Shadows & Sorcery #147
*wizard sounds* It’s Shadows & Sorcery! Again!
Hello! You know, I think this one’s very old school S&S, which we can kinda have now, seeing as this thing is over three years old and 600+ stories in. What the hell do I mean by that? I don’t know, I don’t plan these openings. It’s pure stream of consciousness. You’re lucky I read over these at all for typos.
Anyway, you’ll see what I mean, because we’re revisiting a very old world this week, in fact this world appeared in the very first edition of this thing. That’s old school. AND we have two other standalone glimpses into horrible realities! How horrible? Read on, pilgrim.
Now, real quick, if you just got here or missed last week’s edition, don’t let that happen! Check that out right over HERE and mayhap take a gander at the question I asked everyone, it still stands.
And lastly, my friends, please take a second and tap that little heart button to leave a like! Let the stories know you enjoyed them!
This week, the wizard Alzared is on the trail of orcs as he descends into Draconic Depths, we learn deep secrets of reality itself in the Archives Temple, and we join a furtive figure on a benighted plain seeking the Memory of the Ash…
Draconic Depths
Alzared had been trailing the orcish warriors for three days now, following the harsh rattle of their twisted black metal armour by day, and gazing upon their camps at night, bathed in the greenish glow of orcish curseflame. Into the frigid hinterlands of the Stone Vastlands had they gone, where in the misty horizon towering peaks of eternal ice rose, a grim bulwark against the draconic terror of the underworld. It had become increasingly clear to the wizard just what these vengeful orcish slayers were braving such cold, perilous wilds for. And where dragons were concerned, any fight became his own.
But there was a pity in his heart for them, the orcs. Denied vengeance against their creator, for that dragon had been slain long gone, their existence was one of aimless, endless wandering and violence. No friends nor allies could they have. The dragons scorned them, as did the draconian dragon-men they claim descent from. Mankind feared them, and mankind was by them held in contempt still. The greyfolk would rather see them gone forever. Alzared didn't quite know what to think. They were living things, so they should live. And yet, as he watched them render down the beasts they hunted into the sludge their accursed frames could consume, a fresh wave of pity and revulsion washed over him. But were their curse to be lifted, they would be as draconians again, and man's avowed and ancient enemies would gain significant numbers. Alzared personally did not believe there was a way to ever make it right. Such was the tyranny of the dragons upon all life around them.
The cavern mouth had been low and jagged, a snarling maw of broken fangs. The orcs had bathed their blades in curseflame and descended into its depths with a renewed vigor. Alzared crept close and bid the dragonblood in his sceptre pierce the dark for his eyes only. He did not yet wish to reveal himself, and his bronzed skin and slate robes helped hide him, though the blood hungered for release in the presence of the orcs. And as he tracked their passage into the snaking cave, the blood began to rumble in the presence of something else which confirmed his suspicions.
It wasn't deep, but the going was difficult, even for a seasoned wanderer like the wizard. How the orcs in their clanking armour managed to squeeze through the cracked stone and cross the yawning gaps he had no idea. But bitter vengeance was a potent fuel, he knew well. He lay now behind a row of finger-like stalagmites, listening intently to the sounds of tense confrontation ahead—stamping, growling, roaring. It wasn't battle, though, it was more like challenges and threats, in a tongue the wizard had never heard before. And for that very reason he believed it must be of profound antiquity.
Alzared dared creep forward, knowing full well how outnumbered he was. In the gloom of the cavern, lit by a single dim shaft far above, the scene was laid before him in a sudden flash of hungry red flame as the sound of a drawn sword and leaping roar was cut short. A throaty snarl issued from the murk, the orcish weapons erupting in baleful fire and shattering, shards of black steel flying in every direction. Grunts and growls of shock and pain came from the collapsing figures, before which, in the dying embers, was outlined the frightful from of the dragon, whose gaze fell squarely upon Alzared.
"Come forth, human."
Dragons did not deign to speak mannish tongues. Indeed, they rarely deigned to speak to men at all. But when they did, language was often pulled from the mind by force so the dragon may speak it. Not so here. It intrigued Alzared enough to edge his way into the weird twilight.
"Bid the blood reveal me," it said. Alzared stood a moment, quite honestly surprised. But he did so, willing the blood to part the darkness. Crouched upon a wide slab of stone was the dragon. It was a large specimen, yet, the wizard saw, it was thin. Drawn. Withered. Old. "If mine end must cometh from other hands, I prefer it be by human hands. Mayst thou render me a final service? Alas, the orc's blade foundeth its mark. T'would be a wretched end for one such as I."
"But tell me," said Alzared stepping forward, "who is one such as you?" He looked at the thing. A lipless maw of crooked teeth, bones protruding from drooping skin and sloughing scales, sunken eyes with nary a glimmer, ragged wings not even folded by its side but splayed flat.
"These waning years lost me mine favour, and so I fled where few dragons dare tread. A serpent cult I desired to foster, but the cursed ones caught mine scent swiftly. 'Tis no good end..."
"Am I meant to pity you, dragon? I might let the orc's wound sap you slowly of life, and sing of your end in whatever tavern I end up in tonight."
"I believe you not to be so crude, human. And," it said with a bitter tone, "I know better than thou canst imagine why the touch of curseflame is a darker death than any other, for I was there when it first scorched the world."
Alzared stood silent, grappling with what couldn't possibly true.
"Aye," it said, "aye, I perceive a glint in thine eye which wants to believe. But why wouldst thou give credence to anything a rotten old wyrm would say, hmm?"
"They sought some measure of succor from your death, then," Alzared said half to himself in thought.
"I believe this also. I was in my prime, human, when the dragon who cursed them slithered from its egg. I was its master and then its rival, and was old when news of its demise reached the Dragon Mountain."
"I may believe you that far, a stretch though it is. But how old is it you claim to be?”
The dragon reared its head forward with a shudder of effort.
"I have no reason to spin falsehoods. Not here, not now. I know thy kind, and thine hunger. The only thing that can sate it is knowledge, and the power it brings, no matter the source. Well, human, I can give you payment enough. The Silver Ones left their marks on your flesh when you first emerged into the sun, but we left ours on your hearts. After all..." the dragon said with a struggle, "I was there."
The wizard stared at the thing before him. This was a dragon. The archenemy and once slave-master and tyrant of mankind. Yet, for all this could almost certainly be nothing more than a cruel final joke, there was something in its bearing, in its appearance, in its speech and in the timbre of that speech, that he, who knew far more than most, felt a touch of truth from. The blood in the sceptre by his side had, too, fallen silent, when in every other encounter with a true dragon it had roared and struggled. In all honesty, Alzared could not help but feel humbled in its presence, implicitly accepting the thing's words. He, like many humans, had a weakness for history that contradicted their nature. Man had no grand lineage, it had crawled from the slime in the shadows of warring primordial titans, and to the slime it would return. Humanity lived in the moment, and its world was intimate. Yet, to stand on battlegrounds of old, or gaze upon ancient tombs, to feel dimly some impression of a world and age beyond yours, to experience a sense of continuity, that was one thing. To have history, dark or not, speak to you was another.
"What...is it you want?" Alzared said.
"Death by dragonblood, even if it be by human hands. Though glad I am they are capable ones." Alzared drew forth from his girdle the dragonblood sceptre from which he sourced his magical might. The dragon looked to it. "Might thou remember from what whelp thou obtained that blood? Perhaps I knew them in my youth," the dragon spoke with a weak tinge of mocking mirth. It drew back and rolled onto its side, exposing its bony ribs. The black, seeping wound from the orc's curseflame gaped. "Ah, one final thing. These frayed scales and this half-dried blood will do you little good, I fear. But thou mayst take a token or trophy, if thou wishes it."
Alzared took one last look at the ancient dragon, and for a second, imagined it soaring as a black cloud beneath a sky of archdragons, driving his own ancestors forward with flame and talon into savage war against the ancestors of the greyfolk that man how called friend. Or even against the Great Grey Ones themselves. And then, grasping of the dragonblood sceptre, with a look Alzared shot a dragon's dagger glint, with which they could strike a man dead, into its heart, and with a final rasping sigh, it died.
The wizard stood in the cavern for some moments, utterly unsure how to take in what had just happened. It was a dead dragon, that much was true. And if it was indeed what it claimed to be...better that a piece of that dark age was gone from the world forever. He had to stay his hand from removing a scale, even though a thorn of doubt was stuck in his brain. The indescribable feeling his chest would be all the token he needed. He set the body aflame and remained until only dry ash remained, and then did the same for the dead orcs. Maybe in this, their souls, if that was what they had, could somehow find a measure of peace.
Archives Temple
The round, domed chamber was populated by tall cylindrical shelves filled to the brim with books. Some bore the heft and size of a human torso, many were slender little tracts no bigger than a hand, some were short but dense, others were loose leaves bound with red bindings and wrappings. She moved amidst these stacks with a reverence different to that of the veiled archivists. She was a guest here, a fragile but unique position. Her reverence was of the mystery, theirs was of what they knew dwelt in those pages. The archivists, whose black robes hushed through flowing shrouds of incense smoke, were as books themselves, living extensions of the vast trove of knowledge contained within this entire temple.
Covered braziers with perforated golden caps lent a gentle warmth to the air, and thuribles hung from beams in the ceiling, bearing glowing coals whose diffuse light flooded every corner. Sticks of incense in clay bowls littered the floor around each stack of books, some long gone cold, some freshly smoking, their scent calming and focusing. She had offered a dozen of these herself, one into each bowl at each stack she had perused, and she carried three more just in case. A number of tomes had caught her eye, but she had yet to make a decision.
She was about to offer another stick when an archivist approached her. It was her liaison with the temple. A older, round-faced fellow of kindly temperament, he wore the formless black robes of his station, and had parted the opaque veil which hung from his tall cylinder mitre for her benefit. He was otherwise a receptacle and channel of Knowledge, he had reminded her. In a hushed tone he enquired as to her progress, not that she need be rushed, for this was a sacred task, but rather, if she had the time for a diversion. He was, he said, going to the catacombs, and asked if witnessing this was of any interest to her. She positively jumped at the chance.
The catacombs which run around the temple were cramped and of roughly chiselled but thick, strong stone. The ground was well worn from the passage of archivists over the past several thousand years. The walls were home several hundred alcoves of varying sizes, some fit with shelves of wood, some deliberately carved with shelves, some utterly bare. They were not the graves of human bones, however. They were the resting places of books. Mouldering tomes of torn and ragged pages, beaten and worn bindings and covers, yellowed, decayed, and flaking to pieces. They were also covered in salt, and thick granules of it were scattered across the floor, gathered in every crack and niche. The archivist held gently in his arms, as if cradling a child, a book whose leather cover bore a ragged tear that reached into the pages themselves, and whose pages seemed terribly stained.
It had suffered greatly on a journey, the archivist explained. Assaulted and defiled by beasts who had not Knowledge, trampled into the mud when the caravan transporting it was attacked. He spoke of it as if it were alive. As if it were a person. Strange though she found it, she did not intend to question it. But it was the archivist who answered her unspoken musings. They deserved this just as much human bones did. After all, why not? They were receptacles of Knowledge as much as any intelligent brain. Their pulp was of living things, and they were updated just as living things learned. Knowledge, he said, as they came to an alcove in which few books lay, existed beyond they who perceived it, and interpreted it. She asked what she felt must have been the most crushingly oblivious question the archivist had ever heard, but he was not phased. No question, in his eyes, was ignorant.
What is Knowledge but that which exists? Knowledge of something was that thing in fact and function. It was its pure, distilled truth in sublime and communicable form. The world was information, and it all existed independent of our minds. To transcribe and reveal and understand was the very imperative of life itself. The Knowledge, he continued, setting the book down in a small space, held in the temple above ran deep and strange, yes, but it was of learning. Just methods and techniques for teaching? Not quite. The why of learning, and the how. To know something was a deep bond between you and it—between two parts of the world. To learn was to connect these things. He spoke rapidly as he took small handfuls of loose salt and spread it over the cover and into the gouge. The books had Knowledge, Knowledge is the world itself in sublime form—treat it as you would the object itself, for with Knowledge came understanding, and with that came ability. Indeed, he said, his gaze turning with great weight to her, they saw nature as not having hard laws, cold and mechanical, but rather they saw nature as having memories and learned habits. They came from understanding. And they would continue to be reformed and refined as more Knowledge was understood. Why, he asked, do you see yourself as somehow separate from nature? You are nature, and you understand yourself.
The archivist then cleared his throat and stood upright, composing himself. Choose wisely what it is you wish to understand, he said. The Knowledge will change you, and as you are changed, so is the world. She began to follow the archivist back up the catacombs, taking a second to glance around. She only had three more incense sticks, she thought. No pressure there.
Memory of the Ash
A torn veil of slate clouds drifted listlessly across the night sky, dimming the sharp light of a great crescent moon, and plunging the earthen wasteland into fitful starts of formless darkness and streaks of cold radiance. When the moon did lend its frostlight to the land, the lone cloaked figure who crept across it turned and spun about, as if expecting to be caught by someone, or something, upon that grim span. The dry, barren ground crunched under each step. In the streaks of moonlight, the figure peered closely at the soil, or rather, what was buried within it.
Rows stretched on for leagues beyond sight of strange disks which peered up like dry lifeless cataracts. Each one could be seen to be inscribed with something. As the figure bent down once more, words were revealed—a name. Each and every one had a name, for they were graves, and this was a mortuary plain.
Certain events can leave a mark on a people, on a culture. In their case, the first blow was the crushing and inescapable knowledge that no existence of any kind persisted after death. The world was a closed circuit. The second blow was the race to immortality. For the sake of existence, the ends justified the means, until they found no end, and the means infested their cities with the ceaseless howling of the mad and the damned. Horror beyond compare left an impression on those who fled in droves to cold, lonely townships and hamlets, where an earthy, honest, and fatalistic existence was eked out on the edges of vast urnfields that generations of keepers made sure would never be tampered with, not again.
Part of that race to escape death hit upon a single, simple, fundamental fact of the world's working: nothing passed on, and nothing was ever really gone. Life ended—animation ended, but the memories, the experiences, the knowledge remained—it took physical form within the human body in the shape of impressions on the brain, warp and weft on the body. And it could be read. In libraries, corpses had been studied like manuscripts, and later contained within long urns, their ashes sifted through and recombined to learn from.
Of all the things mankind lost in its scramble from the cities, this knowledge was not one of them. Like the people, it remained on the outskirts as a ghost of the past, and as a forever tantalizing and abhorrent reality. A few folk gave into the temptation. One such person knelt low now in the tombland, prying open the hard-wax seal of the burial urn. The meaning and the inner workings of the brass rod that was dug into the flaking ash, and of the motions made upon its surface at certain intervals, had long been lost—to them, this was the unhallowed sorcery of the old lands, unearthed from the rubble amidst the shrieking spectres of dust and shambling bone-shard wraiths. This was the power of ruin, but that didn't mean there wasn't coin to be made from it.
The old castellan had cracked open nearly every wall of his rotten old manor looking for the treasure, and at last had turned to a necromancer, giving the nameless, faceless shape under the moonlit bridge a name and general row within the vast urnfield, as well as a hefty pouch of thick golden coins, with the promise of more once the answer had been called up. Under a passing break in the clouds, the necromancer observed the open urn, the thick old ashes excited by the brass rod's power. Before this now was another thing set, like a music box almost, a cheap little tin thing constructed to strict specifications in a dead language. Its top half was turned about, and it began to click sharply and release a kind of warbling whine. It was, the necromancer understood, the call and command for the ashes to once more take on a shadow of their former selves.
The ashes began to rise like black water being thrown up from a geyser, and in the midst of it, a human shape writhed and shook, gazing with empty sockets, a maw wordlessly gasping. The dry rustling was as stark as a storm in the benighted burial plain, but the rasping whisper which echoed from within seemed somehow louder. A crumbling hand reached out, unable to pass after a certain point. It was never easy watching this. But the weight of the coins at their hip helped keep focus. The necromancer spoke firm the question, and repeated it as the ashen thing hissed broken words in anger. Bending down and twisting the singing machine's upper half, the already constricted space in which the spirit writhed drew in, and horror filled its dry wailing. The necromancer repeated their question and commanded it then in the authority of its descendants. Although the spirit continued to shiver, its thrashing grew still, and its head drooped down. After a quiet moment, it gave a hoarse answer. The necromancer went to shut down the calling device, when the voice came again.
"Please tell me, how fare my sons? My house?"
The machine died off and the ash fell back into its urn, only buzzing slightly with the animating rod. The necromancer was still for a second before they removed the brass rod and re-sealed the urn, listening sharply to the night air. Not every necromancer was so careful as they, and much agitated ash never made it back into its grave. That stuff lay always on the wind, even the weakest of breezes, especially on uneasy night like this. The rod and calling machine were replaced into a pack, and a swift exist over the undulating tombland was made, an appointment to be kept and a night to be forgotten.