City Sigils

City sigils are an ancient tradition of the hexakin, one that has endured for centuries and has its origins in ancient bugkin magic. While the bugkin have never been able to access actual magic, they are not immune to superstition and myth. Sigils are a relic of this time, once designed to beseech spirits to protect homes, families, or entire cities, but which now survive mostly as symbols of identification or decorative elements. City sigils can be found in offices and on supply crates, in transit stations and in private homes, in art and in literature. Some symbols are created wholesale and designed to reflect the modern city, while others are modifications of ancient markings altered for better recognizability and replication. Here is only a sampling.

The city of Grandtide has used mollusk shells to represent the city for centuries, a tradition that has its roots in the city’s founding myth. But the modern design of a segmented snail shell is relatively recent and the standardized form is mere decades old. Many of these older, more ornate designs survive in the iconography of local organizations and buildings, with a small but vocal portion of the populace calling for its return. However, the oldest known instances of the Tidewatch sigil are not depictions of a shell, but are instead abstract symbols carved into shells which would be placed into the foundations of protected buildings. The use of physical seashells in Tidewatch architecture continues to this day.

The sigil of Godsfall is one of the oldest still in modern use, but it has not survived unaltered. The oldest known sigils were highly abstract, with the more straightforward representational designs coming into fashion as belief in their magic faded. While the abstract designs did carry meaning to practitioners, this meaning was not meant to be understood by ordinary people and was thus hidden in layers of abstraction. But the symbol of modern Godsfall scarcely resembles those found in archaeological records, and whatever it meant is long forgotten. Citizens can only speculate on what the design once was and what it meant. Some compare it to the vertebrate bones which originally formed the basis of the city, while others liken the design to the husk of a bug. It is likely this speculation will continue for as long as Godsfall stands.

The city of Marrowhaven is a small one, founded by former residents of Godsfall once the city’s reserves of marrow were depleted. Located among the bones of a long-dead herd of beasts, the city has long had a fascination with vertebrates and skeletons. For the sigil’s designer, Quercus of North Marrowhaven, the choice seemed obvious. In an artist’s statement, she stated: “Some criticized it for being too obvious, but I think they’re too focused on what Godsfall did with its abstract design. It’s easy to get in your head, this is what a sigil should be, but lots of cities have clear-cut symbolism. We don’t have to reflect what Godsfall did. We’re our own city and this is our culture.”

The city of Burrowhill is much newer than Godsfall or Tidewatch, but its sigil is very much based in the abstract traditions of the former. Designed by an anonymous artist, the meaning of the sigil has been debated since its adoption yet never reached the fervor surrounding the Godsfall sigil. Many citizens of Burrowhill instead believe that the piece never had any meaning to begin with and was simply designed this way to remind the viewer of ancient designs. In any case, it has remained reasonably popular and relatively unchanged.

The city of Leviathan IV is an unusual one. The fourth incarnation of an experimental “walking city”, the entire populace lives within a colossal (and highly crowded) mecha which slowly wanders the land. Because of the difficulty in establishing regular communication and the constantly-shifting set of neighbors (many of which despise Leviathan IV for the noise and pollution produced), the city remains culturally isolated even today. This isolation was the reason why the sigil designers deliberately rejected tradition in creating their city’s symbol, and produced perhaps the most controversial design of any major city. It is said that there are argument threads which began the day it was revealed and continue to this day.

The concept of city sigils developed before the advent of the internet, when cities and nation-states were relatively isolated. But as cities became connected along regional lines, alliances began to form. While belief in the power of sigils was already waning, the symbols themselves were regularly used to represent the cities; it was only natural that allied cities would symbolize their newfound connections with combinations of their sigils. This was a brief trend; most were considered rather ugly by the populace and thus rarely used outside official documents. While few of these alliance symbols survived long-term, there was one that saw use even outside its intended meaning.

The alliance between the city of Godsfall and Burrowhill was an odd but not unexpected arrangement. While not direct neighbors, the two cities had a long and peaceful history, making the arrangement obvious. But the addition of Grandtide into the alliance surprised many, as did the addition of its sigil to their own. The new sigil, which modified its constituents to better resemble an insect, proved to be remarkably popular; even when more cities were added to the alliance in the following years, the symbol remained unchanged.

But the growing internet was not the only reason why cities were willing to join the growing alliance. Because at the same time, the mages were in the middle of a technological renaissance of their own. Mage villages popped up all across the hinterlands and mountains, and more bugkin resources were spent to monitor and guard against them. As fear boiled and new information about their neighbors spread, the bugkin began to focus less on their cross-city conflicts and more on their distant neighbors to the west. Eventually, the symbol of the great alliance, now called the Crossroads Sigil, drifted away from representing the increasingly-large alliance and instead towards representing all bugkin. Even as the importance of alliances faded, the symbol remained popular.

But cities are vast, and no populace is a monolith. When people feel distant from their neighbors, the powers that be, or the city as a concept, they make their own identities. And for some they define themselves in how they are different from their homeland. For these citizens, “mutated” symbols provide a useful way to express their feelings. Used by groups or individuals, representing distinct factions or vague ideologies, these altered sigils can represent nearly any position on any issue and may mean different things to different people. Trying to explain all would be impossible; here is merely a sample.

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