Mythology

### THE WATER-FACED WOMAN

This story is very old, and supposedly it's a tale that comes from the swamp goblins that used to trade with the taller settlements. If you listen to them, they'll still tell you that all of the freshwater in the rivers and lakes of the world comes from the Bogwash.

The Water-Faced Woman was married to a pirate captain who was very successful and very, very dangerous. She was said to be able to harness the sea itself to overpower her quarries, and would throw her prisoners overboard to feed the ocean. Her wife, meanwhile, was a gardener who tended to their homestead on land, growing beautiful fruits and vegetables for her seafaring wife.

Some say that the ocean's pull over the captain became too great, and she leapt into the ocean in a consummate embrace, never again to walk the earth. Some say it was mutiny, that her first mate drowned her to claim her ship and her wife.

Whatever the truth is, her gardening wife continued to garden, forever waiting for her wife who would never come home. As the weeks, then months, then years passed, and her sweet captain did not return to her, her vegetables grew bitter and her fruits withered in the garden. She watered them with her tears, the salt in them spoiling the crops. She had nothing left, so she wept for her losses. Eventually the earth claimed her, though even this could not stop her tears from flowing. Her crying formed the first river, and it's said that her tears were what reunited the land and the sea, allowing her to see her wife once again. The joy was so great that she couldn't stop crying, so a great lake formed over the farm, and her rivers spread across the land, so she would never again be alone.

It is said that if you find the source of all the rivers in all the world, there you will find the Water-Faced Woman, still crying from the reunion with her wife.

### THE FORGETTING FLOWERS

It's said that there is an impossibly old woman who has lived in the swamp from the moment it was born. Even in the oldest written records of this story, she is described as an old crone, her face etched with deep crows feet and a protruding nose. Her house is a strange, wobbling creature that wanders the swamp. Your grandfather claims to have eaten dinner in her house once, when he was a younger man.

When he told you this story, he described a home that seemed nearly sapient beneath the old woman's feet. Inside he told you boys of a greenhouse, a miniature sun dangling inside the house-creature's mouth. There, he claims she drew up a beautiful table and two chairs from the writhing floor, and offered him a cup of tea with the meal.

Often it is at this point that he says that he can't remember the rest of that day, and that he probably imagined the whole thing. But once, just once, the two of you were caring for him after he had been sick with a fever for three days. That night, as you were helping him get into bed whole your parents got his dinner together, he looked at you two with wide wild eyes. That night, with a shaky grip on the bed covers, he told you the rest of what he remembered. She had made tea while they chatted, her asking about his work, his love life, his family. And when she was done making tea, she made him an offer. He says he doesn't remember it. He says he doesn't remember anything else from that night. But he does say that the tea he drank was made with the petals of a plant she grew in that greenhouse, minute flowers with brilliant blue centers that faded to white at the edges.

Others in the village of Eastmawl have stories of seeing the house-creature, carrying an old woman through the muck. None, however, can confirm your grandfather's story.