Shadows & Sorcery #17
Welcome to issue seventeen of Shadows & Sorcery, the first edition of 2022! This is a paid subscriber post, but the first story is free for all, as a little taste of what you can expect by grabbing one of eight free lifetime paid subs I’m giving away as of this writing! All you need do is send me a quick DM on Twitter or on Substack, where I will enter a supplied email into my magical device (the Substack dashboard), thus unlocking for you, a friend or family member, a lifetime of weekly fantasy flash, and a fairly prodigious archive.
In today’s edition, you’ll find five tales of weird faith: strange saints, dark churches, cosmic cathedrals, and one very odd altar…
Today’s stories are:
Altar of the Sea
The Great Saint
Steel Saint
Cathedral of Dream
Demon Church
Altar of the Sea
There's no end to the superstitions and prophylactic practices of sailors the world over. The ocean is a dangerous place, and those who have taken to its waves have invented or discovered certain things that help guide the water's forces - guide, never control, never manipulate, never coerce. Such practices often involve the offering of something symbolic, such as the easterner's human effigies cast into the waves in place of themselves, or the far northern spiced ales they routinely spill into the seas. Many places, too, have some kind of altar upon which small offerings are left for the high tide to claim, or before which certain short rites are performed by seafarers. Not so one particular altar, however.
The great range of hills known as the Visu Span, which separate the cities of Don-je and Parkut, are famed for their verdant and wild slopes, a difficult country to traverse beyond the main road. The rugged slopes, marked with large outcroppings of rock, are perhaps the last place one might expect to find an altar to the oceans.
Sitting quite out in the open, not upon a summit but halfway up a long, rocky hillside, there sits a short, thick altar of uneven, pockmarked stone. Really just a blocky slab, with a kind of indent in its top. It has been said designs can be spied upon its sides, but this may very well be fancy. And yet, it is not like the stone around it. In fact, the altar - for it is an altar - sticks out from its surroundings even from far away. It makes itself known.
The immediate surroundings of the altar are not quite waterlogged, but the soil is perpetually damp, and in places is positively sodden. Of course, this might be put down to the poor drainage of the area, the collection of many seasons of water diverted around the hard rock which stretch for some distance under the surface soil. But sailors will tell you it isn't rain, not inland rain at least. It's sea water, rising to meet the place where old captains have made pilgrimage while on self-imposed exile.
Why is the altar there? Interestingly, despite the vast array of sailor's cultic beliefs, there seems to be one, and only one answer. Ask a sufficiently weathered old captain about the Visu Span altar, and they'll look at you from under odd brows, and say the land wasn't always land, it was bed. Deep, dark floor, where there crawled things that have gone unseen for an eternity. Currents and waves flowed and crashed far into the sky once. Go there, they say in between bouts of growing dark laughter, when a great storm rages in from the seas, and you'll see things in the sheets of rain. Ghosts of things not in the air, but in the cold fog. Look after the fresh rains upon the fearsome stone of the hillside and note to yourself the markings which bear not the aspect of anything that flies or ranges the plains.
Yes, the ocean was once here, and it was everywhere. Likely, they say, it will be here again. Best to make peace at the altar.
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