Shadows & Sorcery #16
Welcome to issue sixteen of Shadows & Sorcery! This is a paid subscriber post. Interested in reading more? As of writing, I am currently giving away lifetime paid subscriptions to this newsletter. If you or perhaps a friend are interested, just shoot me a quick DM on Twitter @SeanCRHill or message me here. All I need from you is the email you want to future editions to go to!
Below you’ll find tales of the rites of peasants and knights, curious burials, and what happens when certain bodies don’t get buried….
Today’s tales are:
Iron Tomb
Sanctuary of the Knight
Vale of the Catacombs
Forest Undead
Wood of Want
Iron Tomb
In the heartland, where the earth is wild and where the many peoples of today traditionally came out of, there lives a fascinating remnant of an ancient race. All but gone from the world now, they were once the scourge of the heartland, a place already rife with war and conquest among the ascendant clans. At the head of this mighty people was a warlord of unsurpassed power. Respected by his enemies and idolized by his followers, the mighty Sabai Khuyr, high chieftain of the tribes, the horse-lord, the sword of the steppes, cleaved his way through countless poor souls as he drove the various races into the wider world.
As all mortals must, Khuyr died, but he died grey and wrinkled in his great yurt, surrounded by, most accounts say, at least fifteen of his progeny, the rest of which were out slaying in his name. The high king, or emperor, or chieftain (what appellation he preferred is unknown for he had them all) decreed that he be buried in a tomb that would symbolize to his strength and will just as well as his own living achievements did. A tomb of iron was to be made for him, from heartland ores and the melted down weapons of the enemies from his final conquest.
A menacing structure was erected with no little effort in the windy plains where Khuyr's people called home: a great face of dull, dark iron, into whose silently roaring maw descended clanking iron steps, surrounded by the dull sheen of metal walls. Six deep, squarish alcoves, also of iron, were set into a single long corridor and held heaps of the high king's treasures. At the end of this sharp-scented tunnel lay the great, slab-like iron sarcophagus of Sabai Khuyr, moulded expertly by enslaved artisans into an idealized likeness of the warlord.
As the other races found new homes, in verdant new lands of opportunity and richness, the chieftain's peoples dwelt in their conquered expanse for many ages, wallowing in the glory of their past might. But while the world grew around them, while heroes ranged the untrodden vastlands and tyrants were felled in battles that became ancient legend, the people of the steppes descended into fractured barbarism. Clan felled clan for control of dwindling resources, and those who struck out into the new lands were met with steel and sorcery, and driven back into their festering wilderness.
New warlords came and went with the passing of seasons. Ancient tales of the god-king ancestor who tamed the land and drove the weaklings out were bellowed by the degenerated far progeny, and Sabai Khuyr's iron tomb was routinely stripped of its metal furnishings as each new would-be high king sought to cling to some symbol of legitimacy. In the end, the clans became as nests of beasts, the land was barren, and every so often scholars would go to document the strange natives of the wastelands and the rusted idol they would defend with their lives.
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