Día duit! This one hundred and twenty first edition of Dorchadas agus Dríaocht comes out right on the very cusp of the final hours of Lá Fhéile Pádraig, depending on what time zone you may be in!
S&S is of course an Irish publication (if you didn’t know that you do now) so I get to be obnoxious about it one day of the year. If you’re in the wrong time zone, well I’m sorry.
Anyway, you’d better grab your robes and holy scrolls because this week’s stories took on something of an ecclesiastical flavour, full of churches and theology and stuff, but sure you’re used to that by now!
Unless you JUST got here, in which case, check out last week’s grim and sorcerous edition HERE
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This week, we descend into the misty Cathedral Depths, we glimpse from afar the Flames of the Shadow, and we listen closely in a Church of Echoes…
Cathedral Depths
The air is shaded by a haze of candle smoke and incense. It hangs heaviest over the marble floor, around the baldachins, and in half domes which litter the vast interior. The songs of choirs intermingle with the chants, mutterings, excited voices, and footsteps of the faithful. The cathedral, which dwarfs the city it dwells amidst, is large enough to have streets of its own between the minor chapels, shrines, and tombs, where devotees come to petition the monks and priests who inhabit the cells for divine aid, or should they be coming from further afield, access to the lower layers of the temple complex.
As one descends, the litanies become dulled, and take on the effect of a soft, warbled droning. Lit by braziers on tall stands, the heavy smoke of not just them, but from the overhead censers and the great chamber above, flows in murky streams down the many steps into the reliquaries that occupy every possible wall and corner in the depths. The walls are of dark marble, black and purple veined, with accents upon the pillars, porticos, and frames, of pearly white, cloudy gold, and spots of crimson.
Every reliquary houses something belonging to an old god. They are the last links to deities gone, forgotten, and cast away. Indeed, gods fade, but their mortality isn't ours, and besides, much like any human lord, people can revolt against their deity with some effort and abandon it altogether. It is the cathedral's duty to explore the astral plane and find gods to fit the populace. When a pact is struck, a community in need is assigned, and a relic forged as a symbol of that bond and a conduit of communion.
Votive offerings, burnt sacrifices, libations, and more are performed to and over the relics which occupy honoured positions in every little country temple. Until they don't, of course, and cathedral agents come to remove the relic and, with their high authority, sever the bond in a complicated, strenuous, and expensive ceremony. Rural folk can be set in their ways for a dozen generations, or fidget in their faith for a decade as the fancy takes them. In any case, relics are removed to a reliquary in the slumbering cathedral depths, where deities whisper from the beyond, and it is the clerics of the inner ministry which continue for years afterwards to listen, and to draw upon their powers.
Gods rarely may leave of their own accord. Deities hunger, and sustenance is symbolic. The objects of offerings and sacrifices do not feed the gods, it is their weight, their importance, their value which sustains the deity's power, and provides them the powers of blessings and boons. So, if they are not fed, they will leave. And like human lords, some gods are cheap and flighty, and go with debts on their shoulders. Gods owing favours are almost always called upon by their old congregation who pay well to access the reliquaries, where the inner ministry sees to it that all accounts are taken care of.
Flames of the Shadow
The world is tinged in shades of murk. Ashen currents course through the black heavens as sable slabs rise and sprawl across obsidian earth and oceans of ink. It is a soft dark with an immense weight, embracing each and every soul. It defines the world, and its deep serenity is revered in the hearts of all life by equally deep senses that shape the world in the mind.
Until you know of flame.
We use a different word to describe the world: shadow. The world is a shadow. Formless Masters tell us that the streak of pure black that accompanies our strides are our true selves, the primal quintessence from which our bodies are projected. It is taken for granted, but we know, we flameseekers, that they rise not from a greater dark, but are cast by that far away blinding pinpoint of flame the eldest seekers spoke of, that beacon to which we are drawn. The shadow is no more than that—a lightless space, and it is that obfuscation the flameseekers must rise above, into the truth.
Ignorance is not oppressive, it is not violent, not brutish—it is deceitful, seductive, comfortable. Keep a world's eyes closed and its souls are yours. This is what we have come to believe, to know. The world is a shadow, and as such, must be cast by a false power which obscured from us the flame.
We gather within hidden heights, in temples open to the firmament upon the crowns of knolls or within old towers, their walls coated in pallid shades to try and transcribe the esoteric words of those who glimpsed the flame. It is there we recite the founding myth of our ascendant faith, that an age ago twelve delvers into the furthest dark came to a current in the firmament no hands had ever touched, no forms had ever been immersed in, and upon that peak, glimpsed through the parting shadows, a streaks which scoured the dimness from their eyes and sent them reeling back into the world utterly changed. They wandered with new thoughts and visions in their minds, and it was known they were a new people. In a dream was it that the name of flame came to them, and so forever have their disciples been known as its seekers.
The Twilight comes, this we know. First there will be a darkness illimitable as the the false power's shadow deepens from the approach of fire, then slowly but surely, it will fade as one, its currents and shades cast away before the rising fire whose embrace will be as enlightenment.
Church of Echoes
The old church out by Waywater is a fine specimen of its type, a "diamond" church with two fine arched doors of admittance, each with handsome decorated porticos. The three anterior angles each hold their required decorated pillar with faded blue and red paint, and dusty old gold icons. The fourth posterior pillar, divided from the rest of the church by a lattice and flanked by two broad oval windows opaque with age, holds its usual niche, framed by saintly statues in well-kept gold. Mats and kneeling benches are found across the central chancel around the podium, somewhat disorganized.
And yet, to the theologically trained eye, curious details begin to emerge. Let it be known that Waywater dwells within a provincial district, and is itself a very old settlement, having only in recent times come into its own as a town. This goes well to explain the nature of the church's unique aspects. For one, the posterior lattice is conspicuously new, only some fifty years old, while the stone into which it is set has clearly been reworked and reformed many dozens of times, one might assume, and correctly, over a thousand years. The interior of the church does not quite match the proper and attractive exterior.
But such is the case in any rural church. Things survive here far longer than they do in the cities. The pace of life—the pace of survival is utterly different to that of the warp and weft of metropolitan life. Things enjoy their status and they enjoy it well.
Although the church at Waywater is a Novidian edifice, and a venerable tradition too, there are images upon its anterior pillars not of the Novidian faith. The pillars themselves are composites, constructed from roughly shaped and mended blocks of stone, and one can find in them the scratches and gouges—old but maintained—conforming to the formula of heathen altar incantations believed to continuously call forth gods of the green, a belief system once rampant across this entire southwestern region. In place of the names of gods, however, are square framed icons of Novidian demigods, hung by nails driven into the stone. The bare low dome of the roof looks old, but has been altered—there are spaces from which things may be hung at certain times of the year.
The floor slabs, the inscriptions on the insides of the door arches—the list goes on. In form it is Novidian, in function it is countless things from a seedbed of ancient faiths. This place may be Novidian now, but once it was aught else, and before that it was a meeting place of many other things, and before even that, the earth this structure stands on was home to something older.
None of these things ever left.
Gods, spirits, and ancestors call out in the prayers of today's devotees, their primal rites and rituals emerge from the depths to creep into solemn Novidian ceremonies with song and gesture and curious offering. They manifest in bloody blessings, twilight visions, and bestial vigour.
In time, the Novidian demigods will too add to the sediment of the Waywater's church, as they will a thousand churches across the isles, and an antiquarian of later date will no doubt remark on the curious classical touches the priests of that day add to their celebrations.
Go raibh maith agat!