Shadows & Sorcery #105
The energy it takes to read this, to display this, to transmit this, the energy it took to write this, that energy has travelled forth billions of years across the mists of time and space…it all comes together in the one hundred and fifth edition of Shadows & Sorcery.
Hello!
Now, there’s three tales of dark fantasy below. Evils to be banished. Strange sights to see. Secrets to be uncovered. Venture forth, dear reader…
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This week, the wizard Carloman is called in to investigate a Graveyard of Shadows, we muse upon the strange Sepulchre of the Sea, and we glimpse the power of the Ice of Silence…
Graveyard of Shadows
The red wizard Carloman stood gazing up the low, wide mound in the late, latter summer day. The days has been drawing noticeably shorter, and this issue of bad dreams and failing crops, whatever it may be, would best be dealt with before the onset of winter. Beside him was one of the village wise women, not exactly sanctioned by the Veneracy of Silverden, but of a class across the country respected by the canons for their status as keepers of the lore of their homes. Her name was Velisna, and she was a kindred soul to the wizard, and she had summoned him to aid in ridding this graveyard of an evil, though he be a Voerlunder.
"You will see it shortly, Salaman," she said in a clear and distinct Merchant's Toungue, save for his name, which he had not corrected. She had bronze skin and dark, burnt gold eyes, and her hair had dark streaks in its muted lustre. Silverden folk didn't age like Voerlunders, especially down here. The sun had langourously crawled its way into the distance, and a murkiness had crept over everything, just enough to confuse the eyes. He idly wondered if the indistinctness of twilight had given rise to phantoms of the mind, and whether or not the worry in the village had just made them persistent. Such illusions were easy to break. But still, best to be careful.
The mound, a small but dense graveyard and sort of ancestor shrine, was bordered a short way from its base by a series of stone pillars decorated lightly with serpentine reliefs—Silverdenners did not set aside spaces for spiritual work, this demarcation was the closest thing they ever came to a temple. The world was beautiful enough without the need for too much ornamentation, they said. Of course all this went out the window in the capital, which was one vast temple city, and one of the most magnificent things in the known world by most reckonings, Carloman's included.
Amidst the dissolving shadows, the wizard now saw something else take shape. Low, bent figures rose slowly from the lightly wavering grass, furtive, and shifting.
Serpent's Breath, he thought to himself, they are real. That's a problem.
One of the hunched figures was half-crawling towards a pillar when suddenly it shirked, and seemed almost as if wrenched back. What Carloman took to be its head peered around, and for a second, stopped as it passed himself and the wise woman. A limb emerged, and a hand was outstretched, as if beckoning. Then it fell back, and began to struggle about listlessly. The wizard looked to Velisna, her eyes were downcast. She looked just as scared as those shadows on the hill did. Carloman felt fear, too, but for entirely different reasons.
Inside the house of the wise woman, Carloman sipped thoughtfully on a cup of wine as Velisna told her story. They had retreated after Carloman suggested being in that place for too long was unhealthy.
"You understand, in Silverden, we know the dead pass on to watch over us, as functionaries of order, granting blessings as they can." He gave a sound in assent. As a Voerlunder, he knew them landwight earth spirits. But as a wizard, he knew them to be a bit of both. "Some folk...they do not fit into the order, they reject it, or they are an ill fit, never finding their niche. Tragic, but it leaves anger upon the spirit. The old man was such a person. We did what we could, but he lived apart from us, and died apart from us. I dread to think that our final act of kindness in burying him with us was in error."
"Or that it was precisely what he wanted..." mused the wizard, darkly.
They remained quiet for a moment.
"There will be more dreams tonight," she said, "more folk huddled by my door in the morning, asking me to please rid them of the faces..."
"Of their departed family," said Carloman, eyes looking off into nothing.
"You know?"
"It's what I was afraid of."
Only when the sun was high in the heavens the next day did Carloman and Velisna gather four labourers from the village. He had experienced a night of fitful dreams, drifting in and out of consciousness. Velisna had complained of the same. He had denied himself a restful night, just to get a better handle of what these poor folk were experiencing. Outside, there was a pleasant warmth slowly flowing into the air—summer was still with them. A cool breeze played over the mound, ruffling the grass about the squat Silverden tombstones, simple broad rectangles, upon the topmost face of which were displayed the names of the interred.
The labourers were four men that shared that same richness of caste as their wise woman. They were quiet and obedient as they were directed to the still fresh grave of the old man, trusting to their wise woman and the wizard to stay safe. Nothing had ever showed itself in the daylight, but every movement belied their fear. The grave was a minute or two's walk up the mound, and they approached, all of them, with a measure of hesitancy.
The first man set his spade into the earth, and suddenly leapt back with a shout. Carloman had seen it, and stepped forward. Black fingers slid back into the soil. The wizard grabbed the spade and dug the head into the ground, pulling away a clump of sodden dirt. Hands slithered from the ground, black and bereft of texture—like silhouettes. Peering from the grass and weeds were faces, he saw, human faces he was sure, missing definition in all but their eyes, their staring eyes which held not one note of dread or threat, but pain.
"Dig it up, now. Now!" he commanded. "Velisna, is there a canon in this village? Or a monk? Cell-bound or not, get them out here."
"It is just us, Salaman," she said with a frown, "no holy folk have come through in some weeks."
"Then we'll fix this ourselves. Whatever theurgies you are permitted to perform, do them, and speak to these dead. One of you men," he addressed the labourers about to flee any second, "bring pitch and rags, I will supply the fire. And you, keep digging. Don't worry about whatever you see."
Velisna was about to leave to find some ritual implement when Carloman produced a small, thick stick of incense he lit from his staff, upon whose top there sat an brilliant orange gem which flashed for a second to life with a spoken word. He handed the incense stick to her and she nodded in thanks. This kind of thing, this cleansing, this righting, was the purview of monks and venerates, but the cunningfolk knew more than half the things priests did, and in some cases, were taught in secret. Precisely for situations like this.
Scraped away, the dirt revealed the bunched end of a winding sheet, and then finally, the full thing, its face sundered and showing a mouth. The flesh was slick and discoloured, and had about its lips patches of peeling skin not unlike scales. Carloman used one of the other shovels to further tear the sheet open, revealing the full extent of the corpse's peculiar deformities in its twisting limbs, sunken flesh, and certain alterations of its spidery hands. It took a special kind of foulness in the soul to cause changes like this, he thought to himself. The old man had lived apart from them, but what had he done out of their view? And for how long?
Velisna was upon one knee on the grass, the incense jammed into it, speaking under her breath half in a fugue state. A Silverden speciality. In Voerlund, they prayed to the Serpent, but here they communed, and meditated. The priests had whole bodies of lore the wizard found intensely fascinating, esoteric rites of order and the keeping of its balance and flow. Whatever she was doing now he'd like to learn, because the shadows which had feebly grasped at the legs of the party had ceased to rise.
The workman returned with a pitcher of oil and a bundle of rags. Carloman climbed into the grave, the sides of which had upon them repulsive growths like tendrils of black mould. He dipped each strip of rag in the pungent liquid, and laid them very carefully over the exposed corpse, which seemed to shrivel somewhat in the strong, late summer sun.
"Go back to your Godhead, traitor," he said through gritted teeth before climbing back out. He guessed it shifted in reply, for one of the labourers stifled a swear, but he wouldn't pay it any heed. Not like it could do aught now anyway. Carloman stood over the grave and poured the rest of the oil in, and handed the pitcher back to the workman. He looked up for a minute then, into the warming sun, brilliant cerulean sky with its wisps of cloud, and raised his free hand to it. He crossed the fingers and brought them to the gem atop his staff.
"Serpent, set a coil here."
He gave a great huff of breath upon it, and the gem blazed into radiance. In one swift stroke he swung his staff up and out in a wide arc with a shout as a searing wave of fire engulfed the grave, letting out a great rush of flame, sending Velisna and the labourers back in shock.
Carloman stayed and watched the thing which had been quickly ceasing to be a human corpse burn to a fine crisp. But for all, there was a sadness to it for him. There always was, when a human soul was lost. Of all the things he could help, this was not one of them. The folk in that village, though, them he could help. Velisna came up to him as she saw the workmen off.
"You can already feel the change..." she said with just a tinge of wonder in her voice. It had been bad here.
"Aye. The season was with us, as was the Serpent."
They were quiet for a second.
"I can only wonder what we have been freed of. Had you an idea, Salaman?"
"I had an idea, yes..." he trailed off, shaking away a sense of unease. "And now, that is all it shall ever be."
Sepulchre of the Sea
On that stark coast, the call of crashing waves are carried on bracing winds through salted air, dulled through the hazy mist, and rising above the drone of the ocean's roar for but a moment. The cloud is a high, unbroken blanket of pale grey with sections that hang low, heavy with storms. The high cliffs are dull and of dark slate, lipped with dim green, almost black vegetation. The lonely cries of slender-winged birds come always from far away.
In the cliffs, which run for miles in either direction, lowering into ragged ridges and mounds, there is a break. The break is thin, like a crack in the earth, and runs deep, right from the rock-strewn land above, through a narrow, shadowy canyon, to a small stretch of rough, pebbly beach only accessible at the low tide. The immediate interior of the crack is perpetually damp and covered in rock pool pockmarks in which dark, curious things slowly pulse and slither about, carried up from abyssal currents.
At these low tides, when the ocean recedes into its uttermost depths, something emerges from the water in the silt and stand and stones. It is, plainly, a tomb, long but narrow, with a sharply arched roof, and tall thin spires at its corners, all of its sable stone pitted and smoothed from aeons of the ocean's might, so that it seems all formed of the one block. It resembles so many of the ancient, lichen-encrusted mausoleums inland, about whom the moss gathers, and the mist creeps at the feet.
Much like the weed-choked churchyards of the cold country, the thick stone portal of the sepulchre in the sea is secured by great thick chains, which are slowly crumbling with rust. The interior must surely have been flooded a thousand times over, but still, those rare few who gaze upon it cannot help but wonder what will be unveiled when the chain falls and the stone door swings inward. Maybe whatever dwells within will finally be swept out into the abyss, should the tide not fail us.
They say there is a cosmos out there, a vastness of infinite,searing blackness laden with cascading energies, hurtling comets, and great solitary stars shining against the night, a limitless expanse through which the world silently roams. And below it, far within it, are points of utter and absolute crushing, silent darkness, seas whose deeps are places forgotten by all the universe.
Ice of Silence
That mankind is the self-aware component and microcosm of a holistic universe is known very well across the world. The tableaux of stars, the whirling orbs of the layered crystal heavens, observe how they reflect the motions of the material, experiential world, and how they may be found on the microcosmic scale within each and every human being, in the skull, the eyes, the humors, and crystalline cores scattered about us.
But, even with this knowledge of wholeness, the universe—life—is generally sorted into a broad duality of flesh and spirit.
The study of the all-pervasive cosmic soul belongs to the legions of saints, those who devote themselves utterly to the theological comprehension of the sublime, invisible, motive force, the very drive behind creation. The mind of which all human mind is a reflection. Theirs is an intellectual study, the work of thinkers in the debate halls and monastery cells, pondering deep into the night. Even though it is known One is All, and All is One, historically there has been a sense, and undercurrent, an implication that the study of saints had more worth, for it is after all, the study of eternity.
If the saints study the force before all things, the sages study its expressions, in all its multitudes. If the saints study in theory, the sages study in practice. The world is alive, its flesh pulses, and the sages dwell amidst this divine anatomy. They can lay claim to the oldest body of lore and wisdom in existence, as the ancient shamans ingested substances that forced them into transcendental experience. It is the search for parallels and reflections in the human body and the world around it, how the components of each interact and move in tandem.
Such knowledge has practical rewards, and it is for this reason that, though vaunted the saints and their spiritual quest are, it is the physicians, natural philosophers, and sorcerers the people flock to for aid. Though, of course, sages have also been the source of the worst catastrophes in human history, where the world stood on the brink of irrevocable ruination.
But just as mankind is as the cosmos, just as the body contains humors and organs which fight off infection and corruption, so does this body of the cosmos have for itself a powerful tool of defense.
This tool is ice.
It is no mistake that sages who strive for a greater power, a greater control, who begin to drift away from the knowledge of Oneness, dwell in arid lands, or in festering swamps. But night will fall, and a chill can creep from the depths of any body of water. Inquiry into nature comes with crushing awareness of a balance, and that balance will preserve itself at all costs, just as flesh will arrest and expel invasion and corruption.
There was once a city, dwelling in the lifeless foothills of a desolate mountain range, where the plundered secrets of creation were set against the stark landscape, where crystal clear water flowed in abundance, warm, rich air carried the scents of luxurious gardens to even the highest point, where coolness settled with serenity in the nights, where the beasts of the mountains came and thrived amidst the people. At the snap of a finger could a garden bloom, or be suppressed so a throng of revellers pass, the stone itself could be moulded with their hands, the rain could fall on one street in gentle patters, or on another in lashing torrents.
And then one day, seemingly quite unbidden to the outside world, a chill came across the whole of the city, and no fire called up could dull it, no current of air displace it—no work could shift it.
Ask any saint, and they will point with fearful reluctance to a point a thousand miles away where, in a now forbidden land, a twisting mountain of ice juts from a barren landscape of naked rock, exuding a biting fog and tinging the landscape around for a full league with frost and rime which never lifts, and where all sound utterly dies. What happened there is a constant and painful reminder for sages the world over, beaten into their minds at every step of their journey, but never dared to be spoken of aloud.