Shadows & Sorcery #111
Come one and all, if ye dare—and I know ye dare—to this freakshow we call the one hundred and eleventh edition of Shadows & Sorcery!
So I have to start this with an explanation. This week, I was unfortunately brought low by a bout of food poisoning. Not the “go to hospital immediately” kind but enough to make me feel like a corpse for most of the week. Due to the rigours of the illness, inability to eat, and lack of sleep all piling up, finding the headspace to write eluded me pretty much completely. But I couldn’t NOT write something, so this week’s edition is a little different. Go look!
Missed last week’s wizard fights and magic armour? Or you’ve just arrived? Check it out here!
Also, next week is the 18th chapter of The Path of Poison—and it’s gonna be full of very unseasonal action, don’t miss out! Get up to speed HERE
And as ever, if you enjoyed what you read here, let the stories know you liked them!
This week, we bear witness to the time-spanning tale of the beginning and the end of the Conjurors of Heaven…
Conjurors of Heaven
First, there was dust.
In that time, there was no land, no sky, no water, no air. Just the dust, and where it moved.
Through the great swirling clouds of the unfashioned chaos went the wandering forms of the first life, lost and alone. With the first life came the first shapes of the world they perceived and thus made. There came to be in that age, before all else, the Winged Folk, who even in that dim time went nameless among themselves. For themselves, they created the air. Then there came to be the stalking shadow of the Wolf, killer of killers, and speakers of the first tongues they found in the air of the black crags which they called from the dust. And then there came to be Man, who was the first to Think, and Man dwelt in the vast reaches of the plains.
In the hollowed hills which sheltered from the wings and fangs that came out of the dust, the thoughts of Man settled the chaos, and the air was quiet. As the first humans came together, they set out into the vastlands to seek the scattered members of their race. The elderfolk had walked fully formed from the dross of creation, broad of shoulder and long of limb, but were few before the Wingfolk or Wolves, and in their long march across the new world, and through the dust which parted but slowly before them, they thought then how to make new generations to walk their steps for themselves, and how to grow them in new ways for the mountains and deep places which began to take shape across the whole of the world.
The elderfolk and their first kin then came together, through generations of trials against the chaos of the world, and they left in their wake things wrought by their hands alone. In homes of hard dust and rock they gathered in silence and thought, and it was then that they heard a voice which called from beyond the dust. But the voice was not a voice of Wolves, but something that they themselves felt was familiar and deep to them, and so they heeded it. The voice said unto them: "Seek ye the tongues of wolves to transmit thought".
And so they did, knowing the voice was a voice greater than that of their enemy.
In that time, Man ranged across the vastlands and into the black crags of old, and there warred with Wolves. The elderfolk would not return to hear the voice, for in a shadowy pass were they slain by Wolves that sounded like dust. But in their steps, as they were born to do, did the new kin leave, having ripped tongues from the jaws of Wolves and placed those tongues in their own, and laid their enemy low and inchoate.
The trek back to their homeland spanned yet another full generation, and Man was surprised that the new kin were born with Wolven tongues and speech in their thoughts. In that time, Man took Wolven words and made them into Mannish words. There was, on the journey, a profusion of new words held in check only by those who were eldest, and there were, too, names for each of them, their names were expressions of their thoughts. In this time, humans had many names for themselves and each other, and they held many names for the things and places of their seeing and making.
During their journey back to the homeland, silent black wings descended from the ashen skies—for there was now sky as there was earth—and sought to steal the tongues of new kin. Though plucked some were, and fled with back into the high dust, the Wingfolk made of themselves enemies of Man. Wings of scale, skin, and feather were torn from bodies that crawled away into dark places, but try as they might, Man's dreams of flight would remain a fantasy.
In their home, in the vastlands, they returned and called out, and the voice spoke back to them. Before a cliff face of raw rugged stone whose breadth nearly covered all the horizon, it revealed itself thus, in a manner which resonates today with every new generation of kin:
"Of all that came from Everything, it was not the winged ones, for they could not bear my words nor had they thought."
"It was not the creeping ones, for though they could bear my words, they had no thoughts."
"No, it was Man who, though you could not bear my words, you had thought, and you could take words. And now you stand here, gathered, the world formed about you by not just your actions but by your thoughts. The dust in the Nothing parts before you, and Nothing becomes Something. It is through me that Something may yet become Anything."
"Know this: thought is the source, but thought is nothing without word. Together, this is action. Know this also: the dust is What Can Be. The dust is what was cast apart so long ago."
"Know now myself: I have delved into the secrets of Everything, and know lore from deep reaches of dust. I will draw now the Great Work of Becoming, and it is you who will assist me in the Great Work. Your words will be divine, your culture will be a ritual, and I will impart to you power and influence in the experiential world."
"But there are laws. Pass these laws down to your kindred as a faith, for faith shall be sacred and loathe to be altered. To your priests I will gift a portion of the sigil, that sign which binds the world in action. Through it, will the world be yours. Through this, we will Become Everything once more."
Lifetimes come to pass…
The vast sweep of a verdant incarnadine landscape under a sky of pale green and pearly cloud was broken only by the worn amber minarets of cities, either perched like beasts atop the broad leafy mounds of crimson, or squatting within the basins of shallow scarlet vales. Over the horizon, long, low sprawls of cracked jade domes and weathered black marble walls lay as reflections of the aeon-weighted heavens. Betwixt these lands lay spans of wilderness. Some were utterly wild and untrodden, crags and canyons abandoned long ago, left to their memories. Others were sparse, if not barren, windswept regions of loose ochre soils and lonely thin forests which never could return to their prime states.
This was the world that the Sigiline Order of Man, the faith ordained so long ago, had called from the dust, stone by stone, and which it by its action, had undone.
Dust-gatherers and dust-breakers eked out a meagre existence outside the cities, seeking every forgotten corner they could for remnants of that old matter of creation, or breaking down what was no longer useful, to call up from the piles by scavenged rite some tool or instrument to sell or work with. These people, spread thin as they were, lived alongside the last of the Hounds, without whom it was possible they would have died long ago. Indeed, the Houndfolk had been cast out in the ages of first cities, for they had sought to bring the faith to the Wolves. It had, by all rights, been somewhat successful, and Wolves by the action of Man and Sigil gained some measure of thought, though it weakened their words.
This was also the first time that the Sigil had been taken beyond the bounds of the priesthood—beyond the Law. And yet, the voice, the Great One, spoke to the wild priests, and taught them.
Generations of kin later, the first stirrings of sundering rippled throughout the old cities. New cities were founded with this unease in their bones, and finally a new city was raised in rebellion. The Sigiline Order was an orthodoxy of heavenly conjurors which claimed unbroken descent from the time of the Voice at the Cliffs. Yet, according to its inner sect of mystics who themselves claimed to be guardians of the Great One's true will, knowing it not as god but as mentor, the orthodoxy had devolved into a mouldering rabble of elites obfuscating the teachings within fawning worship, and who had made the Sigil little more than an untouchable icon.
There was naught for it but schism. Into that new city did they go with their followers, inclined towards primitivism, to be as Man was in elder times, closer to the voice. With them they took their share of the Sigil, and so it was broken again. In that time, too, did Man see to the end of the wingfolk who mocked and mimicked the words, and the Wolves slowly ceased to speak.
And yet, the Great One spoke to them, and so they knew then their truth was the ultimate truth.
The Sigil was passed down in scraps for generations, even the mystics splitting up, becoming secretive and mired in theological politics with their spoils, until the Sigiline orthodoxy began to have dreams of reclamation. Sigiline crusaders marched on the jade domes of the new lands, and two would lay in ruins forevermore. But of those conquered cities, little was truly reclaimed, as with the vision of a new power, a war of conquest raged in the wake of the crusaders, and in its aftermath, secluded cells of bitter regret and insular greed looked on their shards of the sign which bound the world, and through it, could make the world theirs. So it had been said.
And yet, the Great One spoke even to them.
None would remain who had seen the Sigil in anything but its merest scraps. They could only imagine dimly what it would look like all together, made whole, so utterly intricate it would encompass all of the cosmos in its insight and influence. Some wondered if it even really could be seen in its fullness, if it had ever been seen in its fullness, or if that was the symbolic myth of a primal age.
What does remain, down these distant epochs, is the practice of initiation. Never has the power of true action been anything less than sacred and in the hands of novitiates. That, at least, the priests of a dozen stagnant sects in a world of growing silence and gathering dust, could insist upon. Some of those priests even have the writings of an ancient age, copies of copies though they are, and some of those priests can even recite the tongue inscribed upon those yellowed, crumbling leaves, though it has become meaningless to them. Another symbol not to know, but merely to worship.
A memory may recall it.
"The original One, which Was, shattered into all life as we know it. It shattered into Myself, and into wingfolk, and into Wolves, and into You, my kin. One day again the One Shall Be. But for it to Be, there must be the Great Work. Come, and I shall teach you."