It’s a lot easier writing about a new wizard every week than coming up with these opening lines so here’s the one hundred and twenty-ninth edition of this thing
You know, I love writing about the sea. It’s either all melancholy and moody, or its absurdly malevolent. There’s a sea story this week, not telling what kind it is though. There’s also other stories! They feature things that are not the sea, but they’re still good!
There’s been a few new readers recently, and to you—hello! But also to you, and to readers of recent times, remember take a dive into the deeper waters of this publication, mouldering ruins, dark gods, nameless cults, and much MUCH more are lurking in the archives…
If you are new or just missed last week’s edition, check it out HERE
This also applies to the latest chapter of the serial novel, The Path of Poison, the shenanigans of which can be caught up with HERE
And hey, please take a second to let the stories know you liked them—tap that little heart button!
This week, we call up from the deeps the Sorcery of the Sea, we seek out what dwells in an old Sorcerer’s Graveyard, and we learn the strange truth of the Castle Rune…
Sorcery of the Sea
He had been like a son to them, the woman with iron grey hair had said. He'd been the youngest member of their outfit, a roguish young lad who joined them for some episode of intrigue during their stay in a port city half way across the world. Rescued from a life spent looking over his shoulder, and with nowhere to call home, he'd taken up with them. Back then he'd become their fifth, and delved into every ruin they did, fought every enemy they had, shared in their glory, and in their sorrow when they'd become four. They saw him grow from a rake thin street thug into a fine warrior, while he had watched them swing slower and wander less until the they pooled their reputation and coin and got themselves a small shop and home in a second capital city.
They'd never quite been able to go their own ways. They'd been through too much together. Too many times had they endured biting cold and searing heat, escaped mortal wounds by a hair's breadth and broken bread afterwards. Truth was, they were the closest thing to family that any of their misfit, vagabond lot would ever have. They didn't feel like splitting up then, and they didn't now. All save that young man. He was in his prime--a long prime. Fire raged within him, and some two decades of the adventurer's life had only fed that fire. In the end, he had taken to the high seas, venturing forth to claim new and greater glories, promising he would return with grand tales for the kin who had brought him up out of darkness.
Alas, he had never returned.
As the old witch listened to the distant, undulant roar of a wordless voice from deep within a sea-beast's shell, there was understanding. Their ships had passed over every sea in the world in their time, and much of them had remained there, as all things must, to be held in the depths forever. All they had of the young man was a fine red cloak, a cherished memory and keepsake left in the care of those who had been his kin. There was a golden clasp upon it, a bauble gifted by some mystery-veiled beauty in an eastern temple-palace long ago, stained and tarnished with travel and combat, repaired and cleaned again and again. Having been paid in full and then some, the witch held it now.
The sun was just rising. Thin pale beams snaked through gaps in the vast bank of ashy cloud and fog. The waves exhaled upon their shores, long and languid. But the air was bracing and fresh, filling the old witch's lungs with a deep invigoration. It seemed in good spirits today, the sea. Before the stony beach was a ragged growth of crags whose wrinkled facades held innumerable rock pools. The old witch made a habit of collecting the odd things the sea released into those pools, but instead, this morning, something would be left behind.
It was a deeply personal and sympathetic art. The old witch had given so much to the sea through the years that every so often, aught may be coaxed from its furthest reaches if favour was high. A scrap of red cloak, the golden clasp, and soil from the home the young man's cobbled together kin had made for a potent call. That night, as the tides closed in on the pitted coastline, the witch crouched in a small hollow under a hut upon a clifftop. Bells tolled soft and dim, and water seemed to drop from the solid rock itself. In that lightless space, the witch whispered into a sea-beast's shell for some several hours before placing it with fathomless reverence within the pooled moisture.
As the sun rose red through the long tendrils of cloud and haze, light-tower guards passed on the news of a strange ship spotted on the westward horizon.
It may be they have to learn the harshest lesson of all: the sea may return anything, but it cannot fix it.
Sorcerer's Graveyard
"Twisted trees and grasping vines," said the hunter ducking under one specimen whose leaves looked more like fingers than anything else, "virulent weeds, tall grass wavering in no wind," he continued, casting an uneasy glance around, "and...unwholesome insects," he muttered with a tinge of disquiet as a creature of limp, wriggling legs tumbled through the air near him. "Aye, all the marks of an old sorcerer's graveyard. Mark all of this well."
The two youths behind the hunter looked to each other. The woods had been dark, true, yet it was as if a threshold had been crossed but they had no idea where or when it had been. As if the place had decided at some point they had gone too far. A clamminess had suddenly permeated the air, close and musty, the stink of wet stone and stagnant water. All that held it back from choking them were their sputtering torches.
"Yeah, now you know why there's such a scramble to burn them. This is...a few bodies, at least. Or one really bad one. Leeching into the soil for who knows how long."
"A really bad one?" said the girl, forcing the words out.
The hunter cast a glance behind him.
"Have you ever seen a sorcerer before?"
"Once, years ago..."
"What about him?"
The lad didn't reply. He hadn't spoken in some time, his eyes too busy darting about the misty treeline, looking for what, he didn't even know.
"He hasn't told me anything, so I don't think so."
"Well," the hunter said with an uneasy sigh, beating back bushes with his walking staff, "some of the really far gone ones...sorcery is about being able to make your body do things it otherwise can't. Or shouldn't. And that often requires, ah, alterations. Some of the really powerful ones...I'm sure you can guess."
There was a kind of light in the air. It was neither sunlight, nor was was it the youths' torches. It had a faint shimmer to it, and seemed as if cast unevenly from no definite source, filtering through the dense and unhealthy vegetation that visibly parted as the torch flames were held out. The hunter had not exaggerated one ounce when he said the life here would be more active than either of them would expect. When the young man trod on a vine as thick as a human arm that slithered back between the roots of a tree that looked like it was twisting in pain, he finally let loose his panicked voice.
"Why don't we just burn the place down, eh?" He stopped in his tracks.
"The forest'll purge itself in time," said the hunter, turning around. "But we need to kill off the source first."
"Kill off?" the girl said, not hiding her fear.
"What did you think you were getting paid so well for? Look, this doesn't happen too often anymore, but few people will touch this. It's a public service, come on," he said, trudging forward, and urging the youths onward.
The canopy of the small clearing was more like a dome wrought of thousands of interlocking vines and snaking branches. There was an artifice to the growth--not guided, but forced. In the midst of it, something stood. A tall, sort of shapeless pile or pillar of compacted moss and mulch, veritably alive with crawling insects and writhing worms. The hunter put out an arm to stop the youths from going any further. He removed now from his waist a wide, curved blade he attached to the end of his walking staff. On his other hip was what looked like a small mace.
"Get ready, you two."
Without another word, the hunter stalked forward and sent the blade into the pillar, as it suddenly shook with a violent gurgling.
The blade again sunk into the mass, but this time became stuck. The pillar then twisted around, and looked at them.
A yellowed, cracked skull stared sightless from under a hood of ragged moss and fungus, and a dozen limbs ripped their way from inside the now pulsating corruption, knocking the hunter's sickle away. The arms, themselves composed of rotten bone and seeping mulch, whipped about furiously as it tore its trunk-like legs from the earth and lurched towards the trio. The hunter removed from his waist the small mace-like instrument. He twisted the top half to reveal perforations in the metal. From it, he rained streaks of a rich black oil upon the thing which began to move more surely with every step it took.
"Your torches! Now!" he roared. The young man leapt forward, eyes bulging in terror, thrusting his torch into the body of the thing, which was lit up in a burst of flame almost instantly. The girl threw her torch, jumping back with a curse, another cloud of fire erupting from the thing which now audibly screamed. The hunter had retrieved his sickle, and began to hack away again at the flailing horror until it fell into the wet earth, immobile. The hunter turned to the two behind him, who stood shaking and speechless.
"That went quite smoothly," said the hunter, "that one hadn't any of its magics. Still though, must have been a strong one when it was alive."
"What?" was all the girl could croak out.
"That was a sorcerer, cobbling itself back together. I wonder what was taking it so long. Not that it matters now. Anyway, when the fire's died down, we'll gather the ashes and head home. You both did well, good going."
Castle Rune
The collapse of the Kymer Suhn Tor Empire began as waves and outbreaks of civil unrest, ethnic conflict, and large scale banditry and brigandry in the outer reaches where the law was loose. The escalation of events forced the emperor to spread the legions thin across far lands. With the military presence so low in the old heartlands, a number of scheming governors, old landed barons, and treacherous generals began to move against each other to seize land and coffers in what became full scale war across the empire.
The legions consolidated the capital province, but lost swathes of land as an intricate web of alliances, federations, betrayals, and assassination flowed in dire waves over the span of many generations, chewing up imperial nations into fractious rogue states. Borders were re-written sometimes several times a year. During this, avaricious nobles decried the emperor, crowned themselves such, and split Kymer Suhn Tor first into thirds, then into fifths, never able to conquer each other due to the violent infighting and bloody intrigue within.
Over twenty sovereign kingdoms peered meekly out of the empire's corpse--its time of death never really reckoned by anyone--before collapsing back in, and the whole of the known world quietly splintered into a silent, exhausted wasteland.
Throughout the Age of Strife, countless fortresses, keeps, castles, towers, and fortified manors were captured, re-captured, ceded, repurposed, and some even built brand new. The world came to depend upon the network of keeps, and this centrality never quite left. In the wake of a long period of poverty, disease, and the nursing of deep grudges referred to only as the Great Silence, people flocked around the closest castle or manor, and for well over a century, the lands that had once been a single unified empire were an anarchic vastness where each keep was a kingdom unto itself, its lands stretching only as far its people could see it, and all else was a devastated wilderness.
It had long been a tradition, far back into the misty, half-legendary past of the old empire, to strike a rune into the founding stone of any fortress. Kymer Suhn Tor were each one of the ancient names of the three allegiant marches that formed the first incarnation of the empire, and it was the Suhnic people that gifted the empire with the mystical "tongue of the sky". This curious runic language not only provided a liturgical lexicon for the esoteric and syncretic imperial cult, it also gave that beleaguered final generation the one tradition that survived the demise of Kymerese high sorcery and Torish "deep smithing" techniques in the Time of the Long Chaos.
There wasn't a fortress in the world whose founding stone hadn't a rune struck by the very sky-voice itself. There was not a king or chief or master that would deny it was their castle's rune, and the strength they drew from it, that saved them from ultimate destruction. Man-struck runes existed, and the castles bearing them were dust. Only an original would do. The imperial cult had always been flexible--it had to be--but in the wake of the collapse, it split into hundreds of local variations that faded, superseded by a burgeoning faith centered on the runes.
Divine disillusionment had been setting in for decades. No offering or incense or prayer had soothed anyone's suffering during the old wars and their aftermath. In the race to preserve what little of civilization, or at least order, remained, the subtle touch of the gods had become perhaps too subtle, too soft, or just utterly ineffectual. In their place, the runes--a power one could witness firsthand, a show of might for when folk needed aught to rally around. Some priests slowly diverted their attention while others freshly devoted themselves to the buzzing stones in castle deeps.
Across the swathes of petty kingdoms, a curiously uniform and yet wholly decentralized cult formed about those sure powers, the nascent priesthoods consisting of those with some connection to or mild understanding of the runes and their working, or rather, how to call up their power. And they did this as much as they could, newly astounded every time by the seemingly bottomless wellspring of vitality they had to hand, becoming over time, just a little too fascinated by the vibrations and resonances of the runes they could feel all about them in the deepest parts of their keeps.
Not all the writings of the old empire were lost--many manors in fact contained rich libraries that became microcosms of learning. Scholars would travel from manor to manor, from castle to keep, to peruse each other's famed collections. But language and meaning were ever subject to change, warping, and loss, especially over the span of a thousand bloodstained years of imperial conquest and dissolution. The ultimate result of this was that Classical Suhnic texts on runes became holy writ whose archaic phrasing filled their readers with awe, and not the caution their long-dead writers had wished to impart.
After generations of stumbling back onto its feet and quelling petty conflict, mankind started to build new castles and manors, and each one had its own rune. The sky-voice spoke willingly and eagerly whenever humans beckoned it, and it was no surprise, merely a pleasant subconscious confirmation, when runes began to be found in wild places, appearing of their own accord. These were holy places of pilgrimage where wanderers would return from, enflamed with divine vigour, spreading the wonder and the power. Not long after, the first saints were born with runes on their flesh, superhumans born to be lords ruling from rune-strewn hilltops.
Now that all the land bore its mark, the speaker in the sky would descend to rule for all time.
Excellent stories. I particularly liked the third story of the Castle Runes!