Shadows & Sorcery #1
This is the first official edition of Shadows & Sorcery! Below you will find five pieces of fantastic myth, ancient tradition, and dark magic. Take look, leave comment, and tell a friend!
This week’s locations are:
Grave of the King
Flame of the Sorcerers
Kiln of Winter
Nightmare Archives
Hill of the Shadow
Grave of the King
Deep below the first human settlement, there is an ancient expanse of catacombs. It is here that the bones of the old king rest, still enshrouded in their armour. Crafted via the Arts taught to humans by the old elves, passed down from their ancestor gods, this armour is the goal of every warrior who descends into the perilous royal tombs. A craft held in the highest esteem even by elven masters of the Arts, portions of the armour can be granted to those worthy enough to stir the spirit of the old king. Throughout the land, from lowly guard captain to veteran knight of the realm, warriors of valour and strength bear ghostly copies of the king’s armour. Some a gauntlet, some an arm, some a cuirass, only a mere handful of times has the full regalia been granted, and such warriors lay in the catacombs now themselves. The grave itself is of primal make, the kind humans made after their freedom from slavery under the dragons, a recess in an earthen wall decorated with stone carvings and a pile of offerings below it. The king, whose name is long forgotten, set before his resting place and gift a final quest to prove the mettle of not just the strong, but those with perseverance and faith. Supreme physical ability, craft in the Arts, the will to command dragon blood, such things are required by the king's decree. All manner of dragonspawn are drawn to the place, too, and the catacombs are often home to fog-spewing basilisks and the tunnels of wyrms. The bones of heroes litter the barren earth, and sometimes rise to follow the hopeful to glimpse the chamber of the king's grave.
Flame of the Sorcerers
Above the domed city, with its winding sprawl of streets and alleys, old courts, and shimmering river, there rises a vast spire, reaching far into the sky. It is the only point in the world which touches the threshold of the astral realm wherefrom emanates the flame that animates the world. At the very zenith of the tower, a staircase opens into the golden twilight haze of the upper world, where stars turn in their slow cosmic dance. In the center of this space sits a flame, aureate and warm. It is the animating fire of creation made manifest, and it is from this the pyromancers draw their powers of making. It is also where the heretic sorcerers, in their secret quest to uncover the power of destruction, first learned the unspeakable truth of how the animating flame had not merely given animation to the world clay, but had in fact been quietly burning it up. The Great Schism ultimately did not extinguish the flame, and those on both sides wrought much doom in its name. As the world turned to ash, tides of dust lapped against the base of the tower of fire, and the city below becoming a barren place. The flame of the sorcerers is all that lights the eternal night sky now, a dreadful beacon to whatever life remains in the world. Furtive shadows make and heap curses upon it, knowing full well their work will too be consumed when the clay is finally consumed.
Kiln of Winter
In the heart of the mountain, where the gods first struck hammer to anvil, where their lordship was set in the stone of destiny, there lays a kiln. A low, primitive cylinder where strength was extracted from the earth, and the first weapons were forged. Even now, a chalky blackness stains the interior where the ancient star-fires blazed and smouldered, lending their power and warmth to what once was a world of bare and formless murk. But as the gods shaped and claimed the land, their weapons were lost on the battlefields, and the upstart races sought the source of this power. Warring with each other, the new peoples spread in violent dominion across the world, each led by a god who championed a weapon. The Swordbearers were numerous and swift, the Hammerfolk hardy and strong, and though the Axemen were the least in the number, they were the most cruel. Having hewn the heads of every spear and arrow in their infancy, the Axemen closed in one the divine Land of Shaping, the vast sky-scraping mountain whence the gods emerged with their mighty technology. Sword blade shattered and hammer head cracked under the vicious arcs of the Axemen's assaults. Yet not all the gods had left the mountain, a few had remained cloistered in that place to study the arts of creation. The halls and caverns had become filled with experiments beyond the ken of wandering gods, but it did not matter to the wrath of the Axemen. As the horde closed in, one god who remained and had not been cowed fled to the kiln. Barbarian feet clattered and trampled on the mountain stone, and the lone god fended off the Axeman host. As their champion, with wicked crescent blade swung in a deadly arc set to slay the remaining god, a hand was suddenly cast into the kiln and the star-fire grasped, crushed, and in a heart's beat it was not dark that spread across creation but a pale, frigid veil. Skies grew steel in mien, and sheets of cold crystal blanketed the world for leagues from the point of the kiln. Winter settled, and lush green shirked at the claws of sharp winds. They say the Axemen were not defeated then, but merely halted, and should they stir, the god who remained sends fresh frozen fogs and blizzards out to stay their advance.
Nightmare Archives
Once enough of the resin has been ingested, one can safely and with perfect lucidity wander the shared dream. Although excessive ingestion has been expressly forbidden by the Council of Theogonists, who study man's lineage from the gods and their dream-realm, there are those psychomancers who partake of it in quiet, hidden chambers. They push forward past the mental clay shaped by the nightly visits of people the world over, and into the wilder, inhuman regions of the Nightmare. Wanderers have created stable sanctuaries in the dark where the mind is unbound. They dredge strange old memories from it, scraps of primal knowledge almost forgotten in waking life, but not all of it is good to know, and though the body suffers no harm, the mind and the spirit dwells in extreme peril. For the souls neither brave nor foolish enough to endure the psychic onslaught of the Nightmare, there exists on its twilight threshold a foreboding keep filled to the brim with scrolls, tablets, and man-sized grimoires laden with inhuman wisdom and insight into the metaphysics of the theogony and divine schematics. Weaker minds teeter on the brink here, and it takes both a resolute will and an attentive servant on the outside to pull one from the grasp of the alien beyond. Most knowledge doesn't make it into waking, its very nature is unfit for the proper world of logic, but what does escape makes those who look up on it in the cold light of reality profoundly thankful no more passes through the veil.
Hill of the Shadow
Beyond Wickburn, over the Darkrun River, and into the poorly mapped wilderness of Brackenmere County lies a singular rise in the land. The soil is thin where exposed, strewn with great boulders and jutting slabs, and the heather grows in feverish profusion. The moorland, though itself rugged and filled with perilous dips and sharp depressions, seems to cower before it. The wind blows always upon these slopes, the sky seems ever grey above it, and at its comparatively prodigious height one can see the faintest wisps of Wickburn smoke, horribly far away. Brackenmere County is host to all manner of superstitious idolatries and horrors. There is nary an inch of land in the whole region which does not harbour some dreadful tale or have some vile old practice associated with it. The Pansophical College considers the entire county a battleground against demonic illusion, but there is no place more utterly reviled and feared by the cult's agents or mercenaries than this place, the Hill of the Shadow. When the college's agents, its Answerers, strike out into Brackenmere's wilds to root out witchery and illusions, they sometimes find themselves upon the hill, trusting its damp slopes but little more than the many pitfalls and steep depressions of the moorland about it. The remains of hasty camps can be found huddled under jutting rock, and more often than not, so too can the signs of panic and flight. Although the college is able to cast down the majority of Brackenmere's pagan terrors, their Divine Truth has not yet been able to ascertain the nature of the frightful and vicious shadow which haunts the hillside. It obeys no geometric angle nor celestial music, but answers to the inscribed swords of college agents all the same. The Pansophists have been forced to consider that either the shadow holds some measure of Truth, or it is an illusion beyond their ken. Nonetheless, veteran Answerers of the interior college societies have made it into a whispered tradition whereby new members must go on lonely vigil to the hill and there face the shadow. Experiences there are perhaps the only permitted instances of subjective belief in the entire Pansophical College.