Shadows & Sorcery #127
It seems as if time itself speeds towards every new edition of Shadows & Sorcery, such as this one, which is the one hundred and twenty seventh edition!
A little background lore. S&S comes in two kinds: ones that come together instantly as I get titles, and ones which reveal themselves very slowly. The last two almost wrote themselves, but this one had to be dragged out of the brain-swamps, but I think it was well worth it in the end. Mayhap you, delicious reader, can tell the difference?
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This week, we learn the truth of a Consecrated Saint, we find out what dwells in the wake of a wizard in Demon of the Sorcerer, and we uncover what grim secret can only be defeated by a Sword of the Undead…
Consecrated Saint
There are many, many ways to perform a miracle. It usually requires taking to a life of wandering, but not always, and many people who try their hand at it just aren't cut out for the life. There are the folk saints, the rag-clad kind of eccentric who goes from village to village begging alms and mustering up some kind of display in return—maybe even healing, if they're good. Then there are the street saints, the kind who stick to a small territory they can carve out in a bustling city with plenty of folk around to see them. Then there's those saints with actual followings, and these are saints represent the highest station one can achieve alone, people who have some knack for calling miracles. Who are close to something.
You get all kinds in these groups, too. Loud, abrasive preachers, beating their chests and roaring down naysayers, you get ash-covered ascetics starving themselves or gulping down psychotropic poisons in a marketplace, you get fungus-ridden sages who sequester themselves in odd places so that they may be sought out, and sometimes you get gentle, sensitive saints dwelling amidst the slums and warrens.
How does it all work? Well, it...just does. It's like playing a role, they say. Do it well enough, convince enough people, get the "energy" right, whip them or yourself into a frenzy, even devote yourself to an ideal, or some mixture of all that, and you perform a miracle. Over time you might even get to choose what that miracle is.
And if you're really good, you'll be consecrated.
That's what it's all about. The race for consecration. Sanctity. Some seek it for power, some for authority, some for divine union or experience, but no matter what, they are all believers. What does it do? For one, it makes miracles easier. If acting the part is enough to fool or coerce the world or heaven or whatever's out there into slipping a couple powers your way, then consecration is that nebulous, mysterious force giving confirmation. Official dispensation.
It comes with a change, too. Slow, gradual, subtle. It may come on as a creeping shift, and then jump. And most curiously, it always happens when no one else is around to see it. But it does happen, and there's no mistaking real consecration, people have tried to fake it, they always fail. It's not just the ease of miracles that announce the event, it's the flakes of gold on the skin, the face which becomes as a mask of unmoving serenity, the...odd proportions of the limbs and the torso...
...You know those ancient brazen statues people kiss and lay their hands on?
Exactly.
Of course some are killed before they reach that stage, hacked apart and sold or secreted away, but you won't find many people who'll readily admit to seeking out those kinds of shrines, where they do more than just kiss consecrated flesh. Any red-stained outcast will tell you all about it, the stolen rapture they can never again taste, and soul-shattering vision of a world of blazing gold statues they may never partake in.
So give some crowns to the next beggar saint you see and keep on the right side of it all, yeah?
Demon of the Sorcerer
"The vast majority of people, the most they'll ever see is a ghost. It's the most they'll ever leave behind, too. I'm sure you've seen one, captain. How about you, sergeant?"
The captain suppressed any exclamation he may have made, and shot a glance to the sergeant to do the same.
"Pale, wan, fluttering things," the old magician continued, "weak and airy, all a ghost can do is muster an illusion, or have some slight power over your eyes. So-"
"We know what a ghost is, wizard," the captain growled, gazing over the oak table in the guard barracks.
"No you don't," he sneered. "Call in all the priests and monks and masters you want. A ghost is a remnant. A memory. An echo. Not a spirit. There are no spirits in this world. Remnants are a resonance that spreads out from a point of impact. Sometimes that impact is a very simply a place that's had a whole life lived in it. Sometimes it's the place of a singular death. Sometimes it's more. Anyway...it is not a ghost you are looking for."
"And what are we looking for, hmm?" the captain said as he stood up straight, hand resting on his sword pommel in some attempt at intimidation.
"Any number of different things, really. See, different people leave all kinds of different remnants after death. Shade faiths are very interesting," the sorcerer continued on almost as if talking to himself. "The remnants of old priests and such. See, ghosts fade with time, there's not much substance there in the first place," he sorted through a series of chronicles of grisly deaths and strange sounds as he spoke, "but a priest's shade, that has presence, infused with...grace or whatever it is they channel. Like the echo of a call resounding off the walls of a deep cavern, remnants can be, ah, sounded off other people. Oh but shades are terribly frail things, and all too often does the strain of benevolent power, as it were, tear them asunder."
"And what does this have to do with what we're looking for?" barked the sergeant.
"Indulge me," said the old man with as sinister a grin as he could make.
"What else is there, wizard?" the captain cut in, making his irritation clear in his tone.
"Well, I look at these sketches and these long descriptions, and wraiths tend to exhibit this kind of vindictive tenacity. Heavy, awfully physical things born almost always from the death of a killer, or a glutton, or a miser—cruelty and coldness, more than negligence or dangerous apathy result in the echo of a wraith. They are things bound in shadow, and are violent. They lurk in lonely places, seeping slowly into the ground only to rise when tread on. Patches of blackened soil, dead grass, unclean stains on wood and stone, or a marked abundance of ghosts all foretell the presence of a wraith. And you're not getting that either, are you?"
"So what is it?" the sergeant said as he came forward, stepping right up to the old wizard, who merely gave him a disdainful look up and down, locked onto his eyes, and spoke with dreadful deliberation.
"Sorcerers, however, they leave behind something much different. Sorcerers," he said slowly and with a certain tinge of relish, "bathed in strange or malefic powers, their flesh and spirit bound up with the marks of possessions and spellholds, when sufficiently powerful, leave behind demons."
The captain suppressed another exclamation. Oh yes, you know captain, the wizard thought to himself.
"A demon," he continued, "for reasons one can only guess—and many have guessed—lingers on far more than any other kind of remnant. One enduring idea is that it is the deep, earthy sorceries that create such tangible manifestations, which leads one to wonder why it is darkness that births the strongest echoes. Certainly there is no magic inherent in a wraith, and for all the wonders that sometimes come from those distant celestial realms man struggles to commune with, a shade's presence is easily shattered. No, gentlemen, you are looking for the demon of a sorcerer."
"And what in hell are we supposed to do about that?" said the sergeant.
"Starve it." The wizard looked to the two guards. "Echoes require people to persist. You see, more than any of their kin, demons exhibit intelligence, or at least, some form of awareness. The powers of their corporeal origins are still very much present, as they are in shades, and much like shades that reach out to the living who pass them by for benediction, demons reach out to other sorcerers with the promise of power. Covens and cults form around these things, and a demon is a terribly substantial echo. No echo persists forever, but demons know or at least feel that flesh and sorcery will buy them the longevity they desire. If you want my advice, captain, which I assume you do, then I tell you to starve it. There is naught to be gained from trying to combat it. In fact, that's exactly what it wants."
Sword of the Undead
Ytho had become undead over a decade ago now. The memory of it was in fragments, and only images with faceless figures now peered out from the haze of time. A king, an old king, with limbs that shook not with fear, but aught else. A great mob of people. Roaring, and rushing. A dark chamber, and a solemn procession whereto he did not remember. The bite of the wind in a way he'd never felt, whose sensation sometimes still crept over him in certain moments. He remembered only the feeling of everything slipping away. All he knew, and could remember, were the old trails to walk by night, the ghost towns of an ancient age where he might rest when weariness finally overtook him, how to read the sun and mountains to know the land, and that his sword was his duty.
He had learned much as he travelled with other undead in his first year or two. He learned, or rather, re-learned of the gods and things inside the walls of the cities. He learned that the followers of Mythra would tell you undead are a sign of rampant sin, to be sent on penitent quests in the wilderness. The cult of the Brethren Moons would say they were divine vanguards or awakened incarnations for times of great peril. The Vigilants of Ioth would proclaim they were boundless souls severed from the cycle, perhaps ascended, perhaps damned. It went on like this for every faith in the six realms.
He learned, too, that regardless, the result was the same. An undead would surface, be discovered, be taken before some secret council, and then be sent into the wilds to slay the nameless horrors which roamed in profusion, never to return. For them were swords forged, the last legacy of the magic now all but lost to the world. They would never chip, never shatter, never dull. A constant companion and reminder.
Ytho wondered to which god or divine ancestor he owed his bleak wanderings, for he was not so bereft of memory he could choose his own.
He learned things he wished he could forget, but knew he must not forget. From a wise undead, once a sage of renown, Ytho learned that with the flesh of the undead, anything could happen. Undeath, it was a state of being which should not be—the sage, he believed she was some kind of Mythrist—and so forces which normally act upon dead flesh, begin to work on...not living flesh, but animate flesh. Aware flesh. Feeling flesh. The blooming life, the rot, the prime mover, things and forces people knew of, the world was an overlapping series of these great fundamental forces. There were, too, forces people didn't know about, forces which exist beside us, unable to interact. But with the undead, it was such a unique state of being that these forces were able to, as she put it, and how he could not forget it, make their way in.
Ytho had never felt alone for a second after he learned that. He had never repeated it to any other undead.
Especially, not after he had met the sage again a year later.
He had attained the summit of a long ridge, over which the fog rolled like a great ghostly waterfall. And then, from out of the bank of dense mist a shape had lunged—a monster, the first had ever faced, and though he had heard so much about them already, nothing had prepared him for the ferocity of the thing which sent him crashing back down the ridge. In the broken, diffuse light of the seeming eternal twilight and fog of these cold ranges, he could barely see the thing as its massive claws grasped him and smashed him into the earth. Nothing in him which could break, snap, or tear would stop him—he was undead, after all. A wide arcing slash from his sword sent into the chill air a scream like tearing steel as the blade cut through a gnarled, inhuman leg, sending the monster to its knees. Another swing he sent out, only for it to be blocked, not by flesh, but by another blade.
He strained as he looked at it, and trembling flooded his silent heart.
He fell back, knocked the blade from her hand, and drove his own upwards through the face which was little more than a gaping maw. Wrenching his sword sideways, the head came clean off, and that which had been the undead sage fell to the ground, still and mouldering. Less dead, and more...unable to continue.
That night he permitted himself a campfire, and studied with intense sorrow and crushing understanding both the sword he had retrieved, and his own wounds which mended, though not into any form they had before.
"There were, too, forces people didn't know about, forces which exist beside us, unable to interact."
"Forces...able to make their way in."
In the intervening years, the monsters he faced became stranger. As did he. But ever was there a sword in their hands, or what had once been hands. He took them as their owners were destroyed, and it was by their weight alone did he hold back the countless waves of alien power. He hoped, even prayed, that they would do the same for another should his time come.