Shadows & Sorcery #0
Welcome to the inaugural edition of Shadows & Sorcery! This post is for everyone - let this entry zero be a glimpse into the kind of worlds I want to show you. If you enjoyed it, let me know, and maybe sign up so you can continue to receive these weekly until the end of time. And remember to get involved, take a location and post your own write-up in the comments!
But no more blathering, let’s get to business.
You are now entering…
Frontier Shrine
When men began to rise from death, they were taken and sent out into the unexplored realms of the continental interior. There they wandered and eventually settled, beyond life and humanity. But alas, their curse followed them and took root in the earth, creating sparse lands of tireless winds and ashen mountains. The Undead venerated no gods of living men, gods who had abandoned them, but were desperate to hold fast and minimize their suffering. So they held communion with whatever forces they could beckon in the cold lands, building grim shrines of cyclopean stone and carving faceless idols, wherein dwelt things with no names, who began to demand vile offerings. The Undead could not be destroyed, but for every reanimation, they retained less and less of their corporeal forms. Their zeal for sacrifice, in exchange for promised powers and reinstated life, but rarely delivered, ultimately created a land of hollow ghosts. Eventually, the Frontier was all but abandoned and only the darkly curious would venture out into the sere wastes. Those who returned whispered fearfully that whatever the Undead had called down still remained in the deserted frontier, a place now home only to a race of enslaved phantoms.
Crystal Abyss
Far to the south, there lies a range of vast mountains who peaks touch the celestial Upper Air. Far beneath the two highest summits however, leading deep into the earth, is a steep valley that suddenly opens up at its darkest reaches. This new passage is studded for leagues with singing crystals that thrum with a curious energy and soft light. At a point, the earth and rock ends, and one’s path is made entirely of crystal slopes and steps, which seem to the astute observer cunningly fashioned rather than of natural growth. Descending into the sunless, shimmering depths, one comes to a tall cavern and there is revealed to them a strange vision. An ancient race of beings lies entombed within crystal sarcophagi, serene and still, lining the walls and ground. Through the distortion of the crystal, it can be seen that they resemble us in some superficial way. It should be noted that striking these tombs elicits a shrill and immensely unpleasant tone, a tone that feels to all who hear it, like an alarm. And yet there is more, for beyond the long hall of crystal graves there is an immense set of irregular steps, now plainly shaped by hand, or grown. At the end of a three day descent, there is a change in the air, the singing dims, stops, and before them lies a vastness of dark. The steps continue until, at a point, they don’t, and the wanderer finds themselves surrounded on all sides by what seems to be nothing less than the infinite expanse of the night sky, perforated with silent stars. No further progress can be made here, and a long trek in silence must be made back out, for after glimpsing this, the crystals stop singing. Sages who have ventured deep within and studied the stars in that dark say they are like no constellations of the world above, and guess either the entombed old ones happened upon the cosmos of the underworld, or perhaps sit now as eternal guardians of the place from which they once emerged.
Nameless Kingdom
Many centuries ago, an Age of Storms decimated a once green and bountiful land to dust. For ten ceaseless years, day after day, night after night, lightning blasted stone, wind pulled down ancient keeps, rain battered mountains, floods washed clean whole cities. An ash-choked valley is all that remains of a once deep, misty vale that served as the road into the now nameless kingdom. Silent, grim, and oppressive, this Basin of Ash, as it is known, does not stir, for no wind now blows, daring not to unveil whatever may dwell beneath. The valley walls rise high either side, their pallid slopes bleeding into the equally bloodless sky that hangs over this place. Some features break up what would otherwise be a maddening monotony, for the valley is not entirely smooth. For instance, first among any adventurer's journey will often be found a tangle of crags and fissures, wherein lies a sulphurous grotto dedicated to the defilement of holy relics. Antique idols, icons, and statues are piled in a disorderly fashion, and have been shattered, bent, and defaced in ways too numerous to describe. It is often this which turns back many, for it gives an all too foreboding insight into what might be encountered in the now lost kingdom.
Through wastes that one would never recognize as once having been a great and prosperous land, and among the barely recognizable shapes of what might have once been vast edifices, do those who dare penetrate this land now pass. Rises in the land serve as markers of where plateaus and high hills may once have stood. The leagues are utterly silent still and the dust of the ages shifts only under the furtive feet of wanderers. However, amongst this ruin-made-manifest, one thing still mostly stands: a badly eroded mountain, half-collapsed in on itself, the lone landmark for countless miles. Upon it, quite clearly even from a distance, sits a great structure which, according to the accounts of all who have glimpsed it, stares with baleful hatred across the waste.
A cold, perilous trek ascending the crumbling slopes, clustered in places with the pathetic remains of long dead, mummified trees, ends a quite suddenly. Squatting stop a small, rent cliff-face is a secluded mountaintop palace of pillars and domes, cracked and sunken, colourless and caked in age. Should the histories speak truth, in centuries past it once played host to a gathering of this kingdom's nobles. It has been surmised that they fled a mass uprising across the kingdom, but for what reason has been long forgotten in the lands outside. Finding entrance, the interior of the palace begins to tell a story too frightful for any who have looked upon it to write down, let alone reveal. Isolated within the keep, doors barred shut and windows boarded up, it would appear they fell to derangement and decadence, the halls becoming dark with the blood of nameless rites and twisted by the spectres drawn from the debauched acts. Figures can be spied at the ends of long hallways, dark forms crowd about in empty rooms, the palace is verminous with phantoms whose airy touch is harmless, but all the same, repulsive.
Should one venture deep into the increasingly oppressive miasma that permeates the palace corridors, in the highest tower of the toppling structure, walls blasted open to the sky and yet still in twilit dimness, the palace archives can be found. Ancient corpses are piled in obscene mounds before its doors, the walls are black and flaking with layers of blood and viscera. A darkness seems to float about the very air. The shelves are still stocked with volumes of all sizes, most in a frightful state of decay and corruption. Anything that can be gleaned from the mercifully faded pages by a scholar who can read them quickly reveals their darkly occult nature. It is guessed that perhaps it was once not always so, that the palace library housed a collection of priceless tomes, but their knowledge was twisted in desperation by the mad nobles, likely seeking power against the kingdom which now rose against their seething profanity. The archives are now home to a dreadful gnosis and the unholy results of unspeakable experiments, which it must be noted still roam the archive hallways. To those who have dared brave this far and terrible place, and who have even the merest fraction of good and reasonable sensibilities, it is beyond clear that what happened in this palace is to answer for the near absolute destruction and effacement from memory of the old kingdom.
Hunter’s Peak
Some leagues from the Capital, there can be found the great expanse of the Heartland Forest. It is a verdant, sloping land of shaded vales, bright hilltops which rise above the rich green canopy, and slinking silver streams, and is untouchable to all but the Duke's Royal Hunters. The great tangled expanse, nigh untouched by human feet, is their ordained proving ground in which dwell all manner of dangerous beasts. The Royal Hunters are a tradition whose roots lay within the region's dim past. Masters of the hunt and the cull, shaman-warriors and lordly bodyguards, mediums between man and beast who necessarily would sometimes blur those lines. The Forest is where they are lord and their word is absolute within its bounds, those poachers who dare dwell within the Forest's immediate borders more often than not end up as bait for a hunt. Yet they are held not in fear, as the exploits of the Royal Hunters in their various roles across the ages are fodder for folk tales in lodges, courts and inns across the land. Some measure of otherworldly awe is, of course, placed upon them, and way is made for them when one should ever enter a city street or village market.
In the wilds of the Heartland Forest lay secrets. Holy hunters’ ground since time immemorial, traditions and rites are held within that neither sage nor sorcerer has ever glimpsed nor guessed. Even on Midwinter nights when the sun does not deign to rise, the lights of the hunters can not be seen on their strange processions. But secrets do escape. Though poachers seldom return, vagabonds and lost travelers often do, and those who descend too deep into the Forest have spent hours by close tavern firesides whispering of what they glimpsed in the shadows. One secret which the Hunters are ashamed to have let slip, and whose teller paid a dear price for, is the tale of a barren hillside within the Heartland Forest, where there sits the bloody altar to a nameless god of the hunt. A skull greater than any living beast, with wide, wing-like antlers, draped in beast-skins, a darkish slab of rock, and a carpet of dulled bones. Unknown to those who repeat this tale in the passing through of a Royal Hunter is that Hunters who offer blood here live in strict adherence to Code of Predators, and their tenets are found as echoes in every chivalric order across the land.
In the furthest reaches of the Heartland Forest, where its borders touch upon rugged, uninhabited land for countless miles in every direction, there is a singular mountain. It is a place of pilgrimage for the Royal Hunters and climbing it removes them from their duties to the Duke, to the Forest, and their order. A trio ascends it alone as a test, living and fashioning their arms from the land. No old camps exist upon it, and the hunters who journey atop it dwell upon the threshold between man and beast. Upon gaining its summit, what hunters remain find a mountaintop battleground from an age undreamed of, where old hunters would battle fire-drakes and wyrms that descended from the air, and from where such horrors still emerge. The Royal Hunters have seen that no serpent troubles the Duke's lands for the past three centuries, to the extent that were it not for the skulls of dragons adorning the Duke's halls, they would be thought of as myth. Fire-forged hunters descend with wyrmfangs in accord with an old covenant made an aeon ago.
Profaned Dream
Travelers across the western coast have told that, as one passes a line of dark cliffs, ships come suddenly upon an abandoned city. It is not ruined, crumbling, but the port is empty, the moored ships half-sunk, the windows of the waterfront houses are murky, the towers and domes are weather-stained, and the streets are desolate. Though a rare sight these days in which travel routes have greatly changed, it is still stumbled upon, and when it is, the people know it as where the Lord Mellora once held court. But only shadows stir here now.
As the writings of sages would put it, the Duke disappeared one day into his own dreams. It was a curse laid on a mouldering old lineage with a line of sins reaching back to a dark and barbarous age, and it finally found root with Lord Mellora. When the crypts of his family became unquiet, Mellora retreated into this castle interior, and when the shrines became unquiet, he retreated into his bedchamber with a withered yellow leaf, and was never seen again. Word eventually escaped, and chaos slowly consumed the city as the stranglehold the Lord had on his court faltered, and personages vied for power, only to destroy that which they sought. All the while, the Lord Mellora fled deeper and deeper into a nightmare that seeped in from outside, seeking and failing to find the dream sanctuary he had built in a lonely boyhood.
The Lord Mellora's Dream was defiled when he realized his body was long dead and he had nowhere to return to. Yet the vision persists, and the nightmare continues to worsen even now as his bedchamber looks out across the empty expanse of the city. Should someone dare enter the city and the Lord's bedchamber, it is wondered if they might end Mellora's nightmare, but it is also wondered if the last of the line of cursed Mellora deserves such a release.