And we’re back
Remember last week we had a that chill little Carloman story about how he prepares to battle the Outer Dark? Yeah that wasn’t meant to be a two-parter but now it is. That happens more often here than you think. It’s joined by two other tales: a look into a strange little church, and a journey across the dark mountains. Not necessarily in that order.
Last week was, of course, the first part of the two-parter which you should probably take a look at if you haven’t! It also had a rather gentle tale of magic, and a not so gentle tale of infestations of curses. Check that out HERE.
And, as ever, please leave a like—let the stories know you enjoyed them!
This week, we take a desperate trek across the Mountains of Dark, we seek the services of the Memory Fires, and we join the red wizard Carloman as he flees for the Cavern of the Flame…
Mountains of Dark
Lord Innsford was one of that rare breed of old nobility that has struggled down the long years, yet retained a serious sense of obligation and station. His line held onto its wealth, and had seen to it that things were taken care of, where most others of his kind had drawn only further and further inward. Innsford's reputation might have been built on his fancies and delusions, but people liked him, as far as he was known. The furthest extent of that, outside of his own domain, was the mouldering little town where Inquisitor Veney of the Watch lived.
When a council official shuffled into Veney's meagre, claustrophobic office one dreary afternoon and with some measure of hesitation announced that the city councillors hadn't heard anything from Lord Innsford for some time, Veney was struck with a sadness. The fellow had a reputation for good humour, and always sent good tidings to the Watch. The second the official mentioned that it was time someone checked up on him and his domain of Falmere, his sadness dried up and a profound dread settled in Veney's stomach. Communication between the mountains was sparse, rare, and the odd period of silence wasn't unusual. But it was always followed up, and Innsford was considered conscientious in his communications.
Veney couldn't sleep that night, so he spent the time preparing, re-preparing, and wondering how hard he should throw his authority around for aid. He knew he wasn't going to get out of this. Quite frankly, he was by far and large the most qualified around for this kind of task, what with all the dangers he'd braved and things he'd learned. He really resented more and more the fact he was the most qualified for everything nowadays. He reminded himself some two score times it was for a good cause in the end. But things so often began with good intentions.
No one travelled across the mountains alone. No one savoury, that was. It was an absolute necessity to have someone watch your back, and have someone watch theirs, and so on if needs be. The mountains were not healthy places. They were not the domain of human beings or the wholesome beasts which shared their lands. Something happened to the world when the mountains rose up from the inner earth in another age, an age just long enough ago for people to know things weren't always this way, but long enough for the grandsires of grandsires to remember old tales about them when they were children. Long enough for nearly every remnant of an old life to vanish, only its stains remaining. And the mountains were filled to the very brim, threatening to spill over, with every bad dream and notion any person could have.
Stories and sightings abounded from lone travelling bands of things like massive wolves made of smoke that filtered through the densely packed slender trunks of the jagged forests, or of the heavy, deliberate tread of devils that had the faces of men but the jaws of beasts, or the clouds of huge, predatory moths that descended with nary a sound but that of a breeze to smother with wings and dust. There were ruined structures whose original natures were entirely un-guessable, things either dashed to pieces when the mountains came, or, as Veney knew all too well, things thrown up with them, from some nameless inner darkness. Only madmen, heretics, outlaws, outcasts, and vampirists dwelt in those places. The vegetation was no better. Everything had some venom to it, thorns and needles and seeping stems, succulent fruits that were poison, vines that one could actually watch slither and grab and choke, and massive things that looked like great leaves that closed over animals, and devoured them. The mountains were not for any natural habitation and it wasn't just Veney's opinion that whatever lived in those alternately barren, alternately virulent reaches was not meant for man to know. The mountains were of a darkness, not just in aspect, but in the very light, too, for even standing upon some craggy, wind-shorn crest, the skies above them seemed to exist within a perpetual, ever-weakening twilight that never died, but continued to struggle.
Such were the only thoughts that went through the heads of Veney and the two watchmen he'd been able to bring along as they trekked into the cold murk of the highlands. He had refused his friend Vala because, although he didn't tell her, he considered her his second in command and next in line for the office of inquisitor, thus far too important to the town to be lost out in the wilds. And he would never be able to forgive himself, either. So, instead he brought two of his other best lads, who were made keenly aware of what it was they were getting into. Neither of them had been into the wilds before, but then again, neither had Veney. He never had reason to leave the town walls. Most who weren't saddled with the onerous duty of being merchants, peddlers, or communicators were blessed to never leave their relative safety. They had been as prepared as could be, swords and hatchets sharpened, a hefty supply of medicine more than provisions, for it was wiser to hunt than bring food, and thick oilskin cloaks for the damp and for bedding. They were told it would take a good three days of marching to arrive at Falmere, and indeed it had. But only two of them emerged into the town.
It had come the previous night. There was an ever-present background drone on the mountain path composed of unquiet winds high up, every so often lapping down to make the trees shudder, of clouds of buzzing wings of fat black flies with needle-like things protruding from the bulbous faces they had to ward off with hastily made torches, and the dirge-like calls of animals, voices that cried out from afar—always from afar—sounding like they were calling after someone who wouldn't come. And then came nightfall, creeping up so slowly and hit so suddenly, they barely even realized they'd been out on an open slope and not under some dense black canopy when it happened. And when it did, they found that the mountain had become alive with motion. Rushing, padding feet, flapping wings, skittering claws, long, low chitterings, and some of it wasn't even sound so much as it was just a sense of something moving to and fro constantly.
They knew the fire had been a bad idea, but the bite of the open highland winds cut through their cloaks, and the mists it drove in ceaseless wanderings clung to their faces with stinging cold. The fire barely lit even they who huddled right over it. The mountain was just different streaks of darkness. It never really changed. There were stars overhead, but they were so faint they looked like they might vanish any second. Veney told them the little bit he knew about the stars, and the magicians, scattered across the mountains and towns, who sought to escape to them, who said a beautiful, serene, tranquil oblivion awaited them up there, away from the rotten, broken world below, and how they could use starlight to calm and cleanse things down here a little bit. He'd seen it once. A funny little star mage had helped clean the town of a vampirist's sickness. It had stayed with him ever since. Every so often, he thought about it. The tranquility. That you could escape from it all. They each had, in turn, sat back from the fire and upon the earth as Veney had talked, and it was only when he looked up, his tale petering out, that he noticed one of his men had vanished.
The two of them sat back to back for the rest of the night beside the fire, swords in their hands, ears trained on every single sound until a feeble sun bled some definition back into the landscape, and they descended into the valley.
Falmere was a ruin. They couldn't even muster a laugh at the futility of it all. Veney had come expecting plagues or vampirism, something he could stick a sword into, something he could help. But there was nothing anyone could do, not about a vampirist's magick, but just a rotten, crumbling mountain's sloughed off skin. A simple landslide, he almost thought, but didn't. Simple doesn't wipe an entire town out of existence. Simple can be fixed, more often than not. Well, that was that. They'd probably been dead for weeks. Maybe longer. No one would ever know. One day the mountains, which had already taken so much, sighed, and took a little more. No point poking around the sad little stones that poked out of the mud, stagnant pools, and sodden shale. They'd have to serve as gravestones. At least anything that might have been in there, taking root, had been killed, too.
Veney didn't speak a single word on the three day trek back to his home town. But each and every step he took stamped a curse into the mountain.
Memory Fires
Once something came to be, it never ceased to be. An action cannot be undone. A thought can never be un-thought. Destruction was merely the ever-present transitional state of change and motion, for all things persisted, though the form be changed. The rubble of the collapsed structure returned to the earth as stone, perhaps to be harvested once again to become another building, and would forever be, in some form, every structure and field it was of and lay in. Every thought, the result of an impact, and which left an impact upon the thinker. These things happened, and existed. No matter what a person placed their faith into, that one simple yet profound truth remained, beyond all others, immutable. The lie and the illusion of impermanence was a poison to the logic of the eternal chain, the dominant philosophy and science of the modern era.
No, nothing could be destroyed, reversed, or made to cease. But the temple made a tidy sum pretending there was something that could be: memories. The most fleeting, ephemeral, mercurial part of a person, the mere impressions of impacts, even the strongest of which was dulled with time and age. These echoes, the temple said upon its emergence, could be dispersed, for they were illusions, and not long after their initial demonstrations, the vengeful faithful marched upon their steps and demanded the truth. But they already knew it, the temple said, and besides, they did not deny the truth of the eternal chain, merely that man was subject to illusions still, and that they could be broken. So they sat off to the side, less a cult and more a service, never free from scrutiny or controversy, yet never waylaid in their mission.
A person would enter into a deep, thin alcove of black stone, which could not be dignified with the name of corridor, and be asked to lay upon an flat, unadorned slab, also of black stone. They were one possessed of a memory they sought to forget, and the temple did not ask questions. Their head would rest on a thin grating at the end of the slab, while below a special fire would be built and stoked until it engulfed the head of the person. It was a curious kind of flame, unfeeling, numb, but, as so often described, weighty, as like a strong wind. It was a sort smoky black, tinged with streaks and tongues of yellow. The source and fuel were a secret. And such was the skill of temple attendants that only the specific memory was attacked, so that the person would remember their trip to the temple and the process, but not what they came to forget.
As they left, flooded with relief and a few extra coins lighter in thanks, underneath the temple, a few priests in short robes and soft slippers would gather in a great subterranean dome, illuminated solely by seven braziers. From the perforated apses above, streams of a thick granuled ash would fall with a light rustle into a colossal, curling-lipped dish in which dull gold embers smouldered with the rhythm of a heartbeat at rest. Half of these priests would take from the ground, and laid against the great dish, long thin lengths of black metal, hooked at one end. The other half would light paper lanterns and unfurl lengths of parchment. Then the first of their number stood upon slender walkways over the great dish, and cast the hooked end of the rods into the ash and through the embers, and in short flashes, bursts of fire would shoot up and dissipate. In them were images, shapes, and sometimes sounds that the scroll-bearing priests hastily scribbled down. After some several hours of this exercise, the priests quietly left to place the scrolls into an archive more vast than any college and cathedral could ever hope to boast, while above, a new day began, and new supplicants arrived above the dome.
No, nothing could be unmade, only changed. But they could be changed for the worse. And, the priesthood believed with profound sincerity, nothing, be it strange, terrible, or tender, that which makes the most profound impacts upon the soul, should ever be forgotten.
Cavern of the Flame
He had never seen anything go so bad so quickly before. Sure, he'd been in gods only knew how many close calls, rough scrapes, and hopeless battles, but righteousness and his own might has always powered through. Never before had something gone so wildly out of the control, never had he so badly misjudged a situation. He would have suspected it was a trap had Bozmann, the middling count of this decaying little manor in half-seaward Voerlund, not come out of the encounter nothing less than cursed.
Carloman had dragged the man from the house after setting fire to it, but didn't for a second believe that the den of gnostics within would perish. No, not with the vileness they'd been able to so easily conjure. First by carriage, and then by boat, landward, to Mul Manatar had the red wizard bid the count come. There was no time to try options across Voerlund and beyond—terrible as it was, the World Serpent's guardianship would only go so far in protecting the man's soul, it could not cleanse it, the wizard did not particularly fancy having to curry favour and bargain with however many obscure cults of Oros on the mountain Baletor, nor was there time to comb through the archives of the Paladins of Imaal. As it was, the curse hounding the poor fool was absolutely potent, born of a darkness scarcely translatable to words, that it was genuinely beyond Carloman's ability to undo without extensive experimentation. He could do little more than hold it back as they fled, day and night, through a weakening Summer, to the great Shrine of the Firstborn Flame just outside Mul Manatar.
Carloman had gotten the full story in bits and pieces along the way as the man's strength waxed and waned, as the curse which had been set upon came and went, sometimes in accord with its own malevolent directive to torment, sometimes when the wizard could muster enough power to drive it off for the time being. Count Bozmann had been seduced by the lies of a sect of gnostics. He was the last of his line, a line that had, until him, been content to wither away, safe in the knowledge that their time as guardians of the region had long ago come to an end because the people were, and would be, fine without them. But Bozmann was a Voerlunder, and as such, felt an intimate connection to the grand history of the old house, the ruins, the land, and his blood's deeds as detailed in family chronicles he spent long nights poring over and over. And they had found him, and told him the old glories might be his again, if only he listened. So he had, and they dwelt in the house with him, in its cellars and old tunnels, calling up stars knew what to twist his ancient abode that had once stood as a bulwark into a locus of darkness. Carloman had been under the impression it was some nameless, wretched shadow he could sear and blast with flame and light, not a cabal of wealthy, reclusive sorcerers who'd been operating in that region for Voerlund for decades. They could wait. They'd be ashes soon enough.
The ship had arrived in bad weather at a small port town far seaward of Mul Manatar, a sort of tendril of the great city itself, and that weather had followed them every step of the way. Despite proffering every wagon, carriage, and merchant caravan Carloman saw with a hefty purse of shining lustre, no one would take them, not even a short ways to some farming hamlet down the highway. They'd seen Bozmann each and every time, and though no one could possibly know what was actually wrong with him, Carloman knew something in their souls felt it. The over-eager wizard offering far too much coin didn't help either. So they fled for the shrine on foot, across the vast landward steppes.
They did not pass into the city proper of Mul Manatar, but skirted it, gazing from afar at the long trails of sacred smoke, the glow of countless holy flames, and the glittering lake Manatar itself—divine aid so close at hand, but untouchable. Going into the city wouldn't solve anything. The sky had, since before they had even set foot on the coastline that morning, remained in a state of pallid murk, the Sun struggling to break through the spreading fingers of the obscuring clouds and their perpetual cold drizzle. Serpent's Breath, what an omen the two of them made. What must the people in the city think? Carloman wondered at just what power had been bestowed on that roving, homing malevolence they'd barely even glimpsed. A curse was halfway between a living thing and a phenomenon, not quite an elemental and not quite flesh but an animate spell, a seething bundle of maledictions and imprecations given a form to wander. And they always came in the worst forms imaginable. He'd dealt with comparatively few, and they were not easy to break. This thing must have been the work of the darkest of adepts, gnostics who'd soaked their souls in lightless places that were more of the Outside than this world, and there had gained profound favour from their masters. Anyone could lay a curse, but such potency as this could only be bestowed. The red wizard shuddered more than once at the thought of such people walking the lands of his home.
Night fell swiftly, of course, and from its coming there descended three loathsome moons, bloated and rugged, tinged with a pale, sickly green upon their surfaces more like bloodless flesh than ancient rock. They were being watched. Followed. Hunted. Interest had been taken in a soul that had no doubt been offered, and in the open expanse of the steppes between the last Manatarian farmstead and the Shrine of the Firstborn Flame, a great mass of shadows flocked to them, spilling down from the false lunar radiance. Coils, stars, gods, this was bad. The worst Carloman had experienced in a long time. Bozmann had been silent on just what exactly he had partaken in, and Carloman hadn't pushed it, but the wizard had stopped amidst the growing darkness, and made sure they were on the same page. He was saddened to learn that Bozmann knew the Truth, the kind of which drives them to slavering madness, and the kind of which had sent Carloman on a lifelong crusade. As yet, Bozmann was on the brink which led to ruination, and what happened next would decide everything.
Something rushed by them. The magician had removed his gem of flame, a piece of primordial, crystallized fire from the inner earth, and had set it into the top of his god-carved staff, illuminating a broad circle of the rolling steppeland. The thing ran by, each time, just within the barest fraction of light. Enough for them to see its passing, but not to see what it was. Carloman had an idea the curse was closing in, this time for good. So far, they had not actually seen it. Such was the nature granted it: torment, drawn out, and savoured. But either it or its creators sensed opposition, the wizard guessed. They had not been idle nor had they been far, gnostics the likes their calibre were never far in either mind or space from their works. Potent though he may have been, he was an old man, and the mad rush of the past few days was going to take its toll. But first, thought Carloman, let them watch. Let them know. He'd killed their kind the past, he'd driven out demons, banished rotten souls back to the Dark—no one and no thing could gain the advantage on him for long, experience taught him that, and that constant refrain was his bulwark against every nagging doubt and fear.
They could see the great pillar gates of the Shrine ahead in the growing night. Flames lit them for a long ways, beacons of strength, guidance, and purity. Bozmann, who had grown terribly silent and haggard, let out a whimper like a child when he saw them. They were set into one of the rare few rises in the flat open span of steppe, painted with scenes of Manatarian mythology, of their most ancient ancestors and their arrival at the lake under the guidance of All the Sky. Though no Sun nor even Stars shone now, their images were as guides to the wizard and the count. And then the thing came closer—for just a second, just a flash—its bulk passed far too close into the staff's circle of light, and showed just what manner of thing it was. Bozmann screamed when he saw it. Carloman set himself firm onto the earth, but his heart began to flutter with panic. It was like a man, dripping with cold damp. Horribly thin, as if wasted away, starved, desiccated. The bones that stuck out from the greyish skin were not human, and neither were the bulging, staring eyes that peered in a way that made it seem like perhaps it was blind. But what struck them worst of all was that it was huge, magnitudes larger than a person, and it crept on its long hands and bony feet. There was something that Carloman would call feverish and desperate in its twitching movements, producing something more, at least for him, of profound disgust than fear.
It was also blocking them from one final rush to the Shrine gates.
Carloman decided right there and then it was now or never. They were close enough. The arena had been drawn all about them, and it closed in. Some while back, he had given Bozmann each of his twenty amulets, including the one retrieved in haste from the landwight shrine near the manor, and had stuffed the count's pockets and belt with paper talismans. At this point, they would merely prolong the inevitable as the curse closed in further and further. It was of the Dark, but it was not itself a demon nor the manifest power of one, nor of an Aeon. It was, in effect, a twisted loophole of the world's own laws. It might not like the light, but no harm would come to it from illumination alone. The wizard needed something far, far more substantial if he sought to overwhelm and drown the layers of hateful malignance of which it was composed.
He closed his eyes, and incanted, not with words, but with thoughts.
"Flame. Flame. Heat. Fire. Light. Flame. The flash of flame, the scorch and burst and destruction of flame. The element of change, that which grows, that which releases, that which undoes, that which helps create. Flame. Thoughts of flame, of the hearth, the bonfire, of the inner earth where fires rage against black caverns. Words of flame, in every tongue of man and every magician's secret cant. The first flame, the guiding flame, the purifying flame. Great god of Mul Manatar, god of seekers, Breath of the Serpent come now, out of your deep, out of your shrine, you who casts not shadows but softens the light and land about you, as did the Light of Old before the Dreamer. Remember, O Flame, that for which you were first struck, and come now."
The thing was smothering Count Bozmann as Carloman focused harder and harder. He turned, fire in his mind's eye, striking the curse with the blazing gem atop his staff. It reeled and recoiled with extreme and, the wizard felt, mocking exaggeration, because, he swore, it knew Carloman could do nothing more and not risk harming the count. Maybe he couldn't, no, but the many gods of this world could reach out in ways a person couldn't. Aye, the gods, in their many shapes and guises, were often subtle, invisible, present and immanent but loathe to be intrusive any more than they were invoked by the souls whom they had vowed to watch over since the beginning of the world. If people could see how the world really looked, how the red wizard saw it, the signs and symbols of divine motions in every little thing, could be no nest of gnostic madmen would even exist. But for right now, the colossal spiral of pure, searing fire that flew out of the Shrine of the Firstborn Flame and thundered into and through the stick-thin form of the wandering curse would do to show all those who saw it that the gods listened, and came forth eagerly.
Carloman saw it for only an instant before storm of heat, life, passion, and destruction overloaded the kernel of hate that was the curse, but the face of that thing turned to him, and those that had made it, he knew, saw him. He said in his mind it would most certainly not be the last time.
As the fire expunged itself and the natural richness of the slumbering world returned, the magician noticed, with a great mixture of what he could only call amusement and embarrassment, that the path to the shrine had in fact been fairly populated. So enshrouded in shadows from the moons had they been, which he saw, too, had shirked away, that he'd been unable to perceive anything but what his light fought to show. The wizard sat beside Count Bozmann inside the warm, calm shrine, where a single towering candle burned with a colossal rich, roaring, seven-hued flame, tending to the man's injured spirit and mind with esoteric reassurances as best he could manage between throngs of rather excited Manatarians.