Shadows & Sorcery #180
Who let one hundred and eighty of these things happen? Was it you?
Anyway I’m pretty sure each story this week actually counts as flash fiction, but I’m not gonna check, you’re just gonna have to trust the higher self on this one. Bit of an emotional rollercoaster, this week’s edition. I like keeping it mildly unpredictable.
Last week’s S&S had shaman-warriors slaying demons of hate and regret, the ramifications of celestial phenomena, and two young boys getting into life-altering trauma, if you just got here or missed out on that edition, check it out HERE!
Lastly, as ever, please leave a like—let the stories know you enjoyed them! Otherwise they assume you all open these week after week and just go “god this really is awful”. In any case, thanks for reading.🙏
This week, we brave a ruined city in the midst of a Storm of Curses, we venture into the deep woods in search of the fabled Night Glade, and we join a familiar friend making preparations for combat in the Deep of Winter…
Storm of Curses
In the final years of the catastrophic battle across the three planes, a rogue god spread amongst mankind the power to curse as the gods did, in the form of words. Why this was done, none can say. Revenge? A vindictive nature? A joke gone horribly awry? With curses so unleashed, the war to end all wars came to an abrupt end, causing the gods to slay the transgressor, and then flee, each by themselves taking a seat in the heavens, never to return. Curses, as it so happened, placed by human beings, did not last forever, as was feared. But the knowledge of them would. It spread like a wildfire, and now free to speak, curses flew through the air like bolts and arrows, embedded in stone, soaked into trees, flowing down streams, striking the wrong person, or animal, or building, and lingering.
It took three things to bring the world back from the brink. The Imperial Speech Laws and the propagation of the Minced Curse was one. The backbone of the grand council's justification for its swift and decisive unification wars, the idle, open, uncautious, or malicious speaking of curses was a crime punishable immediately if overheard, and warped versions of the curse words were propagated and encouraged as replacements for things that had become unfortunate parts of every day life. The second was mankind's only succour in a world newly abandoned, the single remaining link with what humanity once called their gods, scavenged from a handful of divine intrusions into their plane: the curselodes, hideous constructions designed to absorb and trap ambient curses. The final were the effigies, for when minced words and curselodes failed.
Four magistrates in foot-length black robes and cylindrical caps tapped their thick redwood staves, topped by curious devices, on the loose pavement, while every so often one or two of them fiddled with the twisted shapes born on chains around their necks. Only their eyes were visible, and these eyes searched all around the hideous silence. The gold-trimmings of swooping roofs, the jade ornamentation on wood, and intricate stone carvings of the local architecture had fared no better than the looming imperial structures of smooth grey and shallow reliefs. Everything was off-kilter, deeply cracked, faded in great patches, damp-stained as from torrential floods, or apertures vine-choked and vomiting forth slender black feelers. Overhead the sky was a swirling filthy grey, streaked and blotched with pallid oil-slick colours, and as the clouds moved, it seemed like something shifted just beyond them, pressing as if against a thin skin, trying to find a way through. Every so often, a new sound could be heard off in the distance, something cracking, or being burnt or melted away, and it was not always clear if it was some building, or something living. The stench which came in creeping waves was neither fresh nor old, but it was definitely one of rot.
In the midst of this, and in the midst of the four magistrates, was someone else. A young girl, in a thick, shapeless sort of robe, with a hood, from which her arms did not emerge. She couldn't possible have seen more than eighteen summers. She sent her gaze around, too. Eyes wide, mouth held fast, and fixed on certain details until a magistrate moved to block her line of sight. For her own good, of course. The streets seemed to be sinking. Some of them were so bad that the buildings on either side had begun to fall forward, producing jagged tunnels. Some had even begun to split open. These she was shepherded away from quite swiftly.
There were bodies, and these they made sure she saw. Each and every one, transgressors against holy imperial law, speakers of curses who had reaped what they had sown. They were bloated, distended, burst and burnt, drowned in filthy puddles, not a single one bore any natural shade or texture of flesh, all of it squamous, warped, or rugose of aspect through which bones protruded, almost piercing through. Bent limbs and gnarled fingers curled and twisted inward. All that she saw was the price of sin, of an all too free speech.
During all of this, the four magistrates spoke not a single word, and neither did they look at the girl. They couldn't. They might have been the ones who had personally plucked her from her placid home three days ago, instructing her in her duty, but the moment they'd stepped into the ruined town, they couldn't do so much as look in her direction. Because she'd been so inquisitive. So talkative. So acquiescent. But they were, too, Agents of the Imperial Council, their very right hands in fact, elevated to a solemn and righteous station. They were doing what had to be done. Though, in truth, they had begun to understand why agents of their rank so often were granted an early retirement.
It resembled a kind of twisted human figure, if you squinted long and hard enough. Normally, it would be heavily shrouded, but the wet, tattered remnants of that were strewn about to reveal the thing underneath. The mere sight of it produced a profound sense of loneliness the girl could barely contain or really describe—a feeling cobbled together by everything the magistrates had taught her on the way to the city. The magistrates themselves were glad their robes hid so well their features, or else she may have suspected something in their terror. The air around the sundered curselode, though still translucent and formless, looked almost like an overflowing fountain, the way it all seemed to gather and fall and flow into the ground, and with thousands of long, thin tendrils, seep into the air.
Not even the finest researchers of the imperium's most esoteric and highest ranking offices could readily say why it was human beings were such perfect receptacles for curses. The leading hypothesis was that it was because humans were the only ones who could speak curses. No animal could mimic them. There was a bleak and mirthless irony that it was humans, but only the pure, the untouched, the blissfully ignorant among them, that could act as pits into which one could drop all one's horror. Perhaps the knowledge of curses was itself a curse, and left an indellible mark upon the soul, or the mind, or whatever else there may be within.
Whatever the case, they cast another layer of shawling over the figure which twisted in place, constrained by the four locked heads of their redwood staves, audibly bloating even as they hurried away, the stone already paling of its black marks, returning from its fading, the apertures losing their vines and shadows, the corpses withering, the sky beginning to clear. That she'd been born and raised for this eventuality struck a depth none of them wanted to acknowledge. If curselodes kept overfilling, soon everyone who lived council-sponsored lives would be raised for it. The only thing they talked about as they left the town was that the imperium really must crack down on cursing harder than ever. Maybe keep a few places like this as an example, they dared say. And, they thought, but did not speak, keep new effigies unshrouded. Make them all see.
Night Glade
The wind whispered incessantly through the trees, coming from a different angle at every second, through the green shimmering canopy, and through the gently swaying boughs, and through the sturdy, lichenous boles. It hushed through the tall grasses and the ferns which hid the ancient pathway that showed itself only the wind said it could. There were words on those winds—on some, but not all, and it was those that spoke and revealed the young wizard must follow.
That scroll had cost the sum of a full year's rent of that squalid little bedsit above the inn, scraped together from every source at the last second. At any rate, the great mass of dense parchment on its solid gold rollers would fetch most of the cost back, if needs be. But if it was legitimate, as it had been thus far, needs wouldn't be, never again. Most wizards get their cards handed down to them by their masters, but he had no master, and so it fell to him to construct a deck of his own design. It was the only course left to him. He knew the decks peddled by mountebanks in the black alleys of the city were each and every one them forgeries, cunning ones, yes, but hardly the stolen prizes of master thieves now for sale from the back of a rickety beetle-cart. In any case, it was said only another wizard could ever truly lay hands on another's tarot, and then only if it was given.
He had seven cards done. Seven of forty. And that had taken nearly a year. It would be worth it, in the end—it was a journey, and he understood that. He was eager, but the going was rough. From what he understood, eight cards was enough to begin, to shuffle, and cut, and draw. How to actually express those powers, though, and in all the different ways he'd heard and read about, that was beyond him. He'd been torn between waiting to have the deck completed before starting, and learning as he went. Tonight he'd have to make that decision.
This was going to be the Card of the Moon. Each deck had the same cards, illustrated different each time but still all of a set that had been passed down for time out of mind, sometimes diminished and half-forgotten, but he was of the opinion there were no more than forty. The scroll didn't say there were more, and it was old. It detailed the full set of forty: The Sun, The Moon, The Stars, The Flame, The Wheel, The Arcana, The Dagger, The Chalice, The Path, and so on for quite a while. Each one had to be completed in a certain place, and it was more a riddle to be solved than a guide to be followed. It gave hints, or at least indirect implications. Thus had the scroll led him to the Night Glade, a piece of popular legend, a hidden grove in an old wood where it was always night—the time and the place of magic, of the hidden, half-slumbering, half-dreaming, half-unreal. Here he would illustrate his Card of the Moon.
He let his mind wander as he passed through the darkening wood. Far above, through the minute breaks in the treetops, the pale sky had begun to turn into a rich cerulean. He wondered, from certain hints made in the tarot scroll, if it were not an ancient tarot that lay buried deep in the cool loam that kept the place in the Night. What greater expression of the tarot's art was there? As he dwelt upon the wonder of it, the shards of sky deepened, by subtle degrees, into a smooth navy. There was something special about this. That he was tracing the path of ancient wizards had been a thought he had continually kept in the forefront of his mind, as both guide and drive, for when the road became murky. But here, it was clearer than ever. Perhaps it was because this was the eighth card. Finally, above was a purest black in which distant pinpricks of silver shone, and just as he gazed upon it, his hand, which reached for the next treebole, felt empty air, and he stepped suddenly into the Night Glade.
It was a circle, a perfect circle he'd bet, of tall, dark hazel, straight-as-an-arrow trunks with emerald-tinged black canopies in the midst of which was a vision of the night sky like a deep pool, the stars twinkling, and the moon peering from over the treetops. There were stones of various sizes strewn about the glade, some were flat and looked as if they might serve as fine surfaces for the illustration, but they were too close to the treeline. He wanted to be as close to the center as he could be, right in the very middle of it. Felt right. A rugged, slanted stone sat fairly close, and so he chose it. Perhaps its warps and striations would reflect in the picture. The kit in his rucksack would have to be set up next: inkstone, brushes, charcoal—he did not work in colour. As he took a seat upon the springy grass, he had hoped there'd be light enough to work by, that the moon would shine full upon the glade. As it was, the moon seemed only to peek over. Could be it would change. To light tapers and candles, a few of which he had, just wouldn't seem right. He sat back on his hands. Or maybe it would, to work at night by a candle's radiance.
The scroll did not name it, and he doubted anyone but the eldest wizards could, but it was hinted within that scroll, and two other tracts he had been blessed to peruse, that the cards drew from some nameless central source. Some said it was beyond, just beyond perception or grasp, or that it was a totality no one person could see in its fullness. It was the world, or it was all about the world. The cards were, it could be understood, a channel for something ancient beyond reckoning, or it was what they worked through. This was what the scroll said. Or perhaps, the other sources implied and pondered, they were aspects of it, emanations. He had been wondering, too, if it was that he needed a certain amount of these channels before powers could be effected, or that with more aspects the more of the whole he had, and thus powers. Maybe he really would need the full set after all. Or rather, could be that working from an as yet feeble set was instead the best course of action, less prone to accident and danger. He did know—he knew exceedingly well, in fact—that the cards were not just employed for the gentle, mystical arts of divination and enchantment, but that they could express force as modes of warding and protection, and, he was secretly excited to experience, attack in magical combat. Wizards have in the past waded onto battlefields, and duelled for honour and the right to wisdom. The hurling of spheres like suns from fingertips, the casting of howling storms on shouts, battles of mental domination in illusory realms, dooms of fate upon the turning of the morn, the sundering of castle walls and the raising of mountains—legends abounded, and he knew them all to be absolute truths.
Of ancient forces, of hidden powers, of the earth itself, and secret nature of man did he think, the pangs of excitement rushing too and fro about his head, ideas scrabbling for place at the forefront of his thoughts, until a cramp in his hand bade him stop for a second, and see that his Card of the Moon was all but finished. He laughed to himself. That was the very magic itself. He gazed over his illustration, light glistening—the light! His eyes shot up to find the moon looming vast and serene in the middle of the glade view, so totally and completely full he was sure that with the passing of a few minutes it might just fill the glade itself. He had a mind to let it. Anything could happen. And when it did, and when the card was done, he had a decision to make.
Deep of Winter
It was an old manor the likes of which existed across all of Voerlund. A fortified house, not quite a keep, surrounded by the remains of lesser fortifications, in this case, all bare patchworks of stones in the surrounding fields. Enclosing all this, a high wall, once bearing fine conical turrets, itself now slowly returning to the earth. And like many old manors across Voerlund, attached to an unhappy history, it had something wrong with it. The red wizard Carloman hadn't taken long to figure out just what. Couldn't be anything else, not this deep in winter. So he had went off to prepare.
That morning, the wizard had gone out early, before the rising bell sounded the call to the day's labours, to bid farewell to the stars and meet the coming sun in its brief sojourn to these skies. The country around this house, inwards from but sitting betwixt the meeting point between coastward and seaward, was rugged in the extreme, and extraordinarily bare. Tall, hardy grasses, with a few non-descript growths of gorse and heather, made up the majority of the cold moorland which rolled alternately in low ridges, broad slopes, and shallow dips, all of it tinged with that chalky twilight of early morning. Only clumps of huddling copses or massive solitary trees, and a few spans of long, jutting rock, were there to break up the almost hypnotic monotony of the landscape. Some might call such country empty, others might call it rough, but Carloman thought it, even in winter, it had about it at least some of that stoic beauty of the best Voerlund countryside. It had about it the aspect of profound age, as it should, having been the first land settled in the great migrations so long ago.
As the winter sun began to stray overhead, Carloman saw on a gentle decline a short ways from the old wall upon which he sat, in a half-fugue state, a landwight shrine that he understood had been traditionally attached to the manor. It was an obscure kind, too, a short stone plinth, with little cracks, chips, and smoothed edges, rising from a mound covered in depressions into which old offerings had been set. He saw to it that the hoary, strange spirit was well fed with all the offerings had on his person, as well as a few taken from the house's own store. Among them were bundles of scented twigs wrapped in twine—a landwight favourite—as well as some exceedingly rare roots chewed for concentration, and a particular one of his very own World Serpent amulets, carried on his person for the past several decades. He left that there with a word to the spirit, placed around the plinth itself, that he was putting the little stamped medal in its care, and would return for it.
That afternoon was spent in the quaint village close by. Once it had been the ward of the manor, and in times of peril the people would have fled into the enclosing walls. But that was long ago, and walls and house had fallen into something that might in the not too distant future approach ruination. But it was guardian once, and this night it might be so again, only in a different way than before. He kept that at the forefront of his mind. What he also kept there was awareness of small, niggling anxieties and fears that were perfectly natural for not only the dangerous task at hand, but also his advancing age. But, as he put it, that age spoke his potency, cultivated to the utmost, strong like a fine vintage, and it had not failed him yet. He had neither room nor time for "but what if?" and especially not in such a charming and well-preserved little place as this, with its patches of cobblestones, weathered wide-flagged pavements, broad houses with stone grounds floors high wooden second storey overhangs, and relaxed chatter. Its streets were wide and filled with stalls and carts of painted wood, mostly of books—this village sat not too far from a town which was itself sort of annexed to celebrated college of historians. Such a village might have been home to rare treasures forgotten by time, if not likely plundered by scholars on the regular. He spent a lot of time soaking that in, just enjoying his casual perusal, buying and trading for little things here and there—nothing he really needed, but it felt good, and kept himself mindful of that. It was important.
That evening, as the sun began to wander away after a pleasingly long stay, Carloman sat down to a fine meal with his host, not a feast but a small, special something cooked up at the wizard's insistence. Partly because he could, and partly because it helped the atmosphere. It was to be an evening of drinking and stories, with his own confidence kept at the forefront of his mind, with everything else. An absolute necessity, for if he could shift the mood for just a moment, that was another boon in their favour. The old wizard did not fear so much for himself, but for others. That fear could be a source of strength, that care and compassion, and drive to aid and protect. It could also be a weakness. But it hadn't been so yet. As darkness settled, drink stopped flowing, stories became hazy, and the stars lent their colour to the sleepy winter countryside. The wizard's host retired to a room festooned in paper talismans, and the red wizard stood alone at a second floor window, soaked in the gentle astral luminance. He watched as the slumbering country became more and more frosted with their light. Now there was a good sight. Nothing wandered out there. "I have it," he thought, "right where I want it."
In his guest room, Carloman, clad in his rich red robes, sat in a circle of tall candles, the small brazier in the ceiling sent out its soft radiance, the air was warm and only faintly smoky, and the wind that had picked up was held back by thick-paned windows. The wizard laid out his god-carved staff and his now just under twenty amulets across his lap, examining the signs of the gods of the known world. Their aid and their power was his to invoke, and they listened eagerly, these guides and guardians of this realm. He sometimes wondered if whatever mighty spirits and elementals dwelt out beyond in the continental interior heard him, too, and lent their aid if they could. He was heartened that a world of righteous and gentle spirits and elementals must dwell out there. It was necessary for the wizard to perform these ritual motions every so often. Re-commit, re-prepare, throw another layer upon the thousands he'd already built up by his actions. One could never be too careful. And he relished in it.
In a soft rumble he spoke then, reverent and yet as to old friends.
"World Serpent, loosen thy coils and permit your kin entrance to this land, and set thy custodians about this house. Sun, send thy warmth to me, Stars shine thy rays upon these walls, Fire be in my raiment, Thunder cow the eternal nemesis. Oros Baletor, send to me from thine mountain an aspect of wrath. Heroes of the Far Hills, march now through these halls for the glory of light. Locod, come from thine deep with secret knowledge, Cannoc, shake this earth with your passing, Gaoth, cast off the shadows on thine roaring winds. And Dunmarrow, cold Dunmarrow, who keeps at the threshold of the sleeper, see that Death passes by this house tonight."
With these solemn and heartfelt invocations, the wizard clad himself in the signs and power of the gods, replacing each amulet with a wordless thanks and prayer, gripped his staff in his hand, running his thumb over the Serpent which ran up its entire length, and set forth into the collapsed cellar of the old manor to send the thing which had wormed its way into the world—into his world—back screaming to its masters.