Shadows & Sorcery #108
Sorely tempted to put someone’s actual name here, just to really give them that uncomfortable jolt I hope you all associate with Shadows & Sorcery, especially this one hundred and eighth edition!
Before we begin, I am filled with shame, because in the last Shadows & Sorcery, would you guess it?
We passed 500 stories.
And my ass didn’t keep count and totally missed it, so I want everyone to beat me with sticks. It’s only fair.
Anyway, hello! You’re all gonna become wizards this week, because below is a triple dose of magical lore, some just real absolute dank sorcery, positively dripping with occult implication.
Before that, if you want to check out the 500th story or you missed it, go HERE
Also the 17th chapter of The Path of Poison came out last week! If you missed that, too, go read!
And as ever, if you enjoyed what you read here, please tap that heart icon and let the stories know you liked them! It takes but a second!
This week, we delve into the ancient history of a race of magicians in Lost Rune, we learn the powers and perils of War Sorcery, and we glimpse the power of the King’s Sigil…
Lost Rune
The oldest form of their language, it was something else—something more. Of all the world, which bowed, supplicated, sacrificed, they were the only ones without gods, without divine ancestors, without hosts of spirits or nameless secret forces or powers to which they owed their existence and souls. For them, it was words: the intricacy, the nuance, the mystery, the power of tongues. Beasts, and indeed other humans had communication, they had very complex communication, but they did not have the wisdom, the insight, nor the ability of the Blood of Shamiach.
This was almost certainly the reason why they were hated by every nation they met, and why they saw themselves as worthy of their conquest.
They had not blessings, boons, nor intervention from on high or from beyond. They had magic. The power was theirs, from them, within them. Of them. They had themselves, in their most primordial days, uncovered secrets of something deeper than what was known by all the world, and it was in their words. They spoke, and it was so. Speech was ritual, and therefore life was ritual as speech described and gave meaning to life.
When gods were silent, when rites were performed wrong, when stars or moons were not aligned, when souls were weak, they were strong. With shout and call and dread whisper did walls and flesh fall to them, were eyes struck blind, and did beasts cower before them. With graven runes burning with the fire of their wills did swords pass through armour, were blade tip and arrowhead turned aside, and were fortresses made impenetrable.
And their hubris, for it was such, led them to the building of empire. Unabated, their boots trampled crowns and seals until they came to the land of the deep vales, and were stopped in their tracks when the enemy tribe of the cold canyon deeps made a pact with the fog. As argent mists stole through the night, it smothered the camps, it flew out in the wake of their marches and into their conquered lands, and finally back to the old homeland itself, and at every step was the voice of every single member of the Blood of Shamiach snuffed from existence.
The War of Silence destroyed their burgeoning empire almost overnight, and their people were cast into the wilderness, their homeland overrun, and their lodestone which held every rune of their tongue—the physical embodiment of their power—was crushed to dust.
Centuries passed. Generations were born without speech. Memories faded. The Blood of Shamiach dwindled. These once Masters of the Words only recovered remnants of their voices by adopting the languages of the races they had once sought to dominate. The greatest shame of all was to see the old words, lost to them, but stolen long ago from the battlefields of old and twisted into a lesser, degraded sorcery mixed with heathen ritual whose powers were a far cry from the wonders the old blood had once wrought.
But even in this there was hope. Slowly, surreptitiously, they bartered anything they could—their coin, their land, their lives—with magicians and thieves for every scrap and rumour, taking their miniscule treasures of wizard's tattered grimoires and enchanter's crude engravings, peeling away centuries of syncretism with foreign faiths to reveal the lost runes that lay within. The first words were collected in books made to last, but more importantly, made to be hidden, passed from keeper to keeper, learned, copied, spread, and, in secret places away from prying eyes, spoken once more.
The world remembers them but dimly now as a once war-like race to whom there once befell some great tragedy, and only the initiated know them even now as the ancient creators of magic. But they are still, down through the ages, known to all as Shamiach, the book-worshippers, for it is said that in every sacred archive of theirs is some slim, sealed volume of their lore written in the old words themselves, though the people are still scattered, and their volumes differ from town to town, from temple to temple. Regardless, every book is a talisman and a ritual text of their elder days of conquest, to be read again and again in clandestine meetings, a spell performed over and over to make return the days of glory.
War Sorcery
An army on the move is never just marching soldiers. An army on the move houses mercenaries, gamblers, entertainers, itinerant merchants, and any rabble the captains and commanders don't turn away, or don't find. A marching army is a good source of income for nomadic or otherwise rootless peoples who fear not displacement and who can flee at a moment's notice. An army on the move is an opportunity, and bless the bloodthirsty overlords who keep the boots marching.
Among the ranks of actual fighters, one will find many a hopeful in the form of wide-eyed idealists and angry young folk who believe their bolstering the numbers can only be a good thing. One will also often find zealots eager to be accepted by the militia, should the enemy be the right of kind of enemy, and the cause righteous.
It shouldn't be a surprise that, amidst this hodge-podge of dozens, sorcery naturally crops up in armies too.
What grows amidst militias is never a cohesive lore. Armies adopt and pass down sorceries wherever they go, amassing a considerable and eclectic body of hedge magic and unorthodox rites in the place where religion and witchcraft become blurred. Although no matter the source or system, and this old world has had many, soldiers almost uniformly present a preference for practical spellwork. Warriors will pad their armour with scrawled symbols on parchments and skins, they'll paint or even scratch wards and hexes onto their armour and weaponry, passing these pieces down from soldier to soldier, or looting them from the dead.
These are small scale spells, the kind of peasant magic that finds home on the fringes and outskirts of acceptable religion, a low power, earthy, vivacious, and red in fang and claw. A far cry from the cold, somber, and obscure high ceremony of the noble classical magician. These are signs and passes that can be made by dagger point and with a hand still retaining most of its fingers. They are fragments of pottery, hammered medals, and crude idols. They are primitive candles or cairn-shrines that act as intimate altars of dim communion. But these boons and blessings amass, they congeal, and soldiers clack and shimmer with them. Two forces clashing on the battlefield have waves of invisible power crashing about them, unseen to all but those who know how to look.
On longer campaigns, soldiers become not just brothers in arms, kin forged in trench and ruin, but keepers and transmitters of curious knowledge, vectors for the survival of a power that creeps through its niche and feeds it. Old captains become like old wizards, hardy and wise, their eyes full of singular sights and musings in dark and silent moments, but full of thunder when battle makes their blood run.
Yet for all that it is ubiquitous, the infestation of sorcery in military units is contentious. War breeds superstition on every level, and some fighters are more susceptible to its allure and promise of power and protection than others. Such soldiers overstep the bounds of what is comfortably held as an open secret, and more often than not become a danger to themselves...or their fellows. There has never been a conflict, and there never will be, where some soldiers or even units become blood drunk, desperate to appease whatever spirit or demon or god of the green they've beholden themselves to—above even their commanding officers, turning every encounter with an enemy into a chance for sacrifice and blood offering.
What bodes ill for morale and repute above all else is when such fervour spreads amongst the ranks. Often zealots on a righteous quest are perpetrators of this, their unwavering and maniacal conviction which inspires weary or frightened comrades. But sometimes it is simply one regular soldier who snapped in the night, nothing more. These things have in the past become the basis for secret military cults which even now persist, surviving very well under the banners of certain mercenary concerns who are more like crusading orders than sellswords, chanting frightful spells of battle magic over the traditional dirge or rallying song.
It would be lamentable, say the Barons and Margraves and High Counts, were these frenzied warriors and warlock soldiers not so damnably good at their jobs.
King's Sigil
In the Seven Kingdoms, there is a strict and somewhat labyrinthine legal system. Officious, bureaucratic, totally universal, and absolutely necessary. Above the hordes of Officials are the many Magistrates, above those Magistrates are a number of Governors, above those Governors there are the Voivodes, above those Voivodes, the Archthanes, above the Archthanes, the King.
And above the King, there is the Sigil.
It is the source and mark of Law. The Sigils made the Laws which govern the Seven Kingdoms. It is the sacred duty of every King to safeguard the Sigils, and to use them only ever as desperate last measures, for Law set by a Sigil can never be undone or overwritten. They are modes of order set into the very fabric of the Eternal Kingdoms that may wax and wane, but always will stand until the end time. They are the Laws which govern life and death, the rest of spirits, the duty of bloodlines, the passage of seasons, and reward of all works.
Such is the weight of duty that many Kings never touch their Sigils, for the Making of Laws is a monumental undertaking and will be their mark upon history for all time to come. While the Laws a Sigil makes cannot be undone, they can be broken, and as per the First Law, whose creator has been forgotten, so long ago was it made, the punishment for breakage is the Eternal Curse of Outlaw, to be unbound and unblessed by the beneficent and ordering Laws of the Seven Kingdoms, to become a nameless, wretched wanderer unwelcome under any roof.
Law for the most part these days is fair, interpretable, broad, and accommodating. But it was not always so wise, or so tempered. In certain places, at certain times, Kings have not observed the weight of Law, and decreed their will with abandon. Quickly was it reigned in, and called forbidden, but not before the damage was done.
There was once an Eighth Kingdom. It began with with the decrees of a line of cruel Kings over isolated places down the centuries, Laws of bondage and sacrifice on rebellious peasants, or ambitious Governors, seditious Voivodes, or villains and enemies who were phantoms of the mind. In these places are the mouldering remains of old estates cursed to never fall, infested with frenzied, withered unliving, doomed to never decay, never to cease their toil and tithe for long dead Kings whose name it was made Unlawful to speak of.
But it didn't stop there. Even with the eyes of the other Seven Kings on them, this dark line continued to found and set Laws that tore the fabric of the Kingdom apart in their reality-shattering contradiction, cursing whole swathes of their people into becoming Outlaws. The landscape itself ceased to look right, ceased to work right, and eye-scouring days of freezing sun and month-long nights of searing darkness overlooked entire burgs consumed with tides of self-consuming greenery. Castles seemed to walk, and lakes slither across the countryside, leaving creeping horrors from unhealthy depths in their wake.
The Seven Kings convened and set a Law upon their Kingdoms that the Forbidden Kingdom was to be hidden from sight and mind. It has all but ceased to exist for most. Save those Outlaws who flee into the wilderness, where unbound from the strictures of the Kings, the nameless Eighth Kingdom reveals itself, and under the cover of darkness they go to it, stepping over its nightmare threshold for the lost Sigil they know must still reside within...