Where It All Goes Down
Fantasyland Minus the Magic
So Skin Hunger takes place in a made-up world that has a bunch of elements of fantasy (medieval-type society with kings and lords, invented languages, old stories about wizards and magic)… except there's very little magic in the world itself. In Sadima's time, there are stories of magic, but nothing more. In Hahp's time, many decades later, there is some magic, but only wizards with their exclusive and shady training have access to it. We'll take you on a tour of some of the unique aspects of this setting.
Ye Olde Magicale Past
The history of this land is filled with tales of magic—some good, some bad. Here's a quick history lesson. Wizards were pretty powerful in the past, and could do things like fly, cure diseases, and so on. But then things went south. Hahp learns why:
The first Age of Magic, it claimed, was ended by an alliance of power-mad kings and a general uprising of common people who had been duped by the kings into thinking the wizards were evil. Thousands of wizards had been killed in primitive, ugly ways—by ax, by fire, by quartering, by drowning. (18.22)
That sounds a lot like the Spanish Inquisition and the witch hunts from our own world's history. Magic went underground, and the rest of the world moved on. There were political repercussions, though:
The last paragraph explained that the kings had fought among themselves a swell; that the whole of humanity was plagued with war for generations.
I turned the page, expecting some explanation of why no one had passed down stories of the wars along with the stories of magic and wizards, but it wasn't there. The third chapter of the book had a list of the kingdoms that no longer existed because of that war. It took up twenty pages. (18.23-24)
Pro tip: If starting a war to eradicate magic, keep in mind that there'll be a huge toll on the rest of society.
Some knowledge about the past was preserved in old stories rather than written history books. At one point, for instance, Franklin is talking about his efforts to convince Somiss to study the silent-speech: "No. And I may never. He has found some old story that says it was the downfall of the wizards" (19.26). In stories about magic, how do you decide which of the other elements are true and fact-based, and which are fanciful? We're not sure.
And when Franklin first meets Sadima, he asks her if she's heard the old stories, the "winter-hearth tales of wars and wizards and ships on the sea" (11.30). Again Somiss is totally into these stories, thinking there's a grain of truth in them… and it turns out that there is. So pay attention to old stuff, whether in history class or in a traditional song performance, because you never know when you might learn something useful.
Culture Shock
While most of our story takes place in some unnamed kingdom, there are hints that other nations exist as well. We know that there are other languages, for starters. Hahp tells us:
I had spent my first seven years speaking Yama until noon, Thereisti until supper, and our own Ferrinides until bed. A man who could speak those three, my father had said, could trade anywhere in the wide world, all the way out to the islands beyond the colonies. (18.6)
It's not a religiously homogenous place, either. There are Gypsies and at least one religiously distinctive group, the Eridians. Kary Blae, a noblewoman who gives Sadima a lift to Limòri, has this to say about the Eridians:
"They are wicked. My husband says they are bringing country girls into the city, forcing them to marry." (15.13)
But that doesn't seem likely, given that Sadima's employer, Rinka, is an Eridian, and she seems pretty cool. Here's how she describes her beliefs to Sadima: "Bound by oath to honesty and sacred labor. We work hard, and I will expect you to work hard" (27.17). And this just doesn't sound too bad to us.
We occasionally hear about foods and other things being imported. Hahp is tasked with releasing some "Servenian hummingbirds" (62.3), for example, and he remembers how his "father often imported oranges from Levern" (24.2). In other words, there are definitely lands beyond the one that Sadima and Hahp live in, even if we don't see them in this book.
Country and City
Limòri is the largest city—and possibly even the capital—of the land where Sadima, Hahp, Franklin, and Somiss live.
To someone like Sadima, growing up in a tiny town like Ferne, Limòri seems impossibly huge. At first, she's only heard rumors about it, stories where "there were people with green skin and boats bigger than houses" (11.26), but then she ventures there on her own.
It takes Sadima a little over two weeks to walk from Ferne to Limòri, so it's a considerable distance. Once there, Sadima's astonished at how big everything is:
There were buildings that rose into the air as high as three or four houses piled one on another, made of blocks of dark stone… There were shops and markets everywhere she looked, and the women all wore fine, bright-colored dresses. (15.27-28)
The market square of Limòri is huge, too, but eventually Sadima gets used to it.
As with many large cities, there's a downside to having so many humans massed in one place: poverty. Hahp can see the city from his family's estate before he's shipped off to wizard-school, and here's what he sees:
I stared westward through the steam rising off the river mouth. Beyond it, across the delta and the still-water marshes on the other side, the night-torches in the South End slums of Limòri were being snuffed out. Once the eye-burning stench of the greasewood was gone, the beggars would swarm back to the boardwalk. But by then the shopkeepers' dogs would be off their leashes. Most were half wolf. All were underfed. (2.1-2)
The city sounds pretty unpleasant, right? If you've got enough money to get by, though, it's probably a nice place to live. Rich folks tend to live on Ferrin Hill, where we're betting things are pretty swank.
Wizard-land
When Hahp is escorted to the wizard academy, he and the other boys and their families enter through a pair of giant iron doors—Hahp thinks they're so big that "A ship could have sailed through them" (6.3). Inside the doors are tunnels that connect various rooms and caverns to one another.
The boys are given rooms with cots and small basins in them. They're starved for a good chunk of their time there, they're not allowed to leave, they never get to see the sunlight, and they don't bathe until they can learn to magically manifest soap. In other words, this ain't Hogwarts.
There's more to the caverns than meets the eye, though, and Somiss is convinced, having pieced it together from the old songs and stories, that they're "the ancient home of magic" (65.14). It takes decades (if not centuries), but he manages to restore the spot to what it was in the past, since it's now the location of the academy. Hahp gets a glimpse of how mysterious the place is, when he's led to a forest:
We were standing in a sunlit forest beneath a black stone sky. (52.19)
How does that even work? We have no clue whatsoever, so we're chalking it up to magic.
Magic is also what lets the wizards use the Patyàv Stone (a giant, glimmering jewel) to manifest whatever they need: food, soap, and so on. Are there limits to what it can create? Where did it come from? The academy remains super mysterious, and we're hoping that we get to see more of its inner workings in subsequent books.