Shadows & Sorcery #104
Guess who’s back? Back again? We’re so back that we were never actually gone—who? Shadows & Sorcery, edición one hundred and four!
Below you might find the following: necromantic powers, enraged zealots, and mysterious ruins, all contained within three neat little vignettes.
The potential of encountering such things?
Absolute
Anyway, two quick things:
The 16th chapter of The Path of Poison came out last week, and the gang find themselves in the wintry Voerlund wilderness! Check it, and the rest of the adventure so far, out here…
Also, if you are an illustrator, or you know an illustrator who might be up for working on a project in the near-ish future, please let me know!
And now, on with the show—of course, if you enjoyed what you read here, please tap that heart icon and let the stories know you liked them!
This week, we gaze darkly upon the frightful Graveyard Hill, we delve into the history behind the Pilgrim’s War, and we learn a little about the mysterious Ruins of Night…
Graveyard Hill
The old town lay in the shadow of the Vathian Mountains, that desolate expanse of dark summits which rose sharply from the deep, silent forests into spans of barren, treacherous mountainside surmounted by jagged, frostbitten peaks from which biting winds descended and snaked across the sparse landscape. Little sunlight reached the old town, and what did reach it acquired a curious caste as it passed over the black peaks.
Surrounded on all sides by a foreboding wilderness of cold marsh and bleak woods, with a single pass through the Vathians, the old town was a hardy, if not sluggish beast. Toil was long and slow, with care taken in everything they did to preserve their numbers, as precious little new blood came in. But mostly, it was so they would not have to add more corpses to the graveyard hill.
Over a thousand years ago, the ancestors of the old town were bid bury their dead upon one single sizeable knoll after consultation with the daemon which coursed through the land they settled. Their coming had been a nightmare trek through the mountains which left half their number dead and an imprint of terror in their souls that would last forever. Hastily were the first corpses set into the lower reaches of the rugged hillside, but others were surreptitiously interred closer to their loved ones. A grisly lesson was the one they learned when having to quickly relocate their unquiet dead.
The knoll became filled to bursting with graves. As sickness crept from the marshes, or beasts slunk from the woods or down the mountains, bodies found their way into the earthen tombs and primitive crypts of the graveyard hill. From the bottom up were they interred, piled atop themselves, the summit itself composed of new, fresh burials and antique, prestigious corpses. But deep within the hill were they set, too, and it became a matter of practicality to compose and keep complex charts in the town hall to describe and illustrate the various substrata of graves of all the centuries past.
So filled with graves did the hill become that rainstorms, violent winds, and even searching for new places to bury the dead became a perilous task, lest the corpse-infested earth should shift and old bodies and tomb markers tumble down the hillside. Its slopes were verminous with headstones and slabs, most of the old dull greenery of the hill lost to internment. It appeared, from the distance of the old town, as if squamous with dark, pestilent scales from which odd growths jutted forth. Long weeds, bowing funereal flowers, and stringy moss only further enhanced its unhealthy aspect.
Indeed, many in the town feared that no place was left for their dead, and the dust and shards of cremated cadavers were hauled en masse and poured in pale, choking clouds over the mound, feeding what many secretly considered and only whispered to themselves on well-lit nights to be a bloated, corpulent egg or pustule of supreme necromantic potency.
Not often had cold night watchmen had to gaze upon the shadow-laden hillsides in the depths of their vigils, and swear only to the idols of their archaic gods that those slopes pulsed slowly as if with breath. Not often had cowled figures been chased or torn from the upper slopes, attempting forbidden and unspeakable conjurations by enticing the land's daemon into the hillside. Not often had vile gatherings been cast into the merciless wilderness for attempting to open the earth, and inter themselves within, for, they said, to one day awaken anew.
Not often, but enough to trouble the dreams of a dozen generations.
Pilgrim's War
Long had doubt begun to fester in the lands of the eastern church. While their distant cousins in the northern church had been content to dream and chalk it all up to ecstasy and allegory, the easterners held out, and clung to the faith that the Angel's relics would one day be recovered.
For three hundred years, since the inception of their small, regional faith had they remained mired in secrecy, an earthy cult which looked from out of the squalor and into the shining world of divinity, performing in ignorance the complex rites gifted from when the Angel walked among them. They passed down from one generation to the next the meager blessings which had been placed upon their peoples by the Angel. The blessings were a promise and a plea, for salvation and for faith.
But in those centuries, the relics had never been recovered. "Seek me at the end of the earth," was what the Angel had said before that sorrowful departing into the leagues of forests which even now slowly consume their homeland, "and there will the instruments of salvation lie". For the northerners, they had strayed and fell inwards, awaiting some appointed time at the very end of the world itself. But the eastern church had birthed a sacred tradition of pilgrimage and wayfaring, scouring the furthest reaches of the earth for signs and omens, knowing and believing that for every failure, they were but one step closer to salvation.
And then in the latter years of the Red Thunder, a wanderer returning home from the far south crashed into a small church in the arid steppes, and said to the faithful there that the Angel's relics dwelt in the City of the Pilgrims.
The opalescent city of glory, the city which sits upon the crystal ocean, the city which is as the threshold to the land of gods, the city where hundreds of thousands of feet pass through on that final quest, the city which they say has no permanent residents and is inhabited solely by those on the path of righteous faith. The city which had never known war, nor invasion, nor pillage. The city which held fast in its walls the holy of holies of all the world.
There could be no doubt, not with that silver tint to the pilgrim's eyes—the touch of the relics, as from the old stories. They were in the city. But not for much longer.
They still speak of it along the riverbanks and lakeshores, where mankind ekes out a living and communes with its distant gods. The day when the first of the pilgrim hosts was seen marching with fire and song. From the bleak woods they emerged in droves, passing through village sprawls spreading the word of their imminent salvation, having gathered their northern cousins. First, it was with the agony of divine revelation which kept them on their feet through the murky swamps and deep nights and chill winds of the mountains. But that ecstasy turned at length, through the long leagues and dire hardships, to a breathless, grim determination enwreathed in wild mania that gripped their souls as they stood before the gates of the City of the Pilgrims.
Ten thousand zealots arrived at the city seeking the return of the Angel's relics, only for every demand to be rebuffed by the theological elite. They were too precious to be let go, these instruments secreted from across the sea for the benefit for a select few. But the Angel's followers, they could not speak to their god through the water, not like the others could. They needed those relics.
And so the "Pilgrim's War" referred not to one great battle, but a prolonged conflict. They were neither brigands nor invaders, they were pilgrims on the path their Angel had lain before them. There is no more terrible a conflict than one in which either side are not warriors, where every move is one of rage and desperation, but between these opposing parties, it was the Angel's people who had a fire and a hunger in them that had brewed for centuries. The pale stone and gleaming towers of the City of the Pilgrims came to know the lingering stain of blood and scorching mark of flame.
Man had lived through aeons of darkness before the voices of gods came from the waters to soften up, in places, what would remain a hard world for all time to come. The Angel's faithful were not looked upon with any sympathy by the holy martial orders that descended time and time again to oust them. In the end, most of the Angel cult dissipated, having either been slain, or vanished, having gotten exactly what they wanted. Debate rages to this day among gatherings of wandering theologians in the city about the clear but perilous efficacy of their grim struggle, and when it will inspire another cult to invasion.
Ruins of Night
Know you of the phenomenon of the Suncastle? I'm sure you do, from afar though you might be.
Yes, the very ones! Many like yourself come to glimpse them.
I have indeed, a bare handful throughout my life. Each one, a shining, vivacious fortress of pure platinum, caught in the midst of brilliant sunshine for a fleeting but crystal clear second.
Oh, I could tell you little, I'm afraid. Truth be told, we've simply lived alongside it for most of our history. It has only been in the past two hundred years, perhaps a little more, that there been serious study and scholarship around them. I suppose we were content to ascribe some spiritual significance to them and leave them be—superstitions abound, naturally.
Well, the general idea we have now is that they're aspects of another world that sort of bleed into ours only in the most intense sunlight. The light bridges some gap, or it dissipates some veil, whatever it may be.
Yes, there are, and speech with them within is exceptionally rare. Legendary, one might even say.
But I bet you didn't know that they have their opposite. And it is a total opposite.
No, they aren't spoken of a great deal. I can guess why, but I think they have a romanticism all of their own.
Well, on certain nights, for reasons we have yet to ascertain, or even really theorize, ruined structures appear in the darkness where there was naught but naked stone or plain earth. And unlike Suncastles, which are dependent on the strength of light, these night ruins never seem to be linked to how dark a place is. They need only the night to appear.
Indeed, one can see their manifestation and dissipation quite easily sometimes. I have seen this myself, for I am one who has taken to researching them. We know it isn't stars or moons which cause them, for nights with and without those bodies produce ruins. We once thought that the night showed us some dark reflection of the Suncastles, that the moons as "inverse suns" showed some future state, but we came to know it wasn't quite that. Although, celestial bodies do seem to have an effect, of a kind.
There are whispers, you see. Whispers, and nothing more, I assure you, among those who seek out night ruins, that on nights bereft of all astral or otherwise illumination—yes, even our torches and our lanterns—the ruins go deeper than they usually do, that doors within them open, and vaults are revealed.
Ha, not a soul, no. At least, not in any of the ruins I or my colleagues have discovered. Of more immediate importance to us researchers is our vigilance that we don't get caught within ruins as the sun rises. As I said, they occupy bare earth and rock, and descend into it, and that earth ceases to be while the ruins occupy their space. But once the ruins begin to dissipate, the earth fades back in and...well, I have never had it happen, and I hope I never even see it, but we learned the hard way. That is all I shall say on the matter.
Hmm? Then good day, my friend, I believe we are in for a brilliant afternoon, so best of luck. And a rather cloudy night, too. You never can tell how much these autumnal suns you will get.