London "It's noticeably different from most of the 'snow' in the streets. It has an oilier lustre, and the smell is not quite the same: ammonia, but  touched with oil of roses. There is no indication at all that the stuff is safe. The wisest thing to do would be to dispose of it."
  12. ↑ "'Ere, you! D'you want this?", Fallen London "It smells like old herring and cats' p__s. But it came off the doorstep of... never mind who. But look close, you can see it's the good stuff. Swap yer. Ah-ah. Not so cheap this year. Lots of groundlings after snow. […] You want it or not?"
  13. ↑ The Noman, Fallen London "Pass the blade of the knife across your palm. Let the blood fall into the lacre. Something will arise: though it will not survive the winter."
  14. ↑ Search the shore, Fallen London "The tide surges then ebbs, rivulets of lacre scrabbling at the shore-stones like fingers. Wait... they are fingers! Milky, globular, and frantic. Behind them, undulating backs push from the waves. They lift lacre faces – half-formed and grief-struck, their eyes only bubbling pits and their mouths pouring. They scream. The tide reclaims them. They collapse into hissing lacre-foam and are dragged back into the reservoirs. It was a spirited attempt to be born, but it failed."
  15. ↑ "'Ere, you! D'you want this?", Fallen London "You carry the stinking stuff home. It does look paler than the stuff in the streets, and its aroma is, perhaps, a little more rotting-vegetable-matter and a little less tomcat. A romantic would say it smelt of the sea."
  16. ↑ Scoop up a pail of lacre, Fallen London "A sprinkling of lacre's come early this year. Your doorstep is rank with fishy-smelling white goo. Happy Christmas-to-come."
  17. ↑ Scoop up a pail of lacre, Fallen London "Ah, lacre. The Neath's answer to snow. Lacre-men always seem watchful. Lacre-capped roofs tingle with sinister phosphorescence. Lacre dissolves in water only reluctantly, like a guest who hopes to find space in your box-room."
  18. ↑ Dispose of it, Fallen London "You dump the 'snow' over the parapet of a bridge. For a moment it glows pale against the glassy darkness of the river, and then it sinks, melts, is gone."
  19. ↑ Dip a soul in it, Fallen London "The soul fizzes like sodium! There is a flash, a bang and the snow sublimes instantly to vapour. Your eyebrows are gone, but your store of knowledge has grown a little."
  20. ↑ A casket marked with a black ribbon, Fallen London "You make the signs to open it, one by one. They pass from you like water. Within the coffin, an odd bottle lies in a sad tangle of rags. Scratched on the coffin, these words: "SUFFICIENT GRIEF DESTROYS A SOUL. WARE LACRE.""
  21. ↑ The Gate of Tears, Fallen London "Joy, or regret? The peculiar secretions of the Bazaar, which some call Neath-snow, sometimes allow a glimpse of the future. Not always. And not clearly. And, of course, as the saying has it, time lies."
  22. ↑ Eat it, Fallen London "You pile it into your mouth, trying not to gag at the taste. It goes down easily enough... and then it all comes back up. Or perhaps not all. Something is different. You dream, feverishly, of a bright light in a long lone empty place; of a gift given and a gift rejected; of the one you love moving away, inevitably as the motions of an orrery, distant as childhood. Furthermore, when you wake next morning, your finger-nails have grown three inches, and grafted themselves to the skin of your hip. Removing them is not pleasant."
  23. ↑ Eat it, Fallen London "Fevered delirium. O the dreams. You see things written on your skin: letters of fire, letters of shame. All your inmost histories are visible to the jeering on-lookers. Curse them as you may, cover yourself like the daughter of Lycaon, still you are visible. You must call birds from the sky to cloak you... What have you been doing? Your skin is torn and tattered with your scratching. You tremble on the brink of wakefulness, and the shapes on your skin almost resolve into letters. Almost."
  24. ↑ Feed it to a Talkative Rattus-Faber, Fallen London "Your pet spins around, shrieks heart-rendingly and collapses, stone dead. Almost immediately, it begins to deliquesce into pale goo. Quick! A mop!"
  25. ↑ Feed it to a Malevolent Monkey, Fallen London "Your Monkey does not respond well to the stuff. It wails. It gibbers. It collapses and lies stiff as a board. You can do nothing to rouse it. But in the morning, you find it's awoken; eaten the most extraordinary collection of things; and retired to the roof-top, where it sits chittering, glaring, flinging snowballs. Finally you lure it down with a penny-whistle and a slice of walnut cake."
  26. ↑ Feed it to a wild boar, Fallen London "When it's finished the creature lies down, blinks blearily, and closes its eyes. Have you killed it? A sound like someone sawing a locomotive in half issues from behind its tusks. It's snoring. Venturing closer, you give it a prod. Nothing. You sit on it. It doesn't stir. It sleeps as soundly as God. The snores harass the marshes for days. Eventually the boar awakes and wanders off in search of something improbable to eat. The marshes return to malevolent stillness."
  27. ↑ Feed it to a Talkative Rattus-Faber, Fallen London "Your pet stops in mid-sentence and collapses like washing on a broken line. When you try to pick it up, you find to your distaste that a whitish fluid is already congealing on its skin. Over the next day and a half, the fluid hardens into a cocoon of sorts. When your rat emerges, no naturalist would recognise it as a rodent. It is less talkative, for one thing."
  28. ↑ Feed it to a Malevolent Monkey, Fallen London "Your Monkey licks up the stuff, rather cautiously at first, then with increasing appetite. Then it goes stiff; quivers; collapses. It lies still for a day and a night and a day, barely breathing, while its skin suppurates a thick white fluid. The fluid clots like a scab, congealing into a pale cocoon. When your Monkey emerges, it is much changed. Less mischievous. More exacting in its diet."
  29. ↑ Attend to a garden of arachnid potatoes, Fallen London "Long ago, you paid the Creditor with a lacreous currency. The effects of that dose are gradually making themselves known. The local soil is capricious."
  30. ↑ Attend to a garden of arachnid potatoes, Fallen London "They nest in the ground, a trap for the unwary, and then when you go to dig them up, they squirm and burst open. The consequence? A thousand thousand spider babies whose bite is fire and whose bodies are highly nutritious."
  31. ↑ Cook the local cuisine, Fallen London "The lacreous ground hereabout grows things that adhere to no single kingdom: beaked parsnips that call from their beds like nesting birds, micaceous fruits that glitter on the branch; tender ferns that curl wretchedly away from any beam of light."
  32. ↑ Lay out a breeding programme for useful labourers, Fallen London "Furnace might be uneasy at the prospect, but the lacreous currency has made this portion of the Neath a fervid breeding-ground of the bizarre. There will be odd creatures everywhere, transgressing boundaries of plant and animal, whether you take a hand or not."
  33. ↑ Mix it with an old wine, Fallen London "You don't drink the wine. That would be rash. You simply swirl it in the glass and inhale its aroma... Visions come to you: images clear and bright as Christmas decorations. The Duchess, in a dark place beneath the Shuttered Palace, caressing a monster's skin. The woman they call the Gracious Widow, weeping over old letters. His Amused Lordship, fierce in bristling beard and striped waistcoat, playing chess alone in a darkened attic. A woman and her daughter poring over encrypted letters. The Captivating Princess, dipping a silver spoon in honey red as apples..."
  34. ↑ Clear the path yourself, Fallen London "Ammoniac vapours rise around you as your spade bites into the snow. As you inhale them, your breath quickens. Your vision blears like wax: images occur of bleak shores, flat dark seas, distant lights... you see yourself, bending to labour in these places. Is there something of you in this snow?"
  35. ↑ Inheritance, Fallen London "Ah, [...] you are real. The lacre is filled with memories, you see. After a long day amid the fumes, the laboratory fills with people I have never met–[...] but few of them are really here."
  36. ↑ Inheritance, Fallen London "Cover your nose, [...] This lacre fell two Christmases ago and melted soon after, but the memories are still just as strong. Every year, it has been becoming more potent. I am trying to understand why."
  37. ↑ Examine it through your Semiotic Monocle, Fallen London "Under the powerful and symbolically enhancing magnification of the Monocle, the substance resolves into – yes, flakes. But far from unique. You see patterns repeat again and again – and the shapes are powerfully reminiscent of Correspondence sigils. Not true sigils, not even close, and the meaning is blurred and distorted beyond uselessness. But it can't be a coincidence."
  38. ↑ The Tears of the Bazaar, Fallen London
  39. ↑ A potent possibility, Fallen London "Do you know what lacre is? Well, I don't. But the rumour is, this bottle contains a particularly potent distillation […] you probably shouldn't feed it to anyone you like. But it will command an extremely high price, for the rash few who desire it..."
  40. ↑ Vial of Tears of the Bazaar, Fallen London "A tiny flask of utter sorrow. The touch of the corked flask provokes weeping. Consume it, and be fatally consumed by melancholy."
  41. ↑ Putting the Pieces Together: the Taste of Lacre, Fallen London "At the loneliest of seasons, the lacre overflows."
  42. ↑ Now this is what you've been waiting for, Fallen London "...that at Christmas, the Bazaar may simply be lonely. But this was universally condemned as 'absurd'."
  43. ↑ Putting the Pieces Together: the Taste of Lacre, Fallen London "Why does the lacre accumulate at Christmas? Why has there been so much lacre recently?"
  44. ↑ Holiday Cheer, Fallen London "A little lacre does come down here, dusting the city and giving a particular sparkle to the [building]."
  45. ↑ A Sundered Sea, Fallen London
  46. ↑ Pass the Wicket and descend, Fallen London "He fastens the last padlock. This is not a generous space: bigger than a wardrobe or a coffin, yes, but not generous. He leans his weight on the lever, and the descent begins."
  47. ↑ A Sundered Sea, Fallen London "Sigils beat in the ceiling of these caverns – letters of fire, pulsing and fading, passing like glow-flies beneath the skin of the rock. Their light is reddish, but the lacre spuming below takes the red light and returns it, somehow, as purest white. Distance is difficult to judge, but this space would handily absorb a cathedral or two."
  48. ↑ A Sundered Sea, Fallen London "It's a second sea, but a divided one. The lacre foams in cells and pits like a horizontal honeycomb. Pillars, curtains, buttresses of rock elaborate it into a maze. You pick your way carefully across, round the edge of lacre pits, through half-natural gates in flowstone curtains. Very carefully. It is unlikely that it would particularly benefit you to fall in."
  49. ↑ Mr Pages: Lacre, Mask of the Rose "Mr Pages: I have presented all the pages of the census, and all the stories that we wrote. Novels written before the Fall, and novels written after. I have scoured the bookshops and confiscated the lending-libraries. With many hired hands, we brought a procession of books by wheelbarrow to the doors of the Bazaar. There were so many that the newspapers wrote about it. They said that we were bringing the books for censorship to the Ministry of Public Decency. But it was not for decency that we inspected and presented them. They were presented in bulk. [...] They were digestified, consumed, consummated utterly, useless!"
  50. ↑ Did you detect the intrusion of a nautical 'z' into his greeting?, Fallen London "He jumps, as if you'd performed some impossible act of witchcraft. "How did you—? Yes. Yes. In fact, I was moved to intercede against this Station IV villainy." Anger blushes his narrow cheeks. "They're feeding old memories into the lacre-vats. Go below, and smell for yourself.""
  51. ↑ Pilfer a large, mysterious box, Fallen London "Someone has nailed the coffins comprehensively shut. The stencilling reads 'SOOTHE & COOPER'. A franked, handwritten label adds 'DELIVERY TO DEPOT (A), STATION III'. One of the coffins is open and empty. The adjacent lacre pool seethes like a glass of liver-salts."
  52. ↑ Search the shore, Fallen London "You find a pool of lacre whose surface is as still and flat as ice. You give it a prod, finding it to be the consistency of thin cream. So how is it that Correspondence signs are written upon it as if someone had drawn them with a finger in custard? Did someone do this? Or did they arise naturally from the lacre? And what do they say? Something about the eyes of the heavens, and immortal, burning thrones..."
  53. ↑ Slip the stone into the lacre gently, Fallen London "You kneel by the edge of the closest pool and let the block slip from your fingers, so gently that it hardly makes a sound at all. Some time passes. The lacre stills, then goes thick as an ice-cream, if ice creams stank of fish. Sigils form on its surface, as though a finger traced them. Penstock reads: "She is mortified. She is humiliated. She should have been told of her debt. She would not have had this happen at any price. The Masters are to blame. She asks why they didn't come to see her.""
  54. ↑ Search the shore, Fallen London
  55. ↑ An unexpected volunteer, Fallen London "Observe the motions of the fluids from the base to the summit to the base. As the sluices open, the pressure is relieved: the model, of course, is imprecise. You might choose to imagine that the fluids at the base have anaesthetic properties—"
  56. ↑ Putting the Pieces Together: the Taste of Lacre, Fallen London "Stone-Pigs cannot be drowned in lacre. They only slumber."
  57. ↑ Arrange for the Bazaar to send a Christmas Card to an Acquaintance, Fallen London "ALL SHALL BE WELL, [...] AND ALL MANNER OF THING SHALL BE WELL. THE LACRES FLOW AGAIN THRO' THEIR CHANNELS, AND ALL THE GROWTHS ARE GREEN."
  58. ↑ Putting the Pieces Together: the Taste of Lacre, Fallen London "Why does the Bazaar reshape London? Where do the channels flow?"
  59. ↑ Search the shore, Fallen London "The lacre-tide is unpredictable. One minute it might be desperately climbing the beach, wave breaking upon wave. The next it can be flat as a mirror but dropping rapidly, like some great beast is drinking it from below. Sometimes it fountains like a geyser, drenching you with spume, or churns with mysterious currents."
  60. ↑ Mr Sacks! Take this tale of romantic misery!, Fallen London "Ah no, ah no. At any other time, it would be welcome indeed! But not in the deep of winter when the lacre surges from its reservoirs... and when certain other matters occur below. But be not afraid! We have everything in hand. Keep your story, and keep your emotions well-reigned. Good night!"
  61. ↑ Mr Sacks! Take this dream of better times, Fallen London "What a delightful dream. This will be useful, I suspect, in the soothing of those who must be soothed. I will pass it along. Sleep well, my dear."
  62. ↑ Mr Sacks! Take this dream of lost winds!, Fallen London "That lorn thing that was. Its traces remain, and even they are so very strong. Of all the world's sins, it was the fiercest. Though not the greatest. The greatest stir now. Accordingly, we have all this business. Forgive me: I ramble. Good night."
  63. ↑ The Violet-Eyed Waif told you what you should say..., Fallen London "Mr Sacks: the winds are wild, the lacre deep. The snarling stones arise from sleep. The Fifth's tales may exalt the suns, but never hope to halt what comes."
  64. ↑ Inheritance, Fallen London "Two pages are stuck together. Carefully, you pry them apart. According to the Archivist's research, there could be a way to predict where lacre will emerge not just at Christmas, but at other times too. Such a project would be complex, require great leaps of intuition and, she suggests, first-hand experience of all lacre floods to have occurred in the Neath."
  65. ↑ Inheritance, Fallen London
  66. ↑ Myself, Fallen London The lacre reservoirs are hungry: the Bazaar's passions empty them every year. Rather soon, I think, the citizens of London must go down into the tanks. London will be the new Forgotten Quarter.
  67. ↑ Deepen your acquaintance with Prisoner's Honey (DREAM OF A CITY), Fallen London "One by one, they go down the stairs into the soft white glow, their eyes wide and tender. You approach the edge of one of the pits. The scent is sharp, unpleasant."
  68. ↑ Inheritance, Fallen London "You lean over the milky pool, seeing your own face briefly reflected in its pale surface before you dive in. You inhale, and the lacre floods your lungs and seeps into your blood. It is a relief, at last, to—You get to your feet and stagger away from the lacre, a bodily imperative your mind cannot process. "Before each city fell," says the Sage Archivist, "the inhabitants of the one beneath slid into vats of lacre. They couldn't resist. Everything that was once them is in those pools.""
  69. ↑ Where did the Rosers go?, Fallen London "Into lacre," she whispers. "Into the underpipes. Where even souls cannot survive."
  70. ↑ Something forbidden, Fallen London "'This is not our city […] This is its crouching corpse[…] We are overwritten by the Masters […] They will make of us lacre. The streets are dead, but let us remember them. Chalk their old names high! Let them be remembered in flame!'"
  71. ↑ Look out across the zee, Fallen London "A group of desperate survivors throng once-grand docks. A handful of boats linger in the dark zee, where the False-Stars twinkle in the depths. There is violence: space is limited. [...] Webs hang over the docks. There is a toll of eyes for others wishing to flee. The lacre tide rises and soon all is washed away. The last boats zail on."
  72. ↑ Look down into the depths, Fallen London "The process is efficient. Space is cleared as buildings crumble beneath the weight of the lacre, brick and stone and marble breaking into dust, churned up into the lacre and swallowed away. A few ruins on the edge of the city limits linger, upstanding."
  73. ↑ My Kingdom for a Pig, Fallen London "Some people call them Stone Pigs. When the Fifth City fell, they awoke. That's why the Fourth City doesn't exist anymore. They churned it into the ground."
  74. ↑ Look out across the zee, Fallen London "[...] The lacre tide rises and soon all is washed away. [...]"
  75. ↑ Inheritance, Fallen London "Lacre once coursed through those channels, [...] After it drowned the First City, it flowed away to some place beneath, and took the remnants of the city's people with it. There must still be traces of them."
  76. ↑ Adornment, Fallen London "The problem isn't a lack of memories. It's a glut. A flood. You remember holding a flapping quail aloft, pressing an obsidian blade against its neck and feeling its warm blood sliding down your wrist. Digging into a sizzling feast of horse-sausages as you regale your sons with tales of the hunt. Writing poems beneath the silver tree. Bathing in mare's milk in the secret perfumed rooms beneath the Khan's palace. The priest in red feathers, cackling as he slips his knife between your ribs."
  77. ↑ Press on, Fallen London " —the Ceiba trees are dying. The maize is black. The water here is wrong. Our priests have brought us to the underworld and robbed from us the sun—"
  78. ↑ Press on, Fallen London " ——once the tree flowed with mare's milk and honey-mead, and all drank at the Khan's pleasure. Where now the honey? Where now the milk? This darkness turns the mind inexorably towards shadow—"
  79. ↑ Press on, Fallen London " —tremble with fear on the borders of the cedar forest. I do not want to lose my nerve first. We each compete to be fiercer. I would swear—"
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