Shadows & Sorcery #145
The time has come, and so has the one hundred and forty-fifth edition of Shadows & Sorcery!
This week is just absolutely dripping in occult horror, it is redolent in night-black wizardry. A triple bill of loathsome spell-weaving awaits, these might very well be some of the darkest magics we’ve encountered yet. So cast your wards and buckle up, friends.
Now, last week was the 26th chapter of the adventure serial, The Path of Poison, and if you missed out on that or just signed up, you can check it out over HERE
And if you missed the last edition of S&S, I implore you, check that one out because it was GOOD
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This week, we follow an apprentice magician seeking the power of the Abyss of Sorcery, we join a desperate quest for the Enchanter’s Hills, and we receive our mark so that we may practice the grim Sorcery of Offering…
Abyss of Sorcery
The sub-cellar is cold, damp, and stinks of mould, but it is hidden—perfectly hidden, the apprentice thinks. A small earthen chamber set under a trapdoor, whose lid is nailed to an old rug covering the floor above, surrounded by innocuous shelves of odds and ends, at the back of a wide cellar of much more interesting apparatus. The master certainly wouldn't look for the lost book here, plucked soundlessly from deep within the library, and secreted through the high arched hallways by such a new student.
"Down, deep below, far below," the book ran, "lies an unfathomable expanse of eldritch mystery: the abyss from which the world emerged and coalesced. The infinitude of the innermost space, the maw which breathed. That breath exudes and expands even now," it said, excitement almost palpable in its words, "and so our magicks are intended as channels and streams, filters and focuses, for it to emerge and be shaped. But a law above all governs this, the fundamental and unbendable base law that these must be placed upon earth, or things touching earth, and at no too great a distance. All things are connected to the earth, but understand that every layer, no matter how thin or insubstantial, represents a barrier between the diagram and the abyss."
The apprentice turns the pages with immense reverence, gazing with darting eyes over the examples of diagrams, over the strange words and sigils, over the hints of mystery and esotericism which flare his brain in this moment above all. The candles hiss and sputter but they are healthy, and their warm, dancing glow lends something of life to the book itself—mayhap it is that even these shapes, on these pages, on this earth, draw up the ineffable powers right now? A chill runs across him in anticipation.
"The binding circle, the tri-angled command, the square which empowers, and the ways by which they may be combined—learn them well, and choose wisely," it says, and a thousand ideas and images rush through the apprentice's head. "It dwells below yet as a power, a motive force, a wellspring, a generative principle, an everything that is and can be, that can be thought, felt, or dreamt." The book delves headlong into passages of awesome description, and minute elucidation on the implications. Cosmic lifeblood. Breath of being. The pillars of creation that rise from the depths by the hands of mankind.
Then came something new, and a twinge of impatience laid its hand on the apprentice's heart, but he read on, enthralled nonetheless. "Expeditions into subterranean caverns to seek the abyss," read the book, "were once common. But magicks cast below the earth are uncontrollable—potent beyond compare, but the closer one is to the ultimate source, the wilder the power. It almost seeks to exist. Our magicks, they are emulations, refinements, and aspects of primordial self-made expressions of the abyss, a Great Lattice from which the world tumbles forth, and they were learned at great cost." The apprentice, who knelt down to read, leaned back with a sense of sympathetic tragedy. These noble souls were his forebears, were they not? He owed it to them all to experience the old sorcery first hand.
Here was wisdom and power at his very fingertips. The fundaments by which the source may be shaped to his desires—passion was his drive and his focus, for empowerment to remake the garbled whisper which spoke his thin, reedy bones, his withered limbs, his fogged mind, and shuddering heart into imperfect being. To make his flesh match his will before the sigh that birthed him dissipated.
Thus began the detailed instruction for the creation of an abyssal diagram. Geometries and their combinations, their layering, the order by which they should be constructed—his body can barely keep up. His first spell will be his making, his proof, his rebirth. "This power," he mutters as he crushes chalk between his fingers and spreads it upon the flat, dry ground in a square, "I make utterly binding, down to the bones, down to the soul," he continues as around it he constructs a circle, "this I command of the abyss," his voice rises to a hoarse whisper as a triangle is made around it all.
He stands before his sigil, in awe that such simple working may yield such mighty results. But the magician was no less a part of the channel, this he knew. Before he steps into it, he glances down to the book, and races through pages for anything else he might add, the tome describing and presenting dizzying kaleidoscopic patterns designed for grand ceremonial magicks which enflame the apprentice's mind anew. There is more in this magick than health, more than enlightenment. Words and ideas flit across his mind he dares not speak. Not yet.
The apprentice sets down the tome, and prepares with shaking breath to step into his sigil. But something stops him—something quite literally bars his passage. Yet in the candlelight glow he can see nothing. Confusion grinds his mind to a halt, and he retreats to the book. Crouching, hands twitching from the rush of excitement and the shock, he turns the pages, scanning them for some glimpse of insight, until he realizes he's looking at something different, something new. Long, messy columns of scrawls with so much ornamentation he must stop to decipher them. He checks several, and flips forward only to find more and more. It is a roster of names, names he discovers, of spirits.
His brow furrows in confusion, and he slowly retreads back to the beginning of the section, where his brow shoots up as his eyes widen, and a new shuddering overtakes his heart, as before all else reads: "Know then that the sigil is not for you. Know that the channel and the focus give rise to the necessary intelligence with which to actualize the abyss. Each name henceforth was once conjured up, given shape, and used for the execution of a spell. These names must be used by all but the most adept sorcerer who may inscribe their own—these names are the final and most necessary focus of all. Set one of these names, and one of these names only, into the sigil before the last stroke is made and the geometry thus completed."
"A fleeting will, a fleeting life, a god crafted by one's own hands for one's own miracles" the book describes it as.
Or, as the apprentice sees as he looks up, a demon crafted by his own folly, for his own doom.
Enchanter's Hills
She was nothing but skin and bones by the end, a sad slip of a thing. It made her easy to carry. The grim irony had not been lost on the figure who trudged across half the countryside in a flax-oil cloak, off the roads, through the woods, over deep streams, and past abandoned farmhouses and the crumbling husks of cheap towers built for wars that had ended centuries ago. All of it with the corpse strapped to her back, knees bent up and braced, the arms tied to the sides. Eyes must have seen her, but none could say what they saw, or thought they saw.
The sky had continued to spit heavy drops, threatening for several leagues to turn the landscape into a frigid swamp. The clouds hung low, and the mist they exuded hung lower, obscuring the horizon. She had but the faintest inclination she was still going the right way. Rises in the land peered from the damp haze and vanished back in as she passed. It was as if she walked through an uneasy dream about to turn, memories of other places being twisted into mockeries of the thing she sought.
The sun was dying. She had come prepared, but it had slowed her down. The sickly glow of the lantern at her hip spread its tendrils through the murk-laden air. Her legs ached terribly, and she wished and made bargains for the hills to finally reveal themselves. When they did appear, she wasn't sure what it was in response to, but her heart skipped a beat. A nervous energy fluttered and dissipated in her chest before a renewed drive set her across the sopping wet mud and up the first slope.
It was more rough going than the rest of the country had been. None of the ground was even, the grass and weeds and ferns were long and hid little pits and old warrens, and there was little that was solid to cling to. The perpetual moisture and bouts of seeping rainfall had collected and ran in rivulets from the sitting pools across the hillside. It was all mud and loam that slid and loosened with every footstep, and it stank of rotting mulch and cloying damp. It did not want to be trod upon, was what she thought, or, it was challenging her, was what she hoped.
She slipped a dozen times over, feet and knees sinking into the earthy mush, her cloak soiled, arms sore from pushing and pulling herself about, her back aching with the weight of the corpse in its soaked sheet. But at last, the summit was gained. Undulant and broad, there were all kinds of little hidden places in which to do the deed. There was little she could bring with her but the corpse, her cloak, a lantern, and a trowel. She set the paling light down on a stunted mound of scraggly grass, set the corpse down next to it, and began to hollow out a space in the mud. Her mind raced with scraps of lore the old man had told her as she gouged out the slimy earth. These hills were graves, in which things more ancient than the land itself were buried. They took things into their bosom, and changed them. This was enchantment.
So buried in thought was she that she barely noticed when the trowel met something. A shock shot through her whole body when whatever it was didn't give way. The hilltops were probably infested with buried things. All kinds of things, left to be changed. For all kinds of reasons. She began shovelling the soil back with her hands, hoping she had been quick enough to not truly uncover it. Anything buried was dead, anything uncovered was alive. Reborn. Changed. She hadn't liked how soft it felt. She moved away from it, and began to dig again, only this time images came to her mind, of languid hands reaching from the black earth, of dirt-caked eyes peering through the darkness, and of soundless shadows rising from the ground just out of sight.
The downpour began as the last cord was cut, and the body stretched out in its hollow. Cold pins stung her face and hands, and soon it was falling in sheets. The hilltop was drenched, but the earth had been pushed back into place as best she could manage. She fell back against the low mound and shut off the lantern. The land was of an absolute darkness, the sky obscured by storm clouds. The rainfall was like a deep drone. Though she could not see, she felt her eyes wander to where she knew the grave lay. She did not know how long it would take. But she would be here the second it happened. For right now, though, she let the storm wash her away into a deep slumber.
Sorcery of Offering
"You see that there, over the doorway?" said the uncle, his deeply lined face twisting into a smirk. A sallow finger pointed to the tall, decorated lintel over the ochre-seller's door. Amidst the low relief floral patterns was something daubed in the same reddish ink that was brewed within. "That building has been offered to a demon. It lives in the shop now, probably as protection. And it will never leave, ever."
"Will my mark be like that?" asked the youth, his gaze unable to leave it as they passed.
"Hah! Who can say? Every mark is different, boy. Your one, pff, could be anything. Anything at all. That's up to the witching-man, and the demon."
The town's streets became narrower and deeper as they got older, as the bright new red brick and well-maintained greenery gave way to age-smoothed sandstone and dust pools. They wound as if grown rather than cut or set, and individual buildings teetered overhead, sometimes two would reach each other across a thin street, forming a curious archway. Second storey overhangs, deep porches, and sealed alcoves provided a heavy shade in an already dim tangle, and in this slumbering quarter, anything might stir.
The few open squares or courts seemed repurposed from structures no longer remembered, were quite small, and oddly uneven. This quarter wasn't slums, it was just old, and engendered a certain reticence in its dwellers, knowing they lived somewhat beyond the bounds of the grasp of the city watch. This had its advantages to some folks, such as the one that lived in the tall, skinny house the two now faced. A short rope hung from a pulley that led through a small space into the house. The uncle tugged at the rope, and a series of bells were heard tolling within.
What was a witching-man's house going to look like? The youth had conjured up a thousand ideas in his head the whole walk, and now the the most choice images welled up in the several seconds it took for the door to unlatch, and creak open. Piles of mouldering scrolls, heaps of old stained vials and flasks, noisome collections of esoteric offerings—things still living, things long dead, shifting shadows of a host of demons that would prick at their flesh, damp old stone and webs and braziers burning with odious fuels.
The truth was, he admitted wordlessly to himself, rather disappointing. The bare wooden board floor bore the telltale gouges and warping of negligence, there were faded, dusty hangings, and short-backed chairs with frayed cushions. The windows, at least immediately inside, seemed to bear a film over them, muting the already pallid light into the weary illumination of a dying lantern. At least the figure which greeted them with squinting, oaken eyes was a mite more impressive. Drooping, dusky flesh hung from protuberant bones, the thin lips were held in an unimpressed frown, and the hair was short and unkempt. Each finger on the hand which stroked the chin bore a large ring, and around the neck could be seen three things the youth decided were amulets: roughly hammered squares of iron with odd indentations that may have been deliberate shapes.
No words were exchanged, just knowing looks. Into the murky apartment and up a spiral set of bare metal steps were they led, until the three stood before a heavy curtain of rich purple velvet at the end of a short corridor. The colour was vibrant, practically radiant in contrast to dry, dead surroundings in which the youth barely believed someone could live. A dusty chair, like the others, sat to the side just opposite the curtain. The uncle silently took the seat, and nodded to the youth. The witch-doctor parted and slid halfway between the curtain, throwing a glance back, his oak eyes now more like sharp black points in the murk.
Within was exactly what the youth had first envisioned in every grotesque detail. It was a fairly small square space, with shelves on either side, from floor to ceiling, festooned with cloudy jars and their ugly contents, garlands of shrivelled heads, ornate golden bells, stacks of rusted coins, clay figures stamped with weird symbols, short free standing racks of black vials, prayer beads with hideous images hanging from them, letters from tombstones painstakingly chiselled out, and a plethora of human bones. Thirteen thick, half-melted candles, the yellow of rotting fat, burned with thin black trails and lit the place in an unhealthy glow. The middle of the floor held a square black wood basin on four legs, the far end had a high-backed chair with wooden spires upon which the witch-doctor sat, and finally just before the youth was another dusty chair from downstairs. He took the seat.
"Your offering mark," the witching-man finally spoke in a grim and sardonic tone, "is personal. They be made so demons know who from it come. You give someone your mark, like lords and ladies give them to the servants, you get killed. No bones about it. Worse even than being offered. Keep it next your heart." The youth simply nodded. The witching-man took out then a long, curving dagger like a beast's talon. He sprang forth and grabbed the youth's hand, and his eyes told the boy not to struggle. The wide, keen edge sliced just a little below the thumb, and the witching-man let the blood fall into the basin, in which a shimmering, silvery liquid sat.
"He looks for your mark in your blood. He says one thing only. Your mark. Offer to him then. Your first offering will be always to him. To every demon you are like branded, every offering marks you. This be the first mark. Let other demons see it."
"What..." the youth trailed off as the black of the witching-man's eyes flared. "What do I offer?"
"Why do you ask me that, if you are here? Careful boy, you offer anything old thing, that's fine, but you make it now. Rare is a demon who takes an offering later. Tricky and vile is such a demon. Careful what you offer, here, and forever." With that, the witching-man sat back, sighed deeply, and removed a long white vial from a pocket, undid the stopper, held it up like a toast, and brought it to his lips. There was a mere second's hesitation before he poured into his mouth a thin, milky liquid.
Something indefinable but absolute changed in the man, and though no physical transformation took place, his entire mien changed. He, or rather, the youth increasingly suspected after a few seconds, the demon, stood up, peered at its surroundings, and once at the boy, before with its fingers it began to search about in the bloody silver liquid. The youth wasn't sure what to do, and so sat in a perfect stillness as the thing in the witching-man's body peered into the basin, wondering with some mixture of sharp disappointment and panic if there was anything to find. The contents of the room began getting to him, and he wondered to what demons and for what purposes these things were offered. He had heard of duellists in western lands who fought not with swords but offerings, making hasty pacts for the sake of honour slaked in bloodshed, or of sorcerer-assassins who surreptitiously branded their marks and sent living nightmares to do the deed.
Suddenly the face shot up, and it spoke. It was not the witching-man's voice. It said a single world. The youth repeated it under his breath. The demon grinned, and stared. Waiting. The youth's eyes darted about, and then went to his pocket. In it was a small lumpen sack of sand, sewed perfectly shut, used for playing games of Kicks with his friends. It had been made by his mother. He spoke the word and held it out. The grin receded into a smile, and the demon sat back down. After what looked like a pained blink, the witching-man cleared his throat.
"Place it on a shelf now. Got your mark, eh?"
"A word," the youth said, half under his breath as he placed the sack on a small empty space near a hateful idol.
"Oh..." the witching-man said, and the youth almost thought the fellow sounded impressed. "Make sure no one hears it, hmm? Get home now, boy." The witching-man didn't move a muscle, and the youth slunk out from behind the heavy velvet curtain to his uncle.