Shadows & Sorcery #107
*guitar riff* YOU’RE READING *elephant stampede* THE ONE HUNDRED AND SEVENTH EDITION *wizard noises* OF SHADOWS & SORCERY
This week got out of hand.
Below, we have a triple deep dive into the strange lore of a new world, from the furthest reaches of the cosmos to the depths of the earth. But it didn’t start that way. It started as a classic collection of standalone vignettes, but almost of its own volition formed itself into a whole cosmos that demanded to be designed and defined. A bizarre experience that turned out some bizarre fiction. An impromptu week-long worldbuilding challenge being written to the last second. It doesn’t get more fresh and steaming than THIS!
Now don’t forget, next week is the new chapter of The Path of Poison. Things are about to get hairy in the hillside cottage…
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This week we start off in the distant reaches of the universe to learn about Cosmic Sorcery, we descend through the Outer Space to glimpse the Stars of Power, and finally we land upon the world to commune with the Cathedral Shadows of the inner plane…
Cosmic Sorcery
Three orders govern the world, and have done so, in various forms, for all time. Today there are three, in past ages there were as many as a dozen, all highly specialized fields of inquiry and practice, that have been combined, absorbed, or in some rare cases, aggressively taken over.
They are Earth Sorcery, a mystic pursuit that delves into the unfathomable depths of the powers and primal wisdom which swells and swims within the plane itself.
They are Star Sorcery, the scholarly wisdom pertaining to the crystal bodies of the pearlescent heavens, which seeks to understand the emanation of light, and how that light—and the stars themselves—might be shifted and focused to alter the very fabric of what dwells below in the world.
And there is what lies beyond. Long ago, ancient astral travellers, from a time when the Earth and Stars were almost at war, climbed the beams of starlight to venture beyond the known sky. It was the discovery of the Outer Space which soothed the bubbling tensions. This period of deep study thus revealed the ultimate origins of existence in the infinitude beyond, wherefrom blinding energies flowed and crystallized into the stars themselves, and from there were focused and refracted into the various forms of the living Earth.
One cannot know the Earth without knowing the Stars, and one cannot know the Stars without seeing where light originates. The formless outer reaches of the cosmos, a wild chaos of energies, and a terrible spectacle that left those who glimpsed it irrevocably changed.
It took supreme effort, control, determination, and a deadening of the senses in order to let slip through forces which invigorated and bolstered the desired powers, and when applied correctly, the results created legend. But alas, such techniques took much time to develop. In the wake of progress were left vast spans of glass, craters that would smoulder and smoke for decades, barren lands of eerie silence, and the threat of every nation against the other that they harboured secret cosmic sorcerers.
A taboo has grown over this power. Its wisdom is a necessity, but its knowledge is something few magicians will ever openly admit to seeking, though a rare few have ever wholly shunned it.
There is an allure to the boundless, formless infinity of the Outer Space one would do well to fear.
Stars of Power
The fate and working of all existing things is written in starlight. Each thing upon the world is a result of a beam of light from the cold and pure crystal heavens, the panoply of stars shines a grand weave, every streak of energy intersecting at some point, and not dissolving, but combining, to form the plane and the life upon it. Everything in the world can be traced back to an individual star, and it is the distant, lonesome study of star sorcerers to map the sky and the intersections of starlight, living at times almost apart from the immediacies of the made world.
But such studies reap fine rewards.
It began first with visions. Dreams. Odd moments of lightness. Ancient humans who slumbered under the splendour of a full sky of stars learned that mere exposure to starlight was enough to evoke an effect. Long were the ages spent gaining, inch by inch, the first grasp of a star.
Despite the conflicts which arose between the many earth-borne and star-borne orders of mages, in their belief that it was either the heavens or the living world which held primary importance, they complimented each other more often than not. It was from the quickly growing spirit-mass within the earth that the star sorcerers obtained the knowledge necessary to transcend their boundaries. Ancient souls drawn from below said to them that their living spirits may yet be young and raw, and so can remember better their descent from above. Recall and ascend was the mantra by which star sorcerers of all breeds finally rose independently to the skies.
Few are willing to remember the age of chaos that came in the wake of the first star sorcerers and their fumbling attempts at manipulation of starlight. It is but a dim, distant, dark memory in the modern day but it is difficult to look back upon classical records without a shiver. Widespread and unstable mutation, phantoms of the mind wandering in flesh, and laws once thought immutable all but undone. Brief a period though it was, it forever became the greatest argument against ambition in the ranks of star sorcerers. It is their sin to bear for all time.
In their place, did a select number of their wisest magicians ascend one final time, as living souls nearly indistinguishable from starlight itself. They would dwell in the heavens, learning to use themselves to focus light into things below, altering things on fundamental levels as was seen fit to do, beholden to a strict code whose breakage would result in terrestrial ruin. As they would leap from star to star, contact was made from those below who met them in the misty upper air, to come learn celestial lore.
Thus did the true order of Star Sorcerers come to be, and at its back, a pantheon of astral saints to watch over their descendants.
Cathedral Shadows
It is said that the ultimate end-point of existence isn't the teeming millions of expressions upon the plane, but what exists within it. The universe begins as a dissolute diffusion, in the Outer Space, and it slowly draws inwards, coalesces, coagulates, not into life, but into the great spirit-mass of the inner plane. Below feet and roots, soil and stone, star and earth, the One that is greater than the sum of its parts, the singularity to which all energy is heading towards, of which life is a self-aware and important, but penultimate step.
All souls descend into the deep earth, but these souls do not slumber, they are not inert, they are, in a sense, hatched from the shell of mortal matter, things of pure and condensed energy, dwelling amidst a self-same ocean of thought and wisdom. Mind which dwells within the living flesh of the plane.
But that ocean has waves, and surfaces, from time to time, in certain places across the world. Since things of life learned to sense, they have been drawn to where the spirit-mass is close.
First it was known when the sky roared and flashed—when thunder rumbled across the primeval landscape, and shadows rose as if in answer to it. Proto-human forms gathered in these places, and created simple shrines in the wilderness, little more than spaces hemmed in with circles of stones or wooden posts, and they created their settlements about them.
As human beings crawled out from beasthood, they erected temples where their shrines stood. They learned to mimic thunder, those great explosions of energy, with voice and drum and bell, and as the numerous nascent orders waxed and waned in power across human realms, cultish rites and theologies developed around the spirit-mass that they venerated, worshipped, and even sacrificed to.
But the fiery passions of early mankind were tempered with the knowledge of the growing mind below, and even in far places, did stubborn, fearsome rites finally die out. The cities which were raised around the old temples demanded greater spaces to speak to the spirits, and so were built the great cathedrals, the seats of communion with the underworld, which would stand into eternity.
There are exactly thirty six cathedrals across the plane, each one a veritable city unto itself, the outer skin of settlements nestled under and upon their forms. There is the three league cathedral whose mile-tall brass gates are forever thrown open in welcome, there is the tri-faced spire around which are seven minor spires which jut from a bustling city, there is the great stepped cathedral surmounted by a shining octagonal dome that reflects the sun-star in every direction.
Each cathedral, no matter its shape, bears a cavernous interior in which echo’s a drone of mage's chants and bells, a perpetual field of calling upon these primordial vortices, where shadows rise to haunt the corners of the labyrinthine cathedrals, souls of ages past returning to visit their descendants and impart lost wisdom.
The spirit-mass mass is the mind of the world, and keeps in motion that which the stars form and project. A deific force more than willing to be called upon, and more than capable of diverting and reshaping the influence of astral saints. It can be said that the power of stars is passive, and the power of the earth is active.
The energies of the Outer Space are flowing towards a single point, and as they travel, they seek and find greater and greater balance and focus. There will come an age where the immensity of the beyond flows in a clean line towards the center of the cosmos, and all the energy in the universe shall go from being All to One.
What lies beyond that is dreamed of only in the depths of the Earth.