Shadows & Sorcery #14
Welcome to the fourteenth edition of Shadows & Sorcery! This week’s post is for everyone to enjoy, and enjoy it I hope you do. Below you will find two tales of a strange ocean and what lies upon it, stories of dark gods, and yet darker secrets…
The end of today’s post also contains a short special message, so make sure to stick around to the end.
Today’s stories are:
Ashen Sea
Mountains of the Sea
Fortress Outskirts
Dragon Kings
Undead Keep
Ashen Sea
Some miles out from a sparsely inhabited coastline lies a stretch of ocean known as the Ashen Sea. The churning, slate-grey waters always seem to be in flux, the sky is pallid, the air is never still, and vessels that pass through that region always find themselves coated in a film of damp, crumbling ash. The source of it is still unknown, yet the world's finest explorers have mapped the whole expanse of that sea.
It is regarded by sailor's superstitions as unhealthy, though most tend to escape with nothing more than a lingering bad feeling in the back of their heads. But too, the fish caught in those waters do not seem like the fish of the broad, sun-tinged Ruby Sea or calm, warm Suropo Strait. They are darkish and cruel in aspect, with black eyes and long teeth, thin and whip-like forms, if forms they even have, for some things drawn up seem to be nothing more than pulsing globules of swirling grey and black.
It is only natural that the sea is avoided by most, but sometimes inclement weather forces ships into the uneasy but usually predictable ashen region. It presents little in the way danger, truth be told, save for a single thing found near its absolute centre...
Mountains of the Sea
Deep within the Ashen Sea's grim expanse sits an anomaly - a small range of short, yet nonetheless perilous, beetling mountains rising from the murk itself. To the sailors who've passed by it, it does not for them constitute a true island. Rather it seems, to them, land where land ought not to be found, at least not this type of land. The mountain belongs to the earth in the beliefs of many peoples, it is the heart of the land, and for it to sit in open water is unnatural.
The landscape of the mountains consists of many sheer cliffs and steep rises, some sections are storm-smoothed, others are chipped and sharp with the irregular battering of the sea. The bases are a wet, coarse sand mixed with ash, creating a layer of cloying loam that sticks to one's person. Thin shelves exist along the rises, and there are shallow yet dark, ash-encrusted valleys between them. Their cold, dry summits are almost stepped in aspect, either formed by extremely dis-temperate ocean weather, or by some forgotten hand of madness. The dark, slick rock has a dull sheen to it where exposed, and the only plants to be found upon it are foreign shrubs and stringy grasses brought on unfortunate winds. It is otherwise barren stone.
Life of a frightful kind lives on these nameless mountains. Countless varieties of small black and grey crabs skitter like vermin across the rock, picking at the corpses of washed up sea-life whose kind no sailor professes to have seen in wave or net. There are skeletons littering the lower sands, some half-buried and half-encased in ash. Slick, black creatures sometimes dart from pool to pool in the outcroppings of rock, things that look disquietingly like the Ashen Sea's inhabitants who have learned walk, though they ought to crawl. The further inland one goes, the less signs of life or even movement there seems to be.
There is not a single human living on those mountains, though there are hints of long-abandoned sailor's camps beneath overhangs or in shallow cavern maws. Some folk say the piles of stone seen here and there are the remains of huts of some native peoples, but what kind of human being could dwell in this unhealthy place, none could or likely wish to speculate on. Bones with odd shapes upon them are sometimes found strewn about the more inward sands, and any sailor who happens to see them keeps the word 'idol' firmly shut in the back of the mind.
Fortress Outskirts
Although it was not the scene of the greatest battle, it is perhaps the finest example of the grim circumstances of that long conflict. One wouldn't know it to see it, but it was once a city, repurposed into a desperate fortress as the battle lines encroached closer and closer. Homes demolished or hollowed out and joined, hovels and shanties squatting under the shadows of monolithic, stepped structures, streets that have been entirely lost under the criss-cross sprawl.
The Hykathroi were a race of theurges. They had, in their belief, surpassed mere faith and worship. Their children did not learn prayers, but invocations, they had not priests but divine magicians, the people expressed not pleas to gods but evoked in their language an invisible world of spirits they knew dwelt around and about them. Proud and mighty, celestial beings raised cities to the chants of theurges, and choirs sung spells of benediction across their lands. Divine philosophers pondered the nature of the astral realms and scholars spoke long into the night with bound daemons.
And then, from the cold desert wastes came the Yehuddir and their host of gods.
The Yehuddir were a race on the rise, a hard people from a hard land, having eked out an existence on the fringes of the inhabited world for many millennia, tribes slowly but surely coalescing into a people united by a stalwart faith into which they submitted their entire being without question. They now strode into lush lands with conviction, knowing they had their gods at their backs and a bounty set before them.
At first, contact was established hesitantly but with interest. But when the Yehuddir beheld the coils of spirits and channeling towers, and when the Hykathroi beheld the wild rites of flame and flesh, they both spoke blasphemy and barbarism, and a hatred was sowed that bloomed into frightful and all-consuming war.
As the conflict between holy warriors and battle-sorcerers drew closer to the Hykathroi homeland, a grand city found itself enclosed behind vast black walls to repel the power of heathen forces. But these walls grew, and eventually were sealed as those within descended into darker and more fearful rites of protection and warding, and those on the outside leeched from the magical energies called down from above each night and midday. A great climbing sprawl of the displaced peasantry clung to crumbling spirit-images and stolen secrets of the inside, ascetics practiced forms of constant mediumship, and word spread that some of the less better off had begun to propitiate entities, rather than compel them.
In the end, the city fell, the fortress outskirts were abandoned and their images crushed to dust. But so too were the gods of Yehud repelled by the baleful magics of heaven-sundering warlocks. Most of the Hykathroi lands were as wastes, and the Yehuddir retreated either back to their cold desert home, or to stranger lands beyond.
Dragon Kings
In days of old, mankind dwelt under the alien gaze of tyrannical dragons. Their petty kings and priests gathered dragonblood and scales for worship in the wake of titanic battles between their masters and the mysterious silver giants. Deep earthen chambers and windswept monolith forests were alike lined with crude clay vessels stained black with dragonblood, and great jagged scales were suspended on vines and dried gut across thresholds.
But the lion's share went to the little lords of humanity, and in time they gathered the blood and scales instead to their throne rooms. People took to worshipping outside such meagre chambers, praying to the dragons who heard them through their blood. But it wasn't enough for human lords that their seat of power was the center of cult adoration, so the various lords of that age began to paint themselves in the thick, dark dragonblood, experiencing rushing ecstasies of power, that let them know they spoke for the gods.
Priest and king became as one. Dragonscales were sewn onto armour and garments, and the dragon kings lined their throne chambers entirely in the collected sheddings of every hamlet and hovel. They smeared the blood onto their bodies, they consumed it, and immersed themselves in it. In the aftermath of dragon battles, priest-lords would make for the sites of conflict and there bathe in the fresh hot blood. They would return to their towns in a state of vile madness from which they would not emerge for days, all the while decreeing inhuman laws.
When dragonblood or sloughed scales are left untouched, they create what the world refers to now simply as dragonspawn: wyrms, wyverns, basilisks, drakes, bastard mutant offspring that spontaneously generate, carrying some aspect of their progenitor. But the strong and constant application of dragonish material had too a corrupting, mutative effect.
The petty lords of squalid human settlements began to exhibit monstrous traits beyond their blood madness. A taste for flesh, which to the dragons is domination, was extremified, and the monarchs partook in the devouring of prisoners. As time wore on, these kings and queens became less human, and more 'divine'. Scaled flesh, bony talons, deformed maws, the dragon-lords terrorized their subjects as manifest emissaries of the gods.
A stroke of fate led a dragon to pass over a village and smell the stink of its own kind below. While left a pathetic lump of cinders, the dragon-chief was carried off as a corpse, and soon humanity had retreated back into the deep below, past what the dragons could flood with fire. Their reign ended, but the dragon-lords lent their unnatural existence to man's eternal nemesis: the introduction of dragonblood into pregnant women produced that terrible enemy, the Draconian.
The elves found men as slave armies under dragons, and with their Arts slew many of the false gods and freed humanity of the shackles of talon and fire. And yet, despite the horror of their previous bondage, mankind still took blood and scale to steal dark dragon arts, to fight poison with poison, all the while a stone's throw from the madness that almost consumed them an age before.
Undead Keep
This entry originally appeared on my writer's blog, but has been vastly expanded from the original version.
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In the farther reaches of the Duchy there sits a lone fort commanding a wide view of the only road through the dusty plains. Built in the grim and imposing style of several decades ago, great big blocks of black stone are arranged in a tight, thick-walled square on a small artificial mound. It resembles many other forts of the kind the old duke commissioned to fortify the vulnerable regions of his domain. Nicknamed 'ten penny forts', soldiers garrisoned there received a bonus wage of ten pennies, as their posts were often in far off corners of the Duchy. It turned out to be a remarkable act of foresight on the Duke's part, as not a year into its construction, an alliance of barons decided to stage a coup.
After the short but violent conflict subsided, and the Queen threw the barons into oubliettes in some ancient castle, many of the Duchy's worst affected regions received commendations and royal funding for rebuilding. As the Duke's generals worked their way through the ten penny forts, they came upon the keep in question. It is bad form to speak of it among the militia, and certain court officials will outright deny knowledge of its existence. Families have made numerous petitions to the Duke, and even to the Queen, to learn what happened to their sons and brothers, and all have been denied. But all, too, have had visits at late hours from hooded officials armed with heavy coin pouches and earnest pleas for forgiveness and forgetfulness.
It's no secret the barons were vicious, perhaps even blasphemous in their short-lived campaign, and few folk will criticize the Queen's actions. Mercifully, few of the real details about the more vile battles escaped the lips of loyal soldiers and shaken civilians. But rumors sometimes appear in taverns on cold nights, near places where certain battles were fought, rumors of dead men in shorn armour atop the walls, still acting out their final orders, attacking those who approach, and impossible to destroy. Such ideas are shot down as nothing more than the festering of the barons' bad reputation over the years. But, say those who speak their fears, what of the secretive groups that are sometimes seen riding from the nameless fort's supposed location?
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