Gogossos

Gogossos is a ruined city on the southern coast of the Isle of Tears, the largest of the Basilisk Isles.

## Geography

The ancient city remains on the southern coast of the Isle of Tears, built by the same Ghiscari as that built Zamettar. It is a ruined city, left to decay following the outbreak of the Red Death.

## History

During the time of the Old Empire, the Ghiscari expanded into Sothoryos and the Basilisk Isles. They founded a city they called Gorgai on the largest of the Basilisks. For several centuries-- between two and four, by most historians' reckoning-- the Ghiscari would rule. During the Third Ghiscari War, Gorgai would fall to the dragonriders of the Valyrian Freehold.

The Valyrians would rename Gorgai, calling it Gogossos instead. To add to their changes, the city would be reorganized into a vast penal colony for the worst criminals in Valyrian society. Things quickly grew worse for Gogossos, however.

Prisoners in Gogossos would be subjected to the cruelest, most inhumane punishments their Valyrian captors could imagine. They would become subjects of experiments involving blood magic. Women enslaved in Gogossos could be forced to mate with animals and would birth monstrous hybrid creatures that the Valyrians would spirit away. The city became infamous for the evil deeds perpetrated there before the Doom of Valyria occurred.

Gogossos' cruel excess would not abate as a result of the Doom, however, as the city rested far from the Valyrian peninsula and suffered no ill effects from it. Much to the contrary, the independence that the slavers and sorcerers of Gogossos had pushed them to expand. Gogossos became fantastically wealthy on the backs of its slaves, and its slave trade would be competitive with all three of the cities in Slaver's Bay. At its height Gogossos would be called the *Tenth Free City*, but it would not last beyond a generation.

Seventy-seven years after the Doom, slaves began to die in horrible ways. Screaming incoherently, they would writhe in pain as their skin sluiced off their bones in ragged chunks. As they lost their skin their eyes, ears, nose, mouth, and anus would begin to hemorrhage, leading to a rapid but horrific death. The Red Death burned through the slave pits, killing many thousands. Slavers who sought to protect their goods would themselves fall victim, and sorcerers who attempted to cure the illness would likewise die. Gogossos would be almost wholly depopulated-- ninety percent of the population would succumb to the Red Death. The plague would sweep through the Isle of Tears, and fearful denizens of the island fleeing the illness would carry it across the Basilisk Isles. The resulting plague devastated the islands, killing nearly every living human on their shores.

A few years later, a slave galley, supposedly from the abandoned city of Gogossos arrives at Lys, carrying with it a variation on the Red Death remembers as Crimson Fever. Fortunately, it proved less fatal as its more nocuous counterpart, but still kills one in fifty, mainly those at the extremes of age.

After the Red Death burnt itself out, none dared return to Gogossos. The ancient and evil place would be given a wide berth by any sailing through the Basilisk Isles, and those who would land on the Isle of Tears would never venture to within sight of its silent, abandoned towers. Those who died in the plague lay where they fell even to today, piles of cloth and bone. The jungles of the island have reclaimed much of Gogossos in the four centuries since its abandonment, though any corsair sailing around the Isle of Tears could still see the spires of the once-glorious and forever wicked place.

In 2AA, a Braavosi Pirate Lord supposedly hunted, captured and slayed a wyvern that was terrorising his fleet as it lingered at the ruined city of Gogossos. His boastful tales catch the attention of a number of wealthy merchants, and thus the Pirate Lord found himself inundated with contracts, causing the formation of the sellsword company the Black Wyverns. The company has continues its existence to this day, but whether there is any truth in the tale remains unknown.