Shadows & Sorcery #101
What in the blue blazes is that? It’s the one hundred and first edition of Shadows & Sorcery, that’s what it is!
You know, just like the ninety-ninth editions of things, I feel kinda bad for the one hundred and first editions of things. You’re not one hundred. You’re like the day after a party, or when the holiday is over.
But that aint the case here, because we are now in the future with a brand new, sleek edition of whatever this is, with all kinds of funky stuff leering at us over the horizon!
Speaking of, if you missed last week’s announcement, you should take a look.
But now, onwards! And as ever, if you enjoyed what you read, let the stories know you liked them!
This week, we meet the mysterious Sword of the Lost, we bear witness to the Spear of the Stars, and we delve into the curious depths of the Crypt of the Dark…
Sword of the Lost
It was on this very day, five hundred years ago. The tribe has been keeping count. Across the lands, there will be a grim mourning, and fire will flash and smoulder deep in the hearts of the tribe. Five centuries since the great war passed through the ancestral lands, and the tribe was scattered to the winds. Lost. Dwindling in number by the year. Over the mountains they'd come, and over the mountains they'd go, searching a silent world that had receded into itself with shame.
The fortified towns, the vast walled manor-estates, and tower-villages, each one was its own little exclave huddled around the leadership of wise stoics and their reasoned, weighed, cold decisions. Into these places did clades of lost tribesfolk go, seeking rumours of sightings of their kind, where they passed to, and if any had died. Taverns, markets, and boarding houses were their haunts, and they traded what little coin and goods they had for knowledge in place of food or weapons.
The borderlands between states were wild, far removed from the leadership of the wise, under the forceful rule of monarchs and chiefs nursing grudges against old enemies, waiting to surge forth when the time was right. But somewhere out there, according to the old innkeeper who gently refused the handful of thin bronze coins, a clade was dwelling, kept by some petty king as entertainment. The news secretly sickened the tribesman as the innkeeper leaned over the desk and whispered it. Hints of kin out in the wilds, alive, and all but taken prisoner. These nomads hadn't the riches or strength to entice a badlands chieftain to give up his novelty, but they could at least be with their people. Still, thank goodness for the pity with which the tribe were looked upon.
The innkeeper nodded then to a figure sitting at a table by a window, hooded, and tense, and wordlessly motioned the tribesman to go over. As he warily approached, his arm was gripped by the cowled figure. A dozen thoughts came to him in that second. A sellsword seeking easy coin? Some brigand looking to coerce a lone tribesman? Some scheme to rid the world of pesky beggars like his clade? Nothing that flashed through his mind was good.
Until the stranger removed their cowl.
What better gift this on this grim anniversary, be it sign or omen, than to find a Sword?
The tribesman looked upon this somber remnant of a once proud martial tradition--more than a set of techniques and conduct, a lifestyle, a philosophy, and now a legacy to be handed down in secret places away from envious eyes. Swords of the Tribe, now Swords of the Lost.
The Sword looked over and gave a grateful nod to the innkeeper who returned it. The tribesman had only ever seen one Sword before, many years ago. He was wearing the same band around the head, with its strips of metal, and the bangles around his arm were the right kind. The tribesman was still staring when the Sword bid him to sit down.
Their talk was brief, terse, but good.
"I am making for that chief's keep. It lies some two or three days from here, weather permitting."
"Is that what we've come to, brother? Settling under the shadows of old enemies?"
"There will be no place in all the world better to protect my people than there."
"I suppose it had to happen at some point." The tribesman's eyes were cast down, struck with an immediate and terrible disappointment. "I know some clades were utterly absorbed, but I'd hoped-"
"You mistake me, brother," the Sword said slowly.
The tribesman looked up.
"Even as we are, the old tales ring true in foreign ears. They will be our way in. That place...will become somewhere to protect my people."
The tribesman studied the fellow before him for a moment.
"You seek...an ally."
The Sword gave a deep chuckle.
"I will feed the fool scraps of the old ways. And then, others will hear of us, and come to us, and the chieftain will show favour to every one of our people who makes their way there."
The tribesman sat back, taking it all in.
"What say you of my plan, brother?"
"How do you know it will work?"
"I don't. But, some decades ago, an old master was taken in by the people of an estate and earned his keep there by training the vanguard there in our techniques. It's our most valuable currency."
"I see..." Something about it stung, but, he thought, others of the tribe. A Sword to keep them. New Swords to be honed. A home.
"I understand this is a grave decision, brother."
"When do we leave?" he asked suddenly.
The Sword did not contain his smile, clapped his kinsman on the shoulder, and said with a rumbling energy, "We leave now."
Spear of the Stars
Fate is irresistible. There is a grand web of causality running throughout the fundament of creation. But, beings of immense fateful importance have a way of stretching and bending the fate around them. Displacing it, like a boulder heaved into a lake. After all, fate is not the product some being, it isn't fine tuned, and it is most certainly not aware, it makes do with what there is. So that minor mutability, that stretching, it allows for fate to be diverted, or connected together in odd ways. This is called destiny. It is the vortex left behind after something of great fateful power affects the fabric. It is not irresistible, but it has great pull.
Why some are born with great fates is unknown--that is the purview of astrologers who believe fate is displayed for us, in all its intricate mysteries, in the stars, the moons, the suns, to be deciphered for the benefit of the Immortals. They are god-kings from time immemorial whose wills move the world around them, for whom war is a grand game not of land or blood or vengeance, but fate. Death was and continues to be an inescapable reality for thousands upon thousands upon thousands across the whole of the world, all born of the artificed destinies of Immortals.
But great fate does not exist solely in the living minds of the Immortals. Indeed, it does not exist solely in living things at all. There are places dotted across the world which have traditionally held great spiritual import for reasons known only to those versed in fate's esotericism. Most Immortals made their eternal abodes in such places where they exercise even more control, where the path of time and life might be set at will.
All of this was theirs for millennia, until something new appeared.
In the warp and weft of destinies, sometimes man was able to rail against fate. The countless oracles, soothsayers, prognosticators, and omen-speakers who were not sanctioned astrologers sometimes saw a dimness in fate's weave, and word of this always spread amongst downtrodden humanity. No rebellion had ever been successful, nor had it ever particularly worsened their situation. The Immortals knew they held the power, and simply laughed in the wake of retreating armies.
And then one day, a nameless human champion strode onto a battlefield and slew an Immortal who, only after it was too late, felt that familiar fateful immensity in now dangerous hands.
They said it was a fallen star. Its head a pearlescent comet, its shaft the azure trail. It was said that when held aloft, certain archaic stars balanced upon the very tip. The Immortals, who seldom cooperated, descended upon it with fervour before their peers could get a hold of it, but no destiny, however intricate, held up under the spear's scrutiny.
With every thrust and strike, it unravelled a knot of altered reality. And so it became known among the league of Immortals as an abomination, and they fled from under its vast shadow to far off places where the skies would once again bend to their whims.
A line of champions was thus destined to hold the spear and cut the threads of fate into an ascendant destiny. Prosperity and strength were written in cosmic stone, and the advancing tide of mankind that stood tall looked to the distant reaches where the Immortals of old had secluded themselves in lands of petty tyranny.
When the first Immortal surrendered to the might of the spear, he was re-written by its blade. Plunged into the bare earth, the Immortal's fate-warping seat of power was, too, changed. If the Immortals were the lords of this world, then man had tamed one of its gods. Standing atop a mountain thrumming with the immensity of fate, humanity looked out into the world with the eyes of its bowed god, and dreamed then a destiny for its whole race, that at the tip of the spear, they would make into mindless functionaries the tyrants old, who would strive for the golden destiny of man.
Crypt of the Dark
"No, not a mote of light until we find him," she said with grave tone.
"And how will we fare in that crypt? The dark there is absolute." He sounded more worried than usual. She supposed he had a right to be.
"Just remember the directions, it's not that far in. And besides, that time spent in the solar chamber ought to give us the time we need."
"Ought to..."
"Oh, people do this all the time," she said, mostly to convince herself.
They were quiet as they dragged forward the great iron gate to the crypt. The undercity was littered with them, sealed away in darkness forever, mostly for the sake of the living above who couldn't bear to think on death. Terrible though corruption and dissolution may be, there was naught more terrible than for what remained in this world to be dragged back into thought and sensation inside a rotting corpse by the merest speck of light. Such dead yearned with palpable agony for it to pass, to return to the irradiate refuge of death.
A thing these two necromancers now sought to violate.
Above the gateway was a warning in large, decorated letters: DO NOT PRODUCE LIGHT. Even the gate only led to an antechamber whose interior portal wouldn't open unless the outside one was fully closed and immobile. An almost perfect safeguard devised after the collapse of an ill-maintained crypt some decades ago, a disaster which led to a horde of vengeful corpses haunting the backstreets of a poor district for several months.
Through a damp, cool dark did they tread, the intensely musty, odorous air was so still, so utterly shiftless, that their own movements seemed incongruous. They kept to the walls, and held to each other's arms at all times. It was the third archway they sought. They had to pass two others, though, and each one felt like stepping through some vast and terrible gulf. There was a small rush of relief when the other side was gained.
Sometimes their hands passed over things that were not stone. Sometimes it was wood, and sometimes it was cloth, and sometimes it was bone, or mostly bone. Despite their particular line of work, there was never a time when some deep-seated part of them did not recoil upon seeing or touching a corpse.
Finally they came to the final arch, and then passed within.
"He should be at the bottom," her voice cut all too loudly through the monolithic silence.
"I'll get everything ready," he replied, a subtle tremor in his tone.
It wouldn't be enough to simply wake the corpse. Anyone could do that. The subtleties of necromancy lay in guiding the awakening of a corpse, reminding it of itself, giving it something pleasant and engaging. Getting what you wanted as quickly as possible. In this case, a stick of pungent incense, a vial of silvery liquid with a tangy odour, and a gold coin. The body within was, after all, a supposed alchemist.
She sent her hands out and felt for the coffin, which would lay within a niche in the wall. She ran her hands along the stone, then the rough, unpolished wood, and finally, along the gilded name plate, upon whose face she carefully felt out the letters of the name. It was him.
The coffin was removed with some effort and placed on the floor. It wasn't a terribly even floor, but it would do for the few moments they anticipated this to take. The lid was forced open, and the coin was placed on the bare, sunken chest of the dead alchemist. Between them then, using their bodies as a shield against the rest of the crypt, they struck a long match. It was more like a small candle, and was the absolute most amount of the light they dared produce. Even then, they felt the crypt revealed itself too readily.
The pale orange light suddenly crept over the corpse. Whatever oils and tinctures it had been bathed in before or after death had preserved it in some peculiar ways. The hair was dry and scraggly, but intact, as were the eyes which had a staring, glazed expression. Some of the features were slightly blackened around the edges. Worst of all was the mouth, the top lip pulled back in a kind of thing halfway between an unpleasant smile and snarl. That the face was not turned towards them in that moment was a blessing.
They took a second to brace themselves. This was a delicate moment. The incense was lit, and drops of the silver liquid were then poured between the lips. It blinked.
"Hold the incense over him," she hissed.
He did so, and the face turned with a freakish tension towards them both. The eyes darted about. The tongue was lapping dryly in the mouth.
"Verghini..." she whispered. She closed her eyes to try and recall the query. "Iron root of emerald rose, earthen vine..."
"Of midday's pose," came the rattled, rasped answer.
"You have that?" she asked her companion. He nodded in assent, his eyes darting quickly back the dead alchemist.
"Let's get out of here. Leave him."
They stood then, as those accustomed to a world of light do so naturally and innocently, and turned around with the lit match shining into the crypt.
There was an explosion of stirrings, shiverings, and creakings. She shut her hand over the flame instantly, and would never know how close a desiccated a limb came to grasping her ankle as she grabbed her companion and ran blindly through the rustling darkness.