Shadows & Sorcery #13
Welcome to the thirteenth issue of Shadows & Sorcery! This is a paid subscriber post. Below you’ll find two strange graves, two sorcerous dangers, and a fortress that stands before the darkness…
Today’s tales are:
Undead Tomb
Fortress of the Abyss
Palace of the Grave
Ritual Archives
Moonside Tower
Undead Tomb
For these monks, the final step, the highest honour, the threshold from which naught may return, is to become Undead. The continent is replete with transcendental cults who all promise an existence beyond the cycle, or the stasis, or the return, or whatever term that particular sect utilizes. It's a grey world, baleful, with little to achieve now that the very upper cap of material existence has been reached. In a world where need and want, where adversity has been conquered, industrious little humankind stubbornly sought for further challenge, and in the end decided it was best to leave it all behind.
Not content with the concept of a senseless oblivion, or a sensory infinity that surpassed the lifetime of fleeting experiences all were granted, great groups of people sought refuge from this static nightmare in transcendence. Perhaps it offered whole new worlds to conquer, new rewards, or perhaps it offered an existence unbound from the frustratingly limited shell of clay, or a world severed from the base organic desires of the flesh and the blood. It didn't matter what was offered, all that mattered is that according to the hushed whispers of several highly respected metarchons, it existed.
Some practiced fasting and meditation to awaken the primal senses, some practiced extreme hedonism in search of a transcendent sensation, some devoted themselves to singular practices (some physical, some mental) in the hopes of an 'awakening'. Yet still others prepared intricate, ritual suicides, mummifying themselves alive, or freeing their 'essence' from the complex web of the material form. All these sects, and many more, required a strong sense of faith after long spans of study and theory. Not so the almost legendary and elite monastic order the Grey Slumber.
It took long years of extremely esoteric preparation in both mind and body from which many candidates never passed, being exiled from the halls blind and tongueless. But those who made it were bade wander among the their soon-to-be kin, to carve for themselves a niche in the great caves, and take the final step to become an Undead. It was existence beyond life, tangible, with feeling and being beyond need or want, the evolution of the egg-that-was-the-body, in the terminology of the Grey Slumber monks. It provided, too, thought beyond human limits, and undead monks were counted as some of wisest philosophers in the world when roused to motion.
Very few even within the order had notions of how undeath really, truly changed a person. They had scores of writings upon the methods, allegories, legends, parables, but their idea of it as a state of being was simple and uniform. The last great desire. When ascendant monks are let wander among the undead, their guides, elder attendants who have forsaken undeath so that they might safeguard the order, are advised to not let them stray too deep into the caverns. Certain sections are flooded, they say, and while the monks within are wholly unaffected, the still living are at risk. The tunnels are not flooded, of course, but the inhuman monks consumed by inhuman desires past natural existence don't wander too far from their niches these days, and it's best to preserve hope for the world in this fashion.
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