Shadows & Sorcery #117
HEY it’s Shadows & Sorcery one one seven, get IN here!!!!!
*halo theme intensifies*
You know what, I think you’ll like this week’s edition. I do. Except for one person reading this who won’t. They know who they are. But everyone else, you’ll like it. Why? Evil magic. Ghosts. Weird towers…
Missed last week’s edition? Or just signed up? Check it out HERE
And hey, please take a second to let the stories know you like them—tap that little heart button!
This week, we follow a travelling magician into the grim Desert of the East, we seek out the secrets of an Undead Temple, and we uncover the power of the Sigil of Spires…
Desert of the East
My friend,
I write to you from, of all places, a hospital in far northern Khorlo. Do not panic—I'll survive, much to chagrin of the college. But I have been through something of an ordeal, and I fear my expedition to the desert was...well, not unsuccessful, but I have naught to return to you and the college but warnings.
I rode into the desert a fortnight ago. I was well prepared in every regard, save for actually meeting my contact. The fellow was direct—that is, aggressive. I was aware upon his first sighting of me I was being tested. Our handshake, my stride, my general bearing had to correct itself at every second around the man, a tribesman in hard leather breastplate and much fur. I have come to believe now they are of the mountain land's kin, not the ice field folk, but represent some lowland breed entirely apart from anyone around them.
The desert is so different to the ice. There is a dryness that was not present there, a parched, scorching kind of dry, and yet it is so cold. The sand is not soft, it is rugged, terribly rough, almost like shale in places. Were it not for my great bird's tough claws and mighty limbs, I don't think I would have survived the relatively short walk to the warlord's camp.
They are a tough, grim people, but they are not joyless asectics—indeed, they are given to indulgence in comforts at any moment that allows it. Not a single one of them is ever without a pouch of snuff, or some sweetmeat, or skin of wine. It's a show of strength, you see. "You don't bother me, desert". They need to let it know they are strong. Strength and its expression is everything here. It's how they've learned to pry powers from its ageless depths. I think, in truth, their practices are less a true sorcery, and something closer to what we in Enverion would call old fashioned theurgy. I had ample time to study as I found myself knee deep in it.
I met with the warlord—understand these people live in perpetual conflict, and strength in brain and brawn determines who holds power—and had to pull out all the stops to overcome him. Had I not been a foreigner, likely they would have crowned me king on the spot. I'm guessing foreigners, though, have to work harder to gain trust through strength. Evidently, twelve slaves had been fed to the sands that morning in preparation for this confrontation. I opted for Khorlo magic to meet the warlord in combat, there is a definite parallel between the mountain sorcerers' martial arts and the cold desert battle magic.
And yes, slavery is a commonplace practice out here. The only currency is strength, and it buys power over others. Their system is far more complicated and loose than you might expect, though, with several castes of slaves and serfs, both temporary and permanent, land workers and labourers, each one with certain rights of their own, with opportunity for all but the weakest to earn freedom and to even reverse the situation through feats of might. A strong slave is a well-kept slave, and I met several personal attendants of the warlord who seemed, if not comfortable, then at least fully accepting of their situation. It is my understanding that my victory against the warlord, though a slim one, brought them much satisfaction.
I had expected a caste of shamans or priests or rite-leaders here, or at least the warlord performing that role, but no, the theurgy of the desert is intensely personal, and no one is barred from performing it. Not even the weakest slaves who are almost always fodder for gruesome rituals. If they can muster up the blood, they're free to call up whatever they can. See, if strength is the only currency, blood is the value of that coin, and it is always high. The warlord brought me to one of their ritual sites to partake of this magick myself—another unspoken test.
When I arrived and found three bound slaves there, I knew what was coming. Any hesitation would have meant the entire tribe turning on me. I had to think like one of them, that these slaves had been handed over to me freely, a gift—you understand that these people, they reward, they take, but they do not gift. So, I called down a celestial bolt, as I always have such evocations prepared. It showed strength to them, I think, if their reactions meant anything. Three men dead, blasted to bits, and cast into an open swamp-like pit of mouldering bones and brown, rotten blood. Immediately I felt the rush of power, vile but absolutely invigorating. I felt as if able to pull down powers from the stars themselves, though in a moment of clarity I dared do no such thing.
The warlord accepted me fully afterwards, and that night spoke to me of the desert. There are all kinds of things under the sand, in the stone. The land is ancient in ways no one can fathom. Older than the mountains and their verdant valleys. Older than the ice which encroaches from the north. Older than the lush plains far beyond. Maybe older than the waters. The stars shone first on the desert, and before that it was something else, but what that something else was, none could guess. The tribes tread its corpse underfoot, and would do so until the end of time.
It could be roused back into life with blood—hot, living blood, and flesh entombed in stone. It reacts to the final throes of life—the strongest throes of a desperate but hopeless scrambling for existence. The trick was in learning how to elicit different things, and you couldn't teach that. You had to learn that yourself, and you had to spend a lot of blood to do it. I asked why I felt a surge of power, the warlord answered that that was simply what was closest to hand.
In the night, I went out into the desert alone, and blurred myself and the stone, the sand, the dust, using that northern sorcery. They found me in the morning, grasping at nothing in the air, my eyes vacant. Some sense was slapped into me, and the warlord had me delivered to some small border village, and eventually back into Khorlo. I heard nothing else from them after that, and I hope I never do.
I remember everything, but there's little to tell.
That desert isn't dead, but it is dying. It's been dying for millennia. The only way it has to survive? I knew its thoughts as I felt myself stretched so thin I thought I'd snap. The desert people are its prisoners, and its devoted keepers. They will never leave. The desert is dying, but it is strong. It rewards their acts with scraps of primal magicks dredged up from deeps—they say none can fathom the age of the desert, but they really have no idea. I'm not even sure I do. And I cannot help but think to myself as I lay here, what if the desert were to one day be empty? Who would feed it? What would it do?
Leave those sands alone, and tell the college to do the same. Leave the tribes to spill their blood down the gullet of a silent, moribund vastness.
Please forgive the melancholy tone I have taken, my friend. I fear certain things weigh still upon my mind.
I hope to return in time for the Madrigals.
Undead Temple
In the existence before the Law of the Wheel was set on the world, and on things in the world, the Old Lords warred for dominion of the earth. In the end, these Lords took clades of primitive humanity and established far reaching lands wherefrom the Lords ruled from on high, or from below, and their command would be embodied by Sovereign and Exarch, who would carry out the will of their Lord with logic and wisdom. Between the Lords and their lands were drawn up extensive treaties which detailed the rights, privileges, and influences of Lords across the world. The Law of the Wheel and the Half Hundred Tractates became the holy writ of all mankind.
But in the old war, many Lords were slain. While humans were ushered into their Lord's Halls upon death, the Lords of the pre-dawn age did not die like men, and they remained in their primeval graves in strange states.
It was through knowledge these graves that the undead came to be.
Many ages into the dominion of the Lords across the world, human explorers, travelling sellswords, and aristocratic "adventurers" happened upon strange things in the far reaches of their Lords' lands. None of them returned, and while some vanished, gone without lament, the families of others were haunted by unsettling visions. Young scions experienced visitations that wore their kindred's face, and into these families was born a secret cult of undeath, and down their lines were passed the rites of calling the old ghosts, free of flesh and form, until it made its way beyond these bloodlines and into the world at large, but ever in the shadows.
That the undead exist is by no means a secret, and their eldritch hungers are as a scourge upon the living and the holy writ of Law and Treaty. And yet, they remain a temptation, and many from city and hamlet like pay handsomely for the old rites of calling, and make surreptitious pacts with ghosts. Upon their demise, they are invited to a hidden temple in a wild and lonely place where they are granted a new form by their new Lords which yet slumber in their aeon-weighted tombs.
Into a hand-carved tunnel does a fresh corpse wander, lit by the lurid flames of low, wide braziers, at the end of which are crude but highly adorned shrines with shards of a Dead Lord's very gravestone, safe-kept across countless temples, through which their dominion over the whole of the world is invoked, and what leaves these subterranean microcosms are formless phantoms, which flit as through fog in the air, dark-shrouded wraiths which fly over benighted skies and reach with cold hands into open windows, and the desiccated but invigorated forms of revenants which stride without need for rest or sleep, or fear of pain or demise.
The Lords of the Dead are many in number, a secret kingdom peopled by dreaming corpses of righteous, lamented Hero-Lords and sinister, nameless Lords of deep and dark. Boundless and ancient is their knowledge, for whatever is taken to the grave can be plucked by their hands alone. The breadth of their wisdom is too much to bear for many living scholars, and into fearsome wilds do some go to seek undead temples and bargain for knowledge forgotten by the living world.
And their steps are more often than not followed by living faithful of mighty and pious Lords, who with hammer and censer, smother phantoms and wraith, and smash gravestone and revenant bones. Theirs is a losing battle, though they know it not, for even Lords die, and they do not die like men.
Sigil of Spires
The spire reached a full day's walk into the sky. A thin, single spiral staircase, ever upwards, with no repose, no rest, until the summit was attained. She had been told it was an honour beyond honour to tread the steps, to go to the ante-chamber, past which dwelt divinity itself. But as she took her fifth rest that day, her legs aching from the incessant, monotonous ascension, more a climb than a walk, she wondered if perhaps she was being taught some kind of lesson. Nothing of the world was permitted in the spire, all that walked into it was her, the clothes on her back, and a light-making sigil.
At some point, she stopped again, sat down, and studied the sigil set into the wall before her, letting herself exist in the moment, with no thought towards the agony of the climb. She'd been making liberal use of them whenever one appeared, for even folk like the pillar saint still far above required them. It resembled a confusion of wavering, hard-edged spirals radiating from a central point, carved into the rock itself. She took a stylus, a silver rod with glass tip, and ran it through the grooves. She could have sworn there was a light trilling, maybe around her, maybe in her head, as she ran the sigil, and it came with a rushing sensation, definitely in her body, that flooded her sore limbs and washed over her brain in a cool wave.
She took a deep breath, the mustiness of the dry, dusty tower scratching her throat, and continued, fatigued in spirit, invigorated in body. She wouldn't have minded something to eat, though. But food was a worldly pleasure, and flesh was only of use to teach the spirit. Sigils made no use of matter, they worked beyond that which rotted and passed as foulness and waste.
How far up was she now? There were no windows—this was a space that by necessity had been cut off from the outside world, from the earth, from the sun. The stone that made up this spire was from the highest peaks, nearest the air, and was worked with such cunning that it could stand the wrath of any tempest, and, laden with dust as it was, would only ever fall when the world finally ended.
To light her way, a palm sized sigil which played a hazy pale yellow luminescence that left the way above and below in a solid darkness. It was old. A genuine relic of two thousand years ago, entrusted to her by the inner temple. It was no transcription, but the genuine voice of a spirit of the upper air, directly into stone. Long ago, they had come down from the clouds to speak—but they didn't emit sound, no audible words, but their voices carved language into the rock. Much like how strong winds batter and gouge and erode the mountains and sea-cliffs. It was the basis of every tongue from around the world. People had learned to "run" them by pure accident, running their fingers through the grooves, eliciting the meanings and powers of the spirit's words. Then came glass-tipped styluses, although some zealous adherent implanted glass on the tips of their fingers.
At some point, spirits ceased to come down and speak. So instead, people followed them back up into the air, in spires, from which developed a tradition of brutal asecticism. Apparently it was hard to gain the trust of airy spirits, and one had to prove one was apart from the world to hear their voices—that is, have their voices directly imprint upon you. Sainthood was a lifetime commitment. People could only guess what a saint must look like after hundreds of years of spirit-speech. She herself wondered just what might be waiting at the top of this spire. Not that she was going to see the saint, she was of the world, and this was not permitted. Still, her imagination would sometimes make vague images in the darkness above, like something peering down at her before ducking back into the shadows.
Quite suddenly, she came to a short landing. It had an arched ceiling of extremely old and finely detailed stonework. She thought it odd why people decorated their chapels and shrines, if these places were supposed to be evocations of the calm, pure upper air, and stone being the ultimate expression of stagnant matter. A lot of intricate scrollwork, spirals, long curls—shapes meant to represent the formless, invisible spirits. At the end of this very short passage was a door, also of stone, and also decorated. She approached it with some small measure of hesitancy. Would she have to wait? The signal had been given three days ago. A part of her was afraid she'd walk in on the saint. What the punishment might be for such transgression and defilement didn't bear thinking about.
She knocked on the door. It seemed only sensible, made of solid rock though it was. After a moment, she pushed it open, and quite easily, too. It had been fit upon a cunning hinge or some such, and when she entered the ante-chamber, it quietly fit back into place with a little "thunk". Inside was a small round room, lit only by her light sigil. It was filled, floor to ceiling, with stacks of stone slabs. The saint's transcription materials, of course. She noticed there were some scattered about the floor, pushed to the sides, near the neat stacks. They had upon them unfinished sigils. Now there would be something worth a penny or two down below, she thought very quickly to herself. But the fresh, finished sigil that lay in the centre of the ante-chamber caught her attention, and brought her mind back to her task.
The last hand that had touched this was some several centuries old, had ascended to this spire's apex before her town even existed, and was sitting amidst living divinity just above her. The door that led to the spire top was just about within arm's reach. The tremble which rose in her chest was partly humbling, and partly, she couldn't exactly figure out why, frightening. Something about the faltering of matter before transcendent purity, the ritekeepers would no doubt say. To her, it felt of something humanity wasn't meant to know.
She scooped up the tablet gently and put it under her arm, opened the door to the ante-chamber, re-ran her light sigil, stood for just a second looking back into the silent, shadowy room, and then began her return to the world of matter, thinking all the while what this new sigil might do. She was tempted to try it, but the ritekeepers would probably know. Indentations into the stone or some such.