Shadows & Sorcery #123
Happy birthday! To you, maybe? If so, congrats! To S&S? No, that’s in September. But definitely to me, for this one hundred and twenty-third edition releases on my birthday—no rest for the wicked, I say, it must be released to the people. They yearn for flash fiction.
And oh my, what flash fiction it is! A three-part deep dive into a bleak world of warping life-gods and ancient undead magics…
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This week, we learn the power behind the Magic of the Undead, we delve into the Tomb of Knights, and we seek out the Primal Tomb…
Magic of the Undead
Something befalls the body after death. Or perhaps, it is more correct to say that something changes after death. Or maybe something is lost. Some would say gained, but such folk are few and far between, and in most opinions, are not to be trusted. The phenomena surrounding corpses, human or no, is part and parcel of culture itself, of tradition and custom. If there was ever a time it did not happen, it was so long ago now it may well never have existed, for no record or even implication exists.
Undeath is a fact. The wraith, the revenant, the lich, and their magic, shall be with us until the end of time.
Mankind worships life. Youth, beauty, vitality, virility, fertility, growth, and rebirth. The green fields, the rich dark soil, the towering trees, the rushing stream and cascading river, the red hot crimson of blood and the supple flesh it courses through. One might surmise that life beyond demise would be attractive, but in truth, humanity looks upon the withered corpse which walks with nothing less than horror and a sense of perversion. There is an acute disgust of age and desiccation in the life-cults of man, and the image of absolute death animated fills most folk with loathing.
But not all.
When a corpse awakens, its lifeblood dried and its flesh gaunt and hollow, it steals out in the night with the curious silent swiftness awarded to the dead. It matters not the form taken, for some are more of air than matter, they seem almost drawn to the hinterlands of human realms, on borderlands between village walls and raw wilderness. Places much like themselves, perhaps. From the half-wilds where human feet may seldom tread, or be gazed upon from afar, do stories come of meetings in the twilight, strange cries, frightful calls, and bargains struck with shadows. Accounts like these exist the world over.
There are many things the undead can offer the living that the passive powers of the green and the deep cannot offer, that cannot be drawn forth. Magic is the art of the undead, the plumbing of depths no living body can behold. For the dead, all barriers are cast aside. Many are the living humans who surreptitiously seek a glimpse beyond, but few are they who go out into the night and beseech the corpse walkers for their powers, in return for what, it has never been recorded, but magic has a price, and few are willing to pay it.
Naught but one thing has escaped this half-secret world in all the ages through which it has persisted, and this thing has survived as knowledge of an art, not quite a sorcery, whereby living human beings may command minor powers at great risk to themselves. The rite of mortification is perilous precisely because those who practice it and found out are known as maimed, starving outcasts made to beg for scraps as a cruel irony for their fealty to death, before being given to the warping, formless life-gods. The mindless wandering titans will live forever, their forms of flowing, supple flesh being as blessed icons, conduits for the life-gods to express themselves in subtle motions.
Those mortifiers who survive and escape become as quasi-deads, able to trace and pull and draw with corpse-limbs, awaiting the time of their inevitable service and tutelage under one of the many liches of the wastelands who will usher them into full undeath.
Tomb of Knights
In the windswept and dusk-laden realms far outside the gaze of mankind, silent spires of sombre stone plunge high into the heavens, their zeniths immersed in currents of world-energy unseen to even the mightiest of the life-gods. They are arranged across vast distances in configurations known only to the old dead within, and are as much fortresses of sorcery as they are watchtowers.
The undead realm does not exist like that of the living, for the dead do not eat, they do not sleep, they do not rest. The inhabitants of those stark towers and lifeless lands are packed into enclaves of dutiful attendants to the liches who peer into the unthinkable secrets of the cosmos, waiting to be called upon by their own masters in the sky-flung crags of the unmade world—the pure world.
In a vast natural cavern of gargantuan pillars, once carved by roaring torrents and wrathful tempests long dry and long still, mournful winds howl from the uttermost depths of the tombs through the cracks in the ancient sarcophagi of the old undead knights. Their immaculate stone tombs litter the grounds in a cunning irregularity, so that passage through their ranks is twisted and slow. The first of their venerable kind were, long ago, sent to slumber in dreams of combat amidst the stinking pools of alchemyckal concoctions devised to keep them limber and deadly. Rivulets and damp stains from escaped chemyck tell of the passage of long ages, and of the times when the knights were called from their dreams the slay living invaders into the tombs.
Many times has the thunderous tread of crusader boots echoed through the tomb halls, bearing in hand their holy wooden swords of living oak or long razor leaves, wizards with chalices of black broth and searing daggers in hand by their sides, ready to set the fury of life upon this place of dust and silence. But the dead are many in number, and shall always be more than that which lives, and come in as many forms. It is not merely the revenant, pliant of limb and sturdy of frame, but the tall striding shadow of the wraith which no blade may touch and whose grip is as a choking cold, and also the lich spellsword, whose edge is so keen it may sunder the bonds of the fabric upon which the world is lain with but an errant swipe.
The tombs have, since their inception, been the highest rank and station any undead may achieve. It is to be an honoured dreamer, and a guardian and spearhead for that which dwells in the space where the world ceases to be.
Primal Tomb
The thing was withered to its absolute core. Beyond its wiry thews, beyond its gnarled old bones, beyond even its blood. Stripped of all but the faintest semblance of the human being it had been in ages so long their reckoning would make the mind shudder. Laid out as if merely reclining upon a slab of rough-hewn stone inlaid with highly stylized bas-reliefs, there are but dim stirrings about its form that speak to strange animation. It is absolutely alone in the great, almost egg-like chamber whose single source of illumination is an ashen blue beam descending through a crack from no earthly sky.
At the edge of the world dwells the first undead, the progenitor of magic, the lord to which all mortifiers call though they do not know it. Not yet.
Few are the dead who ever set eyes upon it, but those who do know it as the first tomb. The living build neither crypts nor coffins, but till charnel fields sewn with flesh and bone. The dead build tombs. It is the privilege of an undead to dream long dreams, to live lives unbound by the limits of mortal flesh which merely bubbles up from the pit before being subsumed. The undead know the life within exists as much as the life without. The living taste of dreams only lightly, and dread it for its omens. The first dead has dreamt in its tomb a thousand lifetimes.
On their path to the edge of reality do dead pilgrims listen to the night-wind whisper of their lord and god at every step...
"Free from the grasp of warp and weft can existence escape the tumult of being, and achieve a greater persistence. 'Twas I who met the end of flesh in this farthest place where no life-god can set foot, and here did I crawl from the mire. Here may I pull you, too, from its depths."
"Death be not stasis, nor be death eternity, death doth be instead purification. Thou who art chosen by mine reach, be lifted from the mire of rot and rebirth, and exist for true. Let wither away, free from the taint of vermin and miasma, the accumulation of capricious life's mutations—they who will return with greedy fingers and maws for what they lent but briefly. Thou who art undead, who art chosen, remember my promise: as thou art, I once was, and as I am, thou shalt be."