Shadows & Sorcery #136
For reasons beyond my control it is the one hundred and thirty sixth edition of Shadows & Sorcery!
This week, a two-part tale of revenge and adventure, and then uh hey you guys like Berserk? Cuz I do. I have only one stipulation: you have read that one while listening to this on loop. I wrote it that way.
Now, last week, in case you missed it (if you did how DARE you) we got the 24th chapter of The Path of Poison, wherein Sepp and Co. have left that weird forest for a rather eerie wintry Voerlund wilderness. Want to check that out? You can do so HERE.
And before THAT was the last Shadows & Sorcery, a rather good one I think. That can be read right…over…HERE…
And lastly, my friends, please take a second to let the stories know you liked them—tap that little heart button!
This week, we meet the young Prince of a merchant kingdom as he learns about the powerful Armour of Flame, we then join the Prince in a far off land as he delves into the Abyss of Frost, and finally we meet a fleeing soldier lost in a pastoral wilderness teeming with horrors drawn to his Rune of Offering…
Armour of Flame
The Prince took stock of the forge as he entered—a recently learned habit. First he saw a domed roof over a round room with a large hole in the center open to the sun. At one end of the place was a sort of well up from which bubbled what he understood to be the "igneous blood of the inner earth" wherefrom raw ore was drawn. Around this, kilns and crucibles of stone and metal alike lined the walls, inside each of which there burned strange coloured flames. Instruments littered the floor and hung from chains all about: hammers, tongs, and other things the Prince couldn't even begin to guess the purpose of. In the center of it all was a great black, glassy slab, worn with decades of hammer strikes and scuffs—the altar upon which raw earthen flesh was refined by the arts of the wizard-smith.
The Prince was motioned to join the master in the forge. The master was a burly, red-fleshed fellow with bush-like beard, curling eyebrows, and long silver hair, though he wore it with what was charitably termed a "crown of marble", that is, the ravages of age. He was clad in a long lower robe of black-stained red, and from a mantle about his neck there hung some twenty or more large bluish metal discs that covered the front of him. His arms were bare, and heavily scarred. He moved with great stride and purpose, and brought the Prince, a lanky figure with bronze skin and close cropped hair in saffron finery, to the far side of the forge where something lay under a large black veil.
"I trust the coin from Behruzj did the trick?" is what the Prince said, with the right measure of coolness in his tone. But what he thought, with a tremor, was he hoped it had. He'd already dipped into the realm's coffers deeper than the merchant directors had approved. The wizard-smith turned with a flicker of a grin. With two hands, he tore the veil away, and let the Prince gaze upon what was beneath.
It was a burnished amber in hue, with reddish accents. A handsome sheen played over flowing, wavering, intricate decoration across its whole surface, so that it almost seemed to shimmer. It was built in overlapping sections that were sewn or tied to a deep red sort of scale or hide suit underneath. The helm rose like a bell, with a sharply tapering point atop it, and had beneath a generous blue chain coif. It was hung upon a rack just slightly taller than the two of them so the lights of the forge were cast upon it.
The Prince reached out his hand, and in an unguarded moment born of a genuine awe, flashed a look to the wizard-smith, who nodded in assent. The second he touched it, he drew his hand back. It was red hot.
"An enchantment for the ages...I always knew my father kept you around for a reason," he said, his voice distant, his senses still lost on the beauty of the armour, but the wizard knew his intent.
"Enchantment indeed," came the thick-accented reply from within the wizard's bushy beard, "but more than even you might guess, young prince."
"Well yes, of course. Sturdy beyond compare, I'm sure!"
"Unbreakable."
"Unbreakable?" The Prince looked to his smith and cocked his head in enquiry.
"What it is you are looking at, my prince, is no enchanted plate...it is crystallized flame."
The Prince's gaze shot back to the armour and danced over it.
Aye, this would most certainly do the trick. The Prince let everything well up to the forefront of his mind. Look at it, he thought, a hero's raiment in the making. The raiment he would be wearing the moment he cut down his father's killer. The raiment to be passed down his line. The righteous symbol of reclamation to which his kin and their allies would rally. The beacon his clan will flock to in this uncertain time.
The Prince shook himself free of these as yet unearned idle fancies.
He had other, material concerns. The directors wanted more than a slain rival, even though it be perfectly legal, lest they strip the regent of his title and seize the realm. For this reason alone, those dreams, and the rushing eagerness they encouraged, would be a better guide than any map.
Abyss of Frost
Beyond his homeland of sandy spires and golden dunes, into the red hot badlands where mesas rise like the petrified trunks of primordial stone trees, through sodden rainforests and stinking mires, within the depths of a rotting jungle where every shadow hid nameless peril...and into a frigid, frost-bound chasm that reached limitless leagues under the earth itself. He couldn't believe something like this existed. It shouldn't exist. The remains of some elder enchantment no doubt, but of such scale, and in such a place? It stunk to the Prince's astute mind like something that not only should not be, but was best left forgotten.
The exact kind of place the Baron d'Fleurre would flee to.
Steam played all about the Prince in this place. He was all but enwreathed in it, naturally making it almost impossible to take the Baron by surprise. But the Prince didn't mind. His flair for the romantic had it so he seemed a spectre of vengeance. Someone in such a position as the Baron would be susceptible to fear and delusion. It worked.
His mission of vengeance aside, the Prince studied the abyss he now traversed. A sheer dark white expanse of deep shadow through which constellations of shimmering ice peered. It looked as the sand looked when the radiance of a full moon was thrown upon it at the deepest part of the night. A cold, pallid kind of hue. Distant and somnolent. Great spires and spikes rose and hung as lone, translucent monoliths and as sheets of cascading rapids struck still as they ran down the walls. Ice was a high value commodity, this the Prince knew, a luxury across more than half the world. Even the cold, rocky deserts of the east are ill-suited to making ice. They are too dry, and enchantment too laborious of a process. At least that was so these days. Back whenever this place was made, men must have walked like gods. Maybe they were the gods.
The Prince shook himself free of growing reverie. Even in this moment, his romantic streak was not immune to the spell of the place.
It descended in long, irregular shelves, and had few spaces with ample room to drop down. Getting out would be a task, the Prince knew, but that came later. His only light—and warmth—was the armour he had donned just over a month ago. It was a quirk of its nature that it emitted both light and took other flames to its own, what the wizard-smith had called, matrix. He had walked the benighted streets of mouldering cities as a shining paladin, his sabre itself flashing like a tongue of flame against assassins, thugs, and honourable duellists alike. And after each battle, the armour had been repaired countless times in countless campfires, lordly halls, and simple hearths. In these crystal plates was symbolized his whole quest.
He once again shook himself. Something of this momentous and ultimate moment was working on him.
The rope ladder ahead got his attention well enough. It was staked into the ice itself quite well, leading down, into further deeps. The Prince chuckled that the Baron had been forced by the treachery of his supposed refuge to leave a direct path for the one who hunted him. Still, he was a tricky fellow, and the Prince give himself a moment to look, and listen, before he clambered down into a miasma of tendrils of biting fog.
It seemed little more than a long corridor of compacted frost and ice walls, thicker than he could imagine. By Meru's golden locks, here was the directors' bounty. And here, too, was the Prince's quarry, suddenly and finally in sight. He had spent many long nights fanning the smouldering embers of his anger, crafting speeches one moment, and cutting declarations the next, refined on long, lonely roads with allies who had come and gone. But now, all he did was breathe deep, and draw his blade.
The Baron d'Fleurre was encased almost entirely in a skin of rime, a pillar of frost whose movements cracked the frigid shell and sent light flakes trailing into the air. He was like a man who moved in sleep, languid and alien. From within the tattered mass of beast skins he wore, the Baron sluggishly drew forth his own blade—a sharply tapering edged needle of ice. With a motion astounding in its dexterity, the Baron wasted no time in lunging forth with an expert thrust, but the flat of the Prince's sabre deflected it at the last second. A quick chop raked across the accumulated ice encasing the Baron, leaving the Prince open to an upward thrust—but as the sword tip met the crystal plate, it penetrated not the armour, but hissed and steamed as the ice blade simply melted away at the touch of the blazing fire of the inner earth.
Each man only took a second to wonder in their own way at it. The Prince glared into the Baron's frost-tinted eyes, a man whose hubris had, it seemed, been leading him to destruction one way or another, and whose eyes now betrayed something like true despair. The sabre was brought down into the Baron's neck, where crimson splattered across the unbroken pale twilight of the abyss.
Rune of Offering
The wound gave a single dull throb as he looked back in the growing dusk, hoping to see one of his comrades stagger out of the bush, but knowing in his heart he wouldn't. It had been a blur. The squalid Áéan village. The shrill screeching. The dozens of wiry shapes coming from the shadows. Gunder knew the hissing savage that jumped him didn't mean to just kill him. Gunder had thrown him off and crushed his foe's throat under the rim of his tall shield, but not before a throbbing crescent had been sliced into the soldier's neck. His one thought, above all else in those feverish few seconds, was "don't let him finish it".
He had to find Atia. She'd know what to do. She always did. But in the approaching twilight, where the Regaen camp was now, he couldn't tell. Gunder did not relish the idea of spending a night in these horror-haunted wilds. Under the arching bole of a grotesque tree, he crouched and checked his equipment. His chain shirt, tunic, belt and bronze bracers were intact. His sandals a little worn from his escape, but serviceable. That was good. He wasn't wholly bereft of the gods' favour just yet. But his sword, of the short, broad Regaen type, was stained up to the hilt with odd blood, and would need thorough cleaning. The exterior of his grand, rounded rectangle shield, which just about covered him entirely, was battered and bore a long gouge in the bronze face.
Images rushed to the forefront his mind of a snouted thing on bent, stalk-like legs lumbering into him with flailing talons, and the wound on his neck pulsating like it was going to burst before he all but gouged out its heart, and left it twitching in the seeping loam.
The Áéans called them demigods, and worshipped and feared them as marks of the divine. But the scions of Regnum Regis assured the people they were monsters, Áéa a place where the gods sent their mistakes to be forgotten, and that it was the moral and sacred duty of the empire to keep the place in check.
That he knew he was little more than branded cattle in this land made the tumult in his chest grow worse in the deepening night. In the tree's shadow he removed from around his neck a small piece of smoothed stone. The hawker had claimed it was a piece of a Vargeld monolith, from the western wilderness. That whole country is infested with them, apparently. The barbarians draw inhuman strength from them for their endless wars and raids. Atia had confirmed the hawker's claims, it was real, as was the guttural invocation he passed on with it to summon its powers. Atia had also said it wasn't a good thing to use much at all. Had Gunder not seen those warped horrors in the arena? You'd end up like them, was what she said. He was inclined to believe her, she was usually right about these things.
Dreamless darkness took Gunder at some point, and in the blink of an eye it spewed him back out into the reality of a cold blue moon and an aching wound on his neck, at which he stumbled up into a crouch, already securing his greatshield to his arm. Something staggered out of the chalky moonlight to his left. Bow-legged and rake-thin, mostly humanoid, its arms seemed to grasp out blindly almost independent of the three great serpentine heads that surmounted it, each one ending in a strange, short, blunt snout with an uncomfortably human outline. Each neck was thicker than the naked torso that barely supported them. The demigod's leftmost head thundered into Gunder's shield, while the rightmost struck at his open side. He slashed at this one, sending it back with a gurgle. The middle head came in, but swinging his shield to it, he knocked it aside, and then back left again to meet the left head. Gunder fell back as the right head lunged with its maw fully extended—more than capable of enclosing his own entire head. The lunge came just short him, and he was able to deliver a heavy thrust into its face, piercing one of its milky white eyes which flung out a jet of brown slime, but at the expense of the wound in his neck crying out with a jabbing agony that nearly made him drop his blade.
The wounded head fell down, cradled weakly by the bony hands. The the other two heads shot out out in wide arcs around Gunder. Holding his shield close to himself, he leapt back, the jaws of each head met the rim of his greatshield. They clamped down, each one trying to rip it from his arm. Gunder gambled and flipped his sword upside down in his hand—he caught the slime-slick grip and thrust it down hard into the demigod's middle neck. He jammed the blade in several more times, thick blood slopping to the earth below, and it was only when he wrenched his sword free and gave a mighty tug to the side did the choking head retreat, coughing up hot blood.
The leftmost head had removed itself from the shield rim and came from above, Gunder knocked it aside again and again with desperate parries, one strike with the edge of his shield resulting in a wet cracking sound of the thing's own bones giving way. The hacking middle head and oozing right head reared up shakily. Gunder buckled under his own terror and the searing stabs of the rune of offering. The gods, it seemed, had taken away what favour they had laid aside for him.
Tears blurred his eyes, blinding him to the steel-wire limbed thing which had risen from the shadows, called by the scent of blood. Gunder wiped his eyes clean upon his arm just in time to see a massive head like a goat's peer from the dusky night, about it a long, thick, trailing mane and mantle of matted hair, a crown of splayed, twisting horns upon which ragged tatters and strings of gore flapped about. It must have stood at least three times his own height, but it was hunched, and its limbs tucked around it, save for one long, sinewy arm and its great long-fingered hand which reached out and grasped cleanly the leftmost neck of the demigod.
Gunder didn't wait around. He was a fair ways off before he looked back to see the goatish demigod tearing off one of the serpent heads and impaling it upon one of its horns. The rune's sharp pulsating had become a persistent, low throb. He didn't know if that was favour, but he'd take it. A greyness on the horizon belied the coming dawn, and with it, some measure of hope. For the next league or two, Gunder chanted aloud the guttural invocation of the shard amulet at his neck, throwing forward his aching limbs until he fell breathless into a Regaen camp under the lurid Áéan sun.