Shadows & Sorcery #119
Yeah uh I double checked and this is definitely the one hundred and nineteenth edition of Shadows & Sorcery
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This week, we avert our gaze from the Moon’s Sigil, we unearth a Conjuror’s Sepulchre, and we learn of the Magic of Night…
Moon's Sigil
It had been a game for those clans who dwelt within the old manor to figure out from which room the odd window under the western parapet faced. It was the one which looked over the forest, whose untouched leagues were once as a bulwark against invading hordes, but was now just a brooding expanse of deep green shadow. No bedroom harboured its curious octagonal shape, no closet, no sliding panel, no thin little overlooked passage. It was a window dimmed with the collected dust of age, plainly gone long untouched.
Castellan Marovan, however, didn't wish for his new charge to be riddled with secret passages like some damned Levuccan fortress, and so a systematic exploration of the old manor was enacted until the Castellan determined the curious angle in the northwestern wall of a bare, innocuous connecting room to be the culprit. It was set to with hammers until the thick old stone fell inward, and a fog of dust poured out, and there was revealed to those present, quite curiously, an old study.
But any dreams the Castellan may have had of nights spent in a perfectly preserved, antiquated study were dashed when a moment's glance revealed sun-bleached ancient parchment and fallen open tomes, all of it scrawled with thaumaturgical symbols. A cloth was hung over the opening as quick as could be done, and magicians were called in to take stock of the discovery.
"Have you the blind ready?"
"Aye..."
"Good. Keep it ready, I know this is laborious work but we are apt to come upon it suddenly."
An old wizard's study shut up like this? There could only one be reason in their minds. College life had prepared them for it since their first step over its threshold. The study of the magicians was the legacy of the wizards of old, the astrologers of antiquity, and sky shamans of prehistory. Humanity's eyes had always been firmly affixed upon the heavens from which there radiated all manner of occult mystery. Instead of building towers and contraptions to place themselves amidst the upper air, man had listened very carefully, and had learned to call it down instead.
But some celestial forces came forth all too eagerly.
The heavens saw and spoke and remembered with senses and voices and minds that were ruinous in anything but a whisper, but a glimpse. This was more true for the moon than aught else in the sky. It took very little to call it down. All that need be done was etch its sign in stone or clay, or as time went on, painted on canvas or parchment, or, as some discovered to their intense horror, merely pictured in the mind. Over the course of some seven thousand years it enjoyed many sojourns to the world surface, whispering to men who knew no better things they ought never to know.
For this reason did the magicians of the Colleges forbid its learning or use to any but the most adept. And even then, their privilege came with the necessity of mind-numbing drugs and blinds so that it might not come unbidden. All the sign needed was to be read by a human, and the moon would descend.
Merely the edge of the tract had been lifted before the magician slammed it shut. But a corner stroke had been glimpsed, and the mind couldn't help but complete the sigil.
"Damn it anyway!" cursed the elder of the two magicians, perfectly aware and uncaring of his loss of composure. He pulled up a length of black cloth from around his neck and over his mouth, and flung a handful of thick powder into the air that hung suspended. The younger of the two took in deep breaths as they both recited in unison a litany designed to focus the mind elsewhere. The younger one's speech began to dull and trip over itself after a minute—the numbing agent did its trick, and it seemed to do so just in time. The older man helped his partner out of the chamber and laid her against the wall. Poor fool, he thought. But exemplary performance nonetheless.
He set the blind over his eyes and made sure it was sealed tight around so that not even a stray sliver of light from near that thing could get in, just in case it may fall open. He removed from his pocket a length of deep ochre chalk and traced the familiar sign of the seventh world, the lifeless sphere which smoulders even now in the far dark. An elementary and miniscule summoning of immense practical application. He didn't even shift his blind until he heard the final piece of the tract sigh as it turned to ash.
The Castellan would inquire soon. Quite possibly the room was a trove of moon-wrought secrets, he would have to look forward to a full investigation from the College.
Conjuror's Sepulchre
An unquiet wind hushed through the grass, making sections of it flare for a second with star-frost. The light hung especially clear on the ring of trees, whose limbs curved up like candelabras, their slowly wavering, upward pointing leaves like little white fires. But all else within the forest's shadow was a formless, swirling darkness, countless currents all converging on a single point ahead.
The conjuror's sepulchre.
In that wan, frosted nightscape, it was the only thing that shone clear and bright in the midst of the churning shadows. A rectangular stone, some six feet in length, slanted upwards gently like a ramp. At its head was a lit candle. They knew it was no gravekeeper who maintained it. That candle's flame had come from somewhere else, on the Other Side, and would never die. It wasn't a marker or memorial, it was a warning.
They set to the white stone facade with two great hammers, while the third waited to wrench the slab away. They knew there wasn't a human soul within a league of this place but themselves. Certainly not that which dwelt below. Conjuration, it was known, required the conjuror to allow things through their body from the Other Side. Things there needed some form of material expression. Conjurors let things work through their very flesh in symbiosis, as a conjured power in anything but living flesh was liable to walk off by itself.
But the technique inevitably left traces in the conjuror that accumulated over the years, and began to change them.
Any second, that slab would come loose, and be pulled away to reveal the remains of an adept conjuror. Someone who had called through so many things over their lifetime their flesh could no longer bear their mutations. Maybe they had simply died from them. Maybe they had been killed out of mercy. Or fear.
And yet, for all that, conjurors had enjoyed a special status in society since time out of mind. For all that they bore the mark of the Other Side, had they not been calling up miracles that the three had themselves known the fruits of? Had these souls, burdened by the touch of the beyond, not been saints and demigods of ages past? The three were not so far gone that it didn't pass through their minds.
But when a rogue conjuror shows up? Foul, rotten business. And profitable...or, if one played their cards right, powerful.
The stone cracked and shifted. Nothing stirred in the trees or the grass. Not even the wind. The bar was set in, and the sundered slab shoved aside. Warm, clammy air wafted from within. Steeling themselves, the three peered in, blades and hatchets unsheathed to do what had been ordered. The rogue would want some limb or befouled organ for their sympathetic traces, so that things from the Other Side might be called back easier.
Alas, the three graverobbers were not themselves conjurors, nor had they been prepared by their enthusiastic employer for the realities of dealing with the remains of an adept conjuror. Traces from the Other Side come in many forms aside from mutating forces. Some of them are animate, even intelligent, and they resent imprisonment in cold lightless stone when there is a whole new realm for them explore.
In the serene shimmer of deep night's silver stars, something hunched over three corpses which, at its bidding, shivered, stirred, and uprose, resembling something other than the three thieves they once had been.
Magic of Night
Warm golden fires blaze in limitless number under the calm cold of the silver sunlight. In this clarity are the bones of the earth scryed by logicians and cogitators for the benefit of humankind. Sprawling cities of sky-reaching metal towers act as conduits and lenses for swirling cosmic energies which every day drive the species further and further into enlightenment. Days are spent in flame-enhanced vigorous labour or cool, sunlit rumination.
But when the sun sets and the fires fade—when the world shuts its eyes for rest, it, alongside mankind, dreams.
Sometimes, in a fitful sleep, or in a particularly deep slumber, old memories well up. This is true of both humankind and the world it lives on. The night and the dream and the sleep are within, they are introspective. From out of dream do some humans come slowly, and perhaps, sometimes, unwillingly. Old memories run deeper than the individual dreamer, and visions of an all but alien past peer out from the abyss of time. One whose savage energy bewitches the mind and soul more than the cold steel of hard logic into which these dreamers feel mankind is slowly entombing itself.
Into the night do these people go, under the dimming streams of the day's scattered sunlight, and into the far places untouched by the hand of the logicians, ungazed upon by the eyes of the cogitators. There are yet spans not under man's sway, but the earth's sway, and there, in the night, does the world dream, and remember. The shadows of rugged, naked stone towers seem to coalesce from out of the darkness. From their yawning mouths ancient memories wander, clad in formless flowing garb, making them appear like airy phantoms.
Into the cool dawn light do these waking dreamers come filled with an aching nostalgia whose only balm are the secret and forgotten things they can pull from the dream, to be pored over in chambers well hidden from prying eyes. Things cast aside in man's ascendancy are handled with intense reverence, and names gone unspoken for millennia are whispered alone with shuddering devotion. The dream of a mythic age is aflame in their hearts, of its return, or its full and total rebirth out of the steel skeleton of a faithless world.
As darkness begets slumber, they fill their ritual spaces with it to subdue the senses of those who might see things they are not ready for. Only, in time it makes for a terrible sensitivity, even weakness to the vivifying effects of silver sunlight, and makes even the most robust nightseekers cower before golden flames, as if exposure to the deep has irreversibly inverted their very natures.
But such people soon disappear into the night, and appear often in the dreams of their kin.