Shadows & Sorcery #137
Someone told me this was the one hundred and thirty seventh edition of Shadows & Sorcery?
Let me tell you what’s going on in here—a three part tale of gothic lunar dark fantasy in another world I intend to develop right here. Why not take a gander at Saint of Winter from back in #133 to get up to speed with the world these tales take place in?
Readers new and old also may benefit from checking out last week’s edition! In fact, everyone would benefit, because it was a cool one. Read it!!
Also! Don’t forget to check up on Sepp and Co. in The Path of Poison! They’re out in a strange wilderness that has even the stoic Dunmarrow spooked… Check that out HERE
My final self-advertisement: I wrote up a lengthy, rambling documentary article detailing the development of a magic system for the barbarian setting debuted here at S&S. If you want a look into how the sorcerous sausage is made, you can read it over at my writer’s blog from which this publication gets its name 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 descend into strange waters in search of Drowned Spires, we then ascend to cold Castle Moon, and finally we plunge into its depths in search of the Emperor of the Shadows…
Drowned Spires
In the far reaches of a frost-strewn waste of crags and yawning canyons, there dwelt the sundered remains of a frigid plateau, entombed within a labyrinthine mass of jagged, rime-encrusted pillars. Upon the still-standing core of that primal tableland, there lay a vast, sourceless lake which not even the biting winds could stir, and within the depths of that lake, thirteen spires dwelt drowned under its mirror-sheen surface.
Once every seven years, the nomad Moon drew near to the plateau ruins, it was believed, in accordance with some old covenant. And when it was closest, the waters of the lake would recede deep into the earth, and the spires would stare out and grasp like sunken fingers from a stinking, half-flooded mire of slush and weeds. They were the only conduit in all the world to the Moon.
Towering spikes of neither stone, metal, nor some colossal crystal, that bore the black stains of unclean water and the unhealthy patina of the scum that stuck to their sides. They tapered sharply with rugose surfaces, and were spread out like a forest of petrified trees, each one shorn of their dead, leafless branches. The moaning wind ceased to blow amid the spires, as if warded away or choked to the barest whisper by some other influence.
The hero drew out then, upon a thick chain, the shield-shaped crest of the forsaken House of Galleya. The crimson enamel coating held under its glossy surface the finely detailed herald beast of the House, a rearing, three-headed wulven serpent, engraved upon a fine steel base. The hero held up the crest, shining like a drop of hot blood in the chalky lunar radiance, just as the words, hastily scratched into the back leaves of an occult tract five hundred years ago, were spoken.
At first, the air seemed to drone with an uneasy rhythm. The sunken space beyond the spires grew hazy and dim, and finally the air within began to blur. It happened, it seemed, almost in time with the deep drone whose reverberations could be felt in the bones. Moments later, the light seemed to fail, and for seven beats of the heart, vision was only an uneasy shifting murk. With a shake of the head, the hero suddenly re-emerged, when the air cleared and stilled, upon the stark, frigid surface of the Moon.
Castle Moon
Seen from below, the underside of moon was a rough sphere of greyish-white hue, pitted and pockmarked with curious black apertures, which some fanciful imaginations took to be bored holes that stared like eyeless sockets. But should one gain the right eminence, when the Moon came close, its true face was revealed.
The overside erupted in to a mass of vast needlepoint thin towers, spiral steeples, beetling belfrys, curving buttresses, and a web-like complex of bridges and covered passages, surrounding a gargantuan central citadel, and all of it ringed a dozen times over with leagues-long walls featuring their own battlements and turrets and gate-houses that were more like villages unto themselves. The whole thing, from foundations to the point the highest spire, was hewn from the dusty lunar stone itself.
The Castle Moon was the ancestral keep of House Galleya, reviled since antiquity, a dynasty of tyrants and devils who ruled and conquered with titanic wills, remaking themselves and their blood in their own image, inspiring a deep and faithful terror in their subjects. In the end, the final members of the mouldering line saw their star-written doom coming from all sides, and so disseminated throughout their enslaved peoples a vision of a cold new world of sable glory, to be shaped by their very own hands. And so did a hundred generations of slaves carve from the newborn Moon a distant astral kingdom.
Within the miles of bulwarks, through the lifeless gate-villages, and finally inside the walls of the castle itself, there was sprawled in a confusion numberless hidden passages, secret chambers, collapsed oubliettes, flooded dungeons, vacant palace halls, endless winding stairs, and yawning courts of moon-dust dunes strewn with half-finished statues and half-buried follies. All built for the deathless bloodline of Galleya. And yet, there nothing to be seen. Nothing to be heard, nothing to be felt. The Castle Moon was, as had been suspected for centuries, long dead. A shell, the celestial body from which it was hacked and moulded, a rotting cadaver, dreamed into being by saints who had long since ceased to be human. The countless idols which peopled the halls and chambers, most of which bore dark stains and striations, spoke of a realm dominated by tyrannical and vampiric deities who ruled with iron fists over the descendents of slaves and serfs who had been unlucky enough to be dragged into the cold heavens with their masters.
It was rightly believed, the hero saw, that they had long abandoned their eldritch keep for the far, cold stars, desirous of further power by contaminating the stars themselves, and thus their fates that lay in them. But, too, they had grown bored of absolute dominion, though unwilling to ever forego control of the souls of their subjects. They were gone, but their slavering worshippers, or what few had survived by unspeakable means, howled the malevolent incantations of their gods which even now reached down to the world on certain nights of fear. The hero knew all too well those sounds, which came as lonely, horrid wails always from somewhere far away. But at any moment they might not. This was to be the test. Every corner turned, every portal flung open could bear the shape of something which ought not to be in this land of pallor.
The grip of the curse tightened with every step, and would continue to do so until death dealt the final blow, at the end of a long, miserable road. No saint's faith of the world below that the hero could uncover, not with coin or with coercion, would serve to heal the doom the seven enemies had set. They were, quite simply, inaccessible, and their wills desired persistence. But legend persisted, too, in nameless corners of the world, the treading upon of which had all but condemned the hero in most folks' eyes. Something tangible of the House of Galleya remained in the lost depths of the Castle Moon. That it would be the one remaining thing of theirs, there was no doubt. Their pride, however alien they had become, would never change, and would not see the last vestige of their control undone. And it was easily stoked.
It was an altar, a place to beg favour from and practice the grim faith of one the most powerful wills in the history of creation.
Emperor of the Shadows
Faith, the old monk had said, during those first months now so long ago, perpetuates. Order must be perceived, and diligently enforced, lest it melt back into formless chaos. Behind willpower, belief was the most powerful force in existence. House Galleya had done much in its time to ensure the persistence of its order of tyranny. There would not otherwise be a Moon, no? The echoes of that revelation echoed through the hero's mind as naught but lonely footsteps now returned from the murk-laden depths of the central citadel's dead corridors. There must, the hero thought, hoped, and feared, be enough amongst the degenerate wretches of the lunar ruins for the frightful ancient master of the Galleyan bloodline to send forth its power once more, and dispel the curse.
In the hero's hands were all that could be snuck into the Galleyan domain, which even when it dwelt upon the earth, had famously denied and assaulted the faiths of messengers and new slaves. In one hand, a long thin sword, whose slender blade had been wrapped in a coiled wick and smothered in snow white wax. The candlesword's pale gold flame left behind it a long trail of light grey smoke, and its handle was of burnished brass. It was a tool of exorcism, and was one of the few things that might bear the stress of entrance into the Castle Moon. In the other hand, another candle, tall, and held upright, and its base enshrouded in black velvet which caught the streaks of meltwax. It was the only thing lending a hint of warmth to the corpse-like hue of the moon-lit walls.
The hero passed through a great open court of smooth stone, with wisps of moon-dust crawling lazily across its surface in a soundless breath of air. Above was the stark eternal night that dwelt beyond the sun, where the esoteric tapestry of the stars dwelt and was divined by those who believed in the assurance of a fate granted to them by a saint long ago. When the Galleyans had left for those cold stars long ago, not content to even think something else had power over them in even the slightest measure, something in the "rhyme of fate" had gone wrong, and they had introduced their own strokes into the weaves of destiny. This had been relayed to the hero on a number of occasions as a warning. But it had done nothing more than reinforce the belief that the altar in the Moon was the answer.
There was one other thing the hero had managed to smuggle in: a handful of parchment scraps with dwimmerscript upon them, little more than the remains of spell tomes with words of power. But dwimmerscript was widely not considered based in faith, but scholarship, and thus something even the Galleyan line had taken ample advantage of. They were a couple of flashes of white hot flame, nothing more, but the kind of thing that might prove life or death against the thing which now shambled down the twilight passage.
It moved with timid shifting on limbs that may as well have been bone. It was bent of back, and its head hung down, facing the dust-laden floor, bobbing as it moved. Its arms were held near its sides, the fingers twitching. But its steps, for all their timidity, were deliberate. The hero watched the thing for a moment, hand tightening about the hilt of the candlesword, as its back arched as it seemed to take in slow, rasping breaths. Torn cloth was all about it, hanging in long brown strips. It stopped as it entered the wide circle of gold light the hero carried, and its head reared up to look. Eyeless sockets and a mouth little more than a slit gaped as its fingers began to work spasmodically, before being lifted in what the hero knew was baleful adoration.
A choking screech sent the thing lunging forth, the name "Galleya" somewhere under its throaty utterances. A wiry hand gripped the candle, which nearly fell, while another went for the hero's throat—but a searing streak caught one of the slave-thing's legs, sending it crumpling to its knees. Another strike from the exorcist's flame across the bared chest of thin, hanging flesh left a burning slash. The name of its long gone masters gurgled again, and something between disgust and pity welled up in the hero. But before another thought could be had, a dozen spindly limbs reached out—wherefrom the others had come couldn't be guessed, but it didn't matter. Within a matter of moments darkness took the hero.
Consciousness came with a start, and the sound of scrabbling. Upon a broad stone table, cracked down its middle, was the hero lain out. Candle and sword were nowhere at least within reach, and to the left, a number of the wretches whose eyeless faces darted from the hero, to something beyond. It became abundantly clear, within moments, that this was the altar, and that the hero was an offering. Beyond, to the right, was an apse half dome, a great rent also running down its center, in which it seemed a whole constellation had gathered to watch. Their metallic blue light threw deep black shadows across the great chamber. The hero looked back to the wretches. They probably didn't remember the rites set for them by the Galleyans. They probably didn't even remember to what personage their offerings must be made. But the hero knew.
Archancestor of the Galleyan Brood.
Lord of the Moon, Saint in the Stars, and Emperor of the Shadows.
That which tears at fate, and that which brings the long night.
Primordial Liege of Ancient Darkness.
The names and titles of the black spot upon history, which must be spoken with idolatrous reverence and true faith. The hero had to fake none of it as a wretch was chosen and the others cast away by a dwimmerscript scrap's blast of fire. Thrown upon the altar, bare hands bore free the blood within, and a soul, once granted by the grace of a primal saint's vision of eternal life, was offered to the Tyrant, should the curse be broken.
Across the earth, seven human beings, seven living wills, were suddenly struck with an agony so crushing, blood seeped from the sundered skin and burst veins, and within the highest chamber of the citadel of the Castle Moon, the tremulous weakness upon the flesh fled the hero's body.
All life after this now was to be considered a blessing.