Shadows & Sorcery #109
Could this be anything but the one hundred and ninth edition of Shadows & Sorcery? No!
Oh man its weird down there. I mean it starts kinda nice, but it gets weird. You should check it out. Strange stars, vile dungeons, and a return to a grim, watery world from a short while back…
Now! Very important! If you missed last week’s edition, I admitted my infinite shame in actually literally forgetting that we passed 500 stories in #107. Missed last week’s shame-edition? Take a look here! Missed the one-oh-seven and the 500th tale? Gotcha boss.
Anyway, 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 and it helps me out!
This week, we travel far beyond to seek the Ruins of the Stars, we descend into dank lightless depths to explore the Sealed Dungeons, and we venture out into the restless ocean and encounter the dreadful Sea Undead…
Ruins of the Stars
Some believed that whatever shone at the moment of birth marked your role in life.
Some believed they guided people through their lives, in some places this guidance was deciphered by an oracle, and in some places it was intensely personal.
Still others believed they offered a constant stream of influences to be watched, documented, acted on, and warded away.
Whatever the case, humanity wouldn't be content until it had finally touched the stars that governed its many lives. Reasons were as varied as beliefs were, some wanted to commune in some fashion with their guides, or some wanted to take control of them. But how to reach beyond the highest points of the whole world, terrestrial places mankind couldn't even itself reach? It took generations of research, of debate, failure, inspiration, of the reading of stars, the choosing of appropriate dates, births, and lands, but finally the deepest esotericisms of the foremost stellar traditions were breached, and in a lone tower, swept by the high, frigid winds of the upper air, did a lone astromancer suddenly find themselves hurtling weightlessly past the threshold of the sky.
There was coolness, but not the bite of cold or creep of a chill. There was darkness, but it did not blot the sight. There was a sense of speed, but it was smooth, and silent. But neither was it all numb. It was as if sensation bypassed the flesh and went directly into the mind itself. The astromancer discovered quite quickly, there was no flesh to feel at all. No hand was put out, no foot tread upon the air. No body hurtling through the curious gloam.
The calm dark sky had been profuse with them, and they had remained ever distant, but now the astromancer was approaching one. It revealed first its true form, changing from a blinking diamond, or spire of crystal as so often was believed, and rounded out into something else entirely. The light of the star was a mist, a silvery, shining mist which bathed the space about in a cold, clear radiance, and it swirled and swam with the lethargy only vast bodies and ancient things have. And then, within, a black sphere, shining, smooth, a world unto itself.
Suddenly, everything slowed as the astromancer focused, and the vastness which had encompassed vision entirely flew inwards, and then the astromancer was upon it, standing, on a star. Its surface was a little darker than the sky, and its lustre scintillated in the silver star-mist. The astromancer wandered upon the alien, heavenly surface, feeling suffused with a vitality uncommon to even the most vivifying experiences of the terrestrial world. Was this, then, communion?
If time passed, the astromancer didn't feel it, not until what may have been days of travel across the featureless dark plains, under skies streaked with soft argent, led to what was unrecognizable as anything else than a tower. An old tower, constructed of black, shining stone, and in an advanced state of ruination. It may once have reached far into the mists, and was in truth only visible because the stars beyond and around it seemed to give it an outline in the air.
The astromancer rushed to it, and passed through a yawning archway lit only by the light which swam across is striations from the mists above. Inside was found stone such as was never reared by human hands, so colossal in proportion was it, fallen, shattered into a million pieces, having rent the smooth earth below it aeons ago. Yet there was one thing untouched. In the centre of the ruin-strewn expanse, there was a short, thick pillar, upon which was resting a small black sphere, much like the starworld itself.
The astromancer reached out with naught but will, and touched it, and drew forth from it something beyond speech, image, sound, or tactile thing. Pure thought beyond sensation, able to only to be delivered and received in a state such as this. A full and perfect knowledge. This had been intended all along, by those who had come first. By those who had been few in number, but left the earth itself as a legacy, and a host of stars as a guide. This had been intended, and indeed, had been expected of mankind. The old ones would never know if their legacy rose from the mists of chaos from the time before, but they had faith and pride in their work.
Beyond the tower, beyond the black plains, beyond the silver star-mist, were the thousands upon thousands of constellations. And each one held a tower, and a secret. Beyond communion, beyond control, was apotheosis.
Sealed Dungeons
Back in those days, they'd just throw people into dungeons and let them rot. No tower prisons like you have now, with light and air, no, there was nothing worse, the authorities of that day figured, than the notion that far, far above your head was the free and pleasant world you know, and that all around, entombing you, were endless leagues of stone and earth and darkness.
Everyone unlucky enough to have the gaze of the guard fall upon them was fair game. Bad, bad time back then. The memories persist. Everyone did a stint in some dungeon somewhere, maybe for a day or a fortnight at worst, before they were hauled, shaking and penitent back into the blinding glare of day.
The dungeons then weren't work camps, either—you were sent in to survive. There were no watchmen down there, you understand? They were pits to be thrown open and shut right back up again. They went unmaintained, uncleaned, and some were pretty big, stretching way down into the earth. Strategically placed so as to make any attempt at tunnelling a particular problem, not that there was much in the way of resources down there to use.
Or so the barony councils of back then thought.
These things had been in use for centuries—centuries!—before someone thought to crack an old dungeon open and take a look inside. Some gained reputations and so found themselves used more regularly as deterrents against crime, but some were simply forgotten. Or looked over, maybe. With everyone inside. Last time this particular one had been used was some eighty years ago. They kept building new ones, you see. Couldn't force too many people into one, because back then, whole villages found themselves interred. And they did expect, most of the time, to bring people back out of ones sealed away.
So, they undo the gates, and a fetid air rushes out—the stink of humanity, of rot, of death, and of age. The darkness was almost palpable. There hadn't been light in who knows how long. Whatever dwelt down there had long since ceased to desire the warmth of flame, and pallid shapes skittered out of sight as a baron's explorers trod the rank, damp, low tunnels. I believe about three of the ten made it out alive with stories of things that'd make your toes curl. Things had been done down there out of desperation for survival, out of hope, by people who knew things they ought not to know, learned after years of darkness. Nothing more was ever said about those places, save that they were bricked up and buried until the end of time.
They unsealed more after that, and found nothing better. Most still resembled human beings, at least, but none wanted out. The barons found a world which lived under their own, of their own making but not their design. Some of those dungeons were huge, a mile or so of dank, lightless passages, stretching every which way.
Just outside a baron's capital was one dungeon where a vicious and cunning tyrant had placed a brutal order onto the prison, as it had been years since the doors were opened. There was nothing in the tunnels, not even mould or fungus to make some use of. But there was enough loose stone to start fires, and make crude tools. And there were people. Plenty of people, and more could be made. The order of the dungeon was a strictly enforced stratified caste system of human beings bred for and turned into fuel sources, tools, and meat for warlords who bickered amongst themselves and feasted on their fallen enemies. Their master was a paranoid and steel-willed killer who dwelt on a throne of bones. The rest were slaves who scratched away at the dungeon walls with bone picks, attempting to expand their lord's domain.
The barons flooded that particular place with white hot flame and set priests to pray over it for no less than a full month.
In another they discovered an insane theocracy of eyeless worshippers of darkness, who did everything they could to get closer to the whispers they heard from beyond.
Another were a cult who worshipped a fire they had successfully fed for five generations with the bones and flesh of their ancestors, a bit at a time, for they feared the "choking shadows" that dwelt in the lower regions, in reality a smoke that had arisen from a fervent feeding of the flame.
Many others were simply the waning dregs of the descendents of prisoners who'd led mind-shattering lives in the darkness, moving from one sprawl of tunnels to the next when they could bear the stench of age and death no longer. Those were brought out and few survived long. Some lived for a while, apparently, and it was they more than any of the nightmares the barons uncovered that led to the end of the old, dark times. Even the greed of the barons back then wasn't so all-consuming that they didn't have some human core, and what they dragged from those hellish depths split them open to that core and bade them fall to their knees in profuse and mortal apology.
Where the dungeons were has been removed from every map and chart and chronicle they could find, the crushing shame forcing them to try and make the world forget it ever existed.
But they're still down there.
For all mankind might forget, the earth won't.
Sea Undead
The sea roared, subdued rarely by calm skies into a low growl, more commonly roused into a bellow and howl by storms whose thunderbolts cascaded across the furious firmament, lashing new sheets of water onto a meagre world that had dared rise above the waves, waves that crashed now with ceaseless rage upon the slowly eroding coasts.
The ship's bow swept up to a tall, majestic prow, whose figurehead was a human figure bearing not arms and legs, but great wings with which it might escape the land, and the water. Its sails were closed up, and six great chains depended from its sides. They led, each one, to a sailor beneath, clad in dark, fin-skin suit and glass helm, who breathed from an air bladder. They were scraping subaqueous landscape for various resources: dead fins, good bone, shell, and such like. Two sailors worked while four stood guard with long spears and pneumatic harpoons. The seas were surprisingly clear today, so they could see a long ways for anything that might approach from beyond the range of sight.
Of the land which shot suddenly from the endless Abyss below, very little actually rose above the water. Most was beneath, sodden and lost. There had been theories that all of its many leagues had once been spread out beneath the sky, but had been reclaimed, or made submit by the ocean, and that other humans had lived upon that land. If there was evidence of such a thing, no sailor had ever found it, and they never would. It was a graveyard now, a charnel house for countless dead sea-things to be picked apart and taken by the hands of men.
Something moved just within sight. Barely within sight. As if it had ducked in and back out once it had seen what it wanted. One of the harpoonmen readied himself to yank the chain. If there was one thing every sailor knew, each and every single one of them, it was never to hesitate, to call alarm at the hint of danger. One could not take chances in the deep. Ever. Then it came again, but this time did not leave, and the fellow screamed in his helmet as he pulled the chain leading above. The others felt it, darting their heads about, and retreated closer to the ship.
A great bell was rung above, the massive wooden hammer striking it and sending a resounding clang down into the waves and through the ocean.
And in response, there came an even louder bell from the lightless depths, and the sailors saw then a tide of corpses and half-ghosts shook into a frenzy, clawing and howling through the water.
Humans who die in the water, if not devoured quickly by sea-things, will bloat and swim, rot and fall to pieces, feasted upon by clouds of verminous crabs and other carcass-eating creatures, until only their half-water ghosts remain, swimming in vast shoals like obscene fins, clinging to ships, infesting their hulls, flooding them with their forms and sinking them, forcing the crew to join their wild hunt for all time in the restless seas.
The swarm thundered past and took a man instantly, seeping into his suit and drowning him. It veered about as the remaining sailors clambered up their chains desperately, leaving their weapons and gatherings behind. Two more were ripped from their lifelines, and the last thing they saw were a hundred hollow eyes and bared teeth and a cloud of thin, watery blood, nightmares distorted and distended from their decades in the chaotic ocean.
Two sailors emerged from the water as the shoal stuck to the hull and the bell was sounded again and again and barrels of salt were dumped overboard, their last line of defense against a dead ship's bell. What happened to the third who should have emerged will never be known.
As the sea around the ship paled with the salt, the deep bell retreated further and further, and the ghosts which had been squeezing themselves into the hold below were left behind. The shoal departed with four dead men. The ship unfurled its sails to head home and warn the land, while the remaining sailors drew lots to see who would go below to salt the ghosts.