Maybe fifty years ago a traveling zoological attraction suffered fire and shipwreck off the coast of Ankhayat Park, in Silkshore. A monster the owner called a “river horse” got loose. It was massive, twice the size of the heaviest ox, with giant jaws full of blunt teeth. Irritable as hell. The local gondolier-based enforcer gangs cornered it for capture, and it resisted. There were lots of deaths—including the river horse. The toughest gondolier gang working for the Fairpole Grotto Council at the time was the Clamdiggers. Selman, the leader, was looking to update their image.
He mounted that monster’s skull on the wall; fleshless, it looked as fearsome as a dragon. He changed the name of his gang to the River Horses.
Twenty years later only the old-timers remembered the story, and the skull was one trophy among many. Denyek was in charge, he had his mistress paint a tribute to the gang. She made this beautiful mural of a white horse in the river. Even that was old and outdated fifteen years ago, when Sunset had a falling out with the leader and decided she was going to start a proper crew, not just thugging for the gondoliers anymore. If they were river horses, her crew would be River Stallions. She got her crew matching tattoos based on the mural under the Cox Street Stables. They never looked back.
From “Iconography of Dust: Stories Behind the Stories” by Tadger Bleek