Shadows & Sorcery #114
Ooooohohohoohhohohohoho yes it’s the one hundred and fourteenth edition of Shadows & Sorceryyyy
Did you know I love kung fu movies? The 70s-80s Shaw Bros Hong Kong wuxia and horror movies. Love them. Been watching a lot of them recently. Some it may have rubbed off on these stories. I won’t apologize.
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This week we learn just why the Witch’s Crypts exist, we are instructed on the mighty truth of the Crucible of Communion, and we take a long journey to learn from the Sorcerers of the East…
Witch's Crypts
Heavy motes of dust whirled about in the shafts of sickly moonlight which slithered through cracks in the wooden walls of the witch's lair. All was otherwise still now, the two heroes having replaced their burnished bronze dagger-axes into their wide girdles, decorated with strips of dyed linen ending in little bells. Black blood streaked their patterned green tunics, however, and was lain particularly thick on their rather fine leather lamellae bracers. That wouldn't come off easily.
It had been bad business. First it was a creeping shadow in the night, then a face peering in windows, then a shrieking phantom rushing past doorways—in its wake, missing children, pets, livestock. And then more shadows. More faces. More screaming wraiths. A prominent town elder stricken dead and noon, the veins in his neck burst from how hard something had strangled him as he tried to escape. Sorcery was afoot, and neighbours were all but ready to tear down each others doors to proclaim each other the culprit.
Finally, a rotten shack had been spied with a strange light from within, and two wanderers, youths seeking glory, were bade finish it. They fought through a morass of walking corpses, ripe and pierced with nails in strange places across their decaying frames. Several slick-boned, skittering skeletons had assaulted them, their joints held fast with blood-soaked twine and their chests packed with dense, moist grave-earth. Awaiting them atop the shack was a gargoyle stolen from a chapel, painted with blasphemous runes, its wings crushed, and so finally cast into a scum-skinned pond near the lair after a frantic battle against the bent horror in which their dagger-axes were of no use.
The witch had been listening within, and had been preparing some vile spell before the youths rushed it—it, for the witch had not resembled a human being in its advanced state—and clove its head in with their weapons. Alas, two or three words of the poison incantation must have escaped its maw because one of the youths sustained a withering of the flesh on his neck which he suspected would never go away. As if some massive formless darkness had tried to grasp and choke his life out. Luckily the girl's dagger-axe found its mark in the witch's open mouth, and its gateway had been abruptly shut.
They had hacked the thing almost apart in their zeal before the stern words of the burgomaster returned to their addled brains. Witch's corpses are as dangerous as their sorceries. Their flesh is dark nourishment for the vermin that congregate about them, their blood is an elixir for every poison weed and venomous thorn, so soaked through with black alchemies are their forms. The ghosts of madmen and killers, legions of demons, and bestial spirits have taken up residence in their bones, and they have yet to vacate. Even now, worms and flies are digging into their dark loam and escaping into the chill night winds, having taken of the witch what they could, and upon this spot shall grow nameless black lotus flowers that must be set to flame and salted.
The heroes took stock of the lair for a moment before they edged their way out to find a town elder. Upon one wall were several shelves, packed with grey clay jars with painted symbols they could not read. They only looked in one and saw the steaming stew of brown liquid and broken bones before they sealed it back up and replaced it. There were wavering daggers with golden hilts, their blades stained darkly, there were green bells, and a variety of half-loosened yellowed scrolls on jade rollers, upon which were scrawled frightful images and sigils which made the eyes wander. The witch's oozing corpse lay in a square similar to them, though around its bounds were engraved skulls with incense in the eyes, and jars and pots from which there spilled slow smoke along the ground they did not look into.
The work was done, and the youths left never turning their backs on the interior. This had not been warned of by the burgomaster, this was merely instinct. The second they left, their spirits began to wane, and upon their trek back into the town, a cold shroud of intense disquiet placed itself about their shoulders. Hunched, they told the elder it was done, and they only suppressed a groan of pitiful horror by digging their nails into their palms when the elder bade them join the priest in a vigil over the lair, and to dig a depression where the crypt shall be set.
Yes, it had to be buried, and in double quick time. Burn it? That would be absurd. Witch's ashes on the wind. Word had already been sent out and labourers had been chiselling away at a rather large boulder to hollow out since that morning. Proactive, the old elder had been, rest his soul. Once it arrived, hopefully tomorrow morning, they would set the corpse inside and seal its lid with wax from holy candles in which sacred texts and talismans had been burned. But until then, please, go pray over that wretched place and contain what must be contained.
Crucible of Communion
You must be strong to speak with the god. You must be changed. Each broken seal and each chamber passed through will burn away another layer of your self. You will stand naked in body and soul before the final chamber, where all resistance and doubt has been cast off as a shell of brittle ash.
You will walk in, and give a piece of yourself to the flame.
In its place there will smoulder an ember for all time.
It is your task to feed that ember.
The final chamber is the crucible where the worthy and transformed, and the impure lay as cracked, grey bones forevermore. Bear witness to the fire and don its blaze about your shoulders.
But you must prepare for the crucible. Just as the holy smith must refine ore before it can be of use, so must your as yet crude form be manipulated into something with potential.
Visit the burning graves of your kindred, and feel the warmth of their divine flames, tempered and fed over a lifetime of righteous work. See how the tombstone retains warmth even when all else around is enwreathed in steely ice.
Walk in the footsteps of the fire priests and through devotion you may glimpse the invisible flames which all adherents blaze with. Watch them, how they burn away the disease and the sin, how in their wake there is vitality.
There is no cipher or hidden writing in some book, scroll, or ancient tablet to unlock a grand truth. This are the domain of idolaters and mystics who dwell in strange darkness before frightful images and cursed rites.
The hard truth all aspirants must face in the crucible is that there is and only can be fire.
This can be said to you, taught to you, revealed to you in fiery vision, but only amidst the flames will you really know, and be changed.
Or destroyed.
Sorcerers of the East
I spent more than a month with one of the mountain-dwelling masters of the central summit-range of Khorlo, amidst the cold and blustery but bright and lively monastery-town of Gurchun. The master—for that is how I will refer to the sprightly old fellow, his actual title having only delicate contextual translations—invited me to a duel not long after my presence was made known. Very polite and almost friendly he was, perhaps because I had taken the trouble to learn as much of their dialect as I could. That was until the battle began, of course, when I first bore witness to the sorcery of the eastern lands.
I must report that I was soundly beaten, and quickly at that. I have never in my life seen such powers. He had seen much of mine, though, and commended me on my skills, blasphemous though they were to him. That, he said, was my first lesson. Once he learned of my station back home in Enverion he treated me quite differently, as one sage to another, but I was glad of his willingness to teach, and treated him as a mentor. He spoke to me of my own magick, of its reputation across the ancient ages of his homeland, and how it had become the stuff of black magicians, they who would bend the ancestors and celestials against the True Path, a difficult religious and philosophical doctrine which permeates almost every aspect of their culture. It would seem we are a society of witches to them!
After some nights of guarded conversation, and much expounding of our views and morals back home, he softened up, understanding ours was not a way of hubris or arrogance or malevolence, but of mankind looking outwards towards the universe in communion. He began, then, to instruct me on the "pure" magick.
How do I explain it... It's so utterly different to the magicks you and I have spent our lives dealing with. Above and Beyond have been the foundations for our order's plan of the cosmos—the invisible vastness of which we are the visible, experiential portion, through which aught may manifest and express. Have we not ourselves authored tomes upon the inhabitants and powers of the Outer Spheres?
I must elaborate at length, but begin with this foundation: put as plainly as I can, it is believed that we co-habit our bodies with other spirits. The "us" we conceive of, our whole selves, is to them, the intellect. This intellect resides in this body with several others with whom it works in unison. The intellect is the seeing, thinking, reasoning spirit—the one reading this right now!
Now, two things: one, the spirits within the rest of the body perform functions independent of the guiding intellect, these are what we know as autonomic functions. And two, sometimes these spirits take over the body momentarily, this is how the easterners describe instinct. But ultimately, and most importantly, all of these things are under the purview of the intellect. It is their belief that there is not one thing in our bodies we cannot take control of.
You see, just as the mind can be focused for incredible precision and complex logical or abstract processes, these other spirits can be rallied by the intellect into performing incredible acts. This is their magick. It is not Above and Beyond for them, it is Within and Beneath. I have never seen a human body capable of such things as the master was, not without a night legendary invocation of spirits. I am partly of the belief now, and maybe this is my excitement talking, that our magick has been, all this time, calling upon other spirits to unlock our inner powers.
I watched this old man, using naught more than a series of interlocking hand seals or flowing motions of his limbs, stand firm as quarterstaffs splintered against his chest, as swords rebounded from his arms, as he caught in mid-air arrows and spears, I saw him levitate over the swing of a swordspear. I saw him effortlessly throw off several charging fighters like they were made of straw. Fire did not even singe his hair. I saw him bend a blade with flurries of blows, and even through one supreme effort, leave a palm print in solid stone from across a room. But there's more to it than feats of strength, the master explained to me. The nature of this sorcery, you see, is longevity.
The man claimed to be no less than five centuries old, and knew well many generations of his descendants. Imagine my shock when I learned that across a dozen eastern lands did numerous ancients live unmarred by time. The sorcerers of Enverion must partake in alchemical solutions and and soul-fastening rites, but this magick is of a more organic kind. The key difference, though, is the easterners do not believe in souls and spirits like we do—yes, intangible forces and intelligences abound, but all are finite. There is no timeless quintessence. To achieve immortality is their highest aspiration, lest they melt back into the formless pool of life which dwells behind the world.
I must admit, that although they seem unable, or unwilling, to perform the vast feats of our homeland's wizardry, I was deeply humbled by this practice, which was for them faith and magick, less of the cold metaphysics you and I have spent our lives immersed in.
I have sent this letter ahead of me as I travel back to the capital, for you must prepare. A manual of eastern sorcery in my possession, and I have enclosed relevant translations for your benefit. A great synthesis is upon us, my friend.