Shadows & Sorcery #188
Breaking the rules by publishing a whole 2000+ word short story, because sometimes that just happens. I wouldn’t worry about it. The other two are definitely flash fiction. You think I’d be submitting this stuff to magazines to get paid and have publishing credits and an “image” or something but nah, these are for you guys, also I’m insane.
So last week was one I’m particularly pleased with, full of sardonic twists, eldritch, apocalyptic fantasies, and a problem that needed sorting. Go on and check it out if you just got here, missed it, or want to read it again!
And, as ever, please leave a like—let the stories know you enjoyed them!
This week, the last member of a dying race quests to pay a divine debt at an Eternal Altar, we take an atmospheric journey into the Northern Woods, and the red wizard Carloman pulls out all the stops to battle his fiercest foe yet in a Tomb of the Dark…
Eternal Altar
Through no land that have I passed has there been one that bears an aspect like my own. The features of my people I’ve studied well, first in my memories of the matron, then when those began to fade, in the waves of warm valley rivers, upon polished palace mirrors, twisted through ancient ice, and on the deathly still surfaces of deep mountain lakes. I believe I am the last, and the weight which perches upon my shoulders is all that remains, apart from my own weathered flesh, of a debt that must be repaid.
Not so long ago, as the world may measure it, there were more of us. First scattered, then decimated, then absorbed—that was how I was taught by my matron. The shifting of borders drew our communities into different and impassable lands, then those lands began to war, and those who remained, they hadn’t been the eldkin for a long time. Save for a few, on the fringes, in the dark. It was these stragglers to whom the offspring of new peoples remarked looked oddly like one’s grandsire, or portrait or sketch of a dead ancestor. And within that last vestige of the eldkin did the last scrap of a dying culture persist: a duty passed from child to child.
Only, with every death, and with every new birth, a bit of it was forgotten, and now it has come to me, and I know not even the name of the deity to whom the debt is to be repaid.
My grandsires spoke of the duty to my matron when she was young, and she told me their words as best she could recall them. They were of shame and regret in their weakness and forgetting. Rare is it for any race to survive too long in this raw, turbulent world, the tide of new peoples washes away the chaff, but we bare few survived, and perhaps took it for granted that if we had lasted this long, we would continue to do so, for just long enough, never grasping that these final times were the worst of all. We dwindled quickly, and scrabbled to keep as many of us who remained together. I think, though, the damage was done. A tireless pilgrimage from one end of the world to another demanded heavier prices than most of my ancestors were willing to pay. So it finally came to me.
I passed through a dozen lands, with only a direction to follow. I passed through searing hot realms of towers and dust where shrill horns sounded to ward off demons, and through half-sunken frigid wastelands infested with grotesque idols whose people seemed to live with one foot too eagerly in the grave. I traversed many long spans of cool woodland I would have found more tolerable had the tribes not been so suffused with gloom that I felt I had to flee, or face the consequences of their half-mad distrust and suspicion. I travelled across cold, arid, craggy deserts in which I believe even now I was watched at every step. I came, once, to a lush open steppeland, of gentle rises and sweeping plains under a blazing blue sky. A place of such profound repose I was tempted far more than once to stay, and dwell in the peaceful seclusion of a shallow leeward yurt, but was too aware I was an alien, and I knew the question of my coming and whence it was I travelled, though it would be asked with sympathy and wonder, would haunt my conscience until the day I died.
Once, in a city of layers, I met an old man who hoarded older books, and was so intrigued by me that he let me read a priceless artefact: a scroll penned by a name I knew from my matron to be my own grandfather of a distant line. I knew some of my blood had found purpose and direction in the duty, while a good deal had also found it onerous. This grandfather had been one of the latter. “But where has our eldgod gone? Have not the new gods, who have kept watch by rite and communion over the tribe for several thousand years, been good to us?” That was when I learned it was to a deity I was going. I only knew what an altar was for I partook in the temples of a score of other gods and pantheons in my wanderings. And indeed, they had been good to me. No dream or voice came to me from the eldgod of my people. But the god was of my people, and the debt we owed it, whatever that may be, was the reason we fought to survive, or so I guessed. What may have lain behind that was enough for me the continue.
As the last meagre hut vanished beyond sight, and I passed from the lands of mankind, I kept close to mind the conversations I shared with the theologists and archaists of the ancient provinces where I had been a prime subject of study. There was much discussion on the twists and turns a religion takes throughout its life, and they do live, they live as the humans that share them live, sometimes fading with immense age, sometimes cut short with one brutal stroke. But like their humans, religions sprang from a shared source. Trace the steps, I was told, and it all goes back, in one form of another, to the same idea. Under their thousand skins, the theologists told me, they had an idea of what my duty was, but were hesitant to say.
To the new gods I prayed one final time, made obeisance, gave thanks, for hereon out there were no humans, and therefore no gods. Save the one that waited. The one who, as I came through a deep canyon between the sheer rises of a dusty plateau, in a wilderness more hard and grave than any I had seen, had given the greatest share of creation, and paid the greatest price. What that was, priests could only give educated guesses, but if it was so, this god’s duty, this debt, held staggering implications on the age of my tribe, and of the weight that had been placed on my shoulders.
I took the temple to be mine, and my people’s. Hewn from hard stone in some time beyond what a human mind could grasp, by hands whose blood might be flowing in my veins, the odious chamber was lit by shafts of pale light given passage by aeons of assault upon the stone. The great inner crevice curved and wound slightly, running all the way to half-domed overhang, under which dwelt both the final object of the quest of a people as old as the world, and their end. Squat and unadorned, and yet, in every way imaginable, unmistakable as aught else.
I believe my ancestors knew what to do, but at some point in their agonies, lost or forgot, and believed it would be me, or someone like me, who would know, who would see, what to do. Having failed each and every one of them as I was met with the silence of this elder space, I slumped against the altar, and closed my eyes.
I asked if the debt was paid.
As the final breath of a race ebbed from my lungs, there was an answer, but only the wind will know what it said.
Northern Woods
The perfume of the pine needles from above and the musty scent of fallen bough and leaf from underfoot. The rustle and crunch of leaf in tree and on the earth. The drifting silver mist between the wrinkled skins of black bark. The shiftless chill which clings to the flesh that passes through it. The cold breath haw trailing up and out like the ghost of fire. The heavy solitary drops of gathered night dew which fall like footsteps. The impression of old, stained stone beneath the deep green blanket of moss. The whole of the north of the world is a mountain, climbing to higher and higher beetling peaks, brooding under eternal slate skies, which knew the tread of falling ice long before that of mankind.
It comes as no surprise that something happens to humans who move to the north.
They live in huddled sprawls which gather in silent reverence around the boles of titanic trees, huts of clay-packed stone and moss-roof that look as if risen from of the earth itself, as if they grew here and had no hand of man to shape them, merely inhabit them. It has long been joked, and more than joked, that northern humans must bear the lichen of the primordial stone upon their skins. True, their flesh bears the cold, mottled aspect of the damp stone, but some might go as far as to say that that northerners are born aged and grey. Others yet might not consider that too far beyond the realms of reason. But for all their leaden visage and weathered mien, it is also said, and with no measure of mirth, that to rouse the ire of a northerner is as difficult as heaving as uprooting a mountain, and just as calamitous.
Not everyone is made to live in the north. Scores of cultures have learned this over the ages, leaving as their only mark the meagre fossils of dead settlements. The foothills of the beetling northern land are covered in the pits and ridges of sunken foundations and crumbled walls. The ruin-strewn, leagues-long hinterlands, quietly being reclaimed after their brief attempts at rebellion against the mountain nature, are a pitiful and incongruous sight before the black immensity of the north, which envelopes half the horizon around those who stand amidst the frost-haunted remains of dead townships.
What smothers from existence each and every failed foothold is not the harshness which meets every step of the explorer and colonist. It takes a special breed to brave not the cold or rain, but the solitude. In the northern wilds, sound does not travel amongst the dense, crowded trees—speech, call, song, and weeping are constricted, made to know their place in this land where storm-shout and night wind whisper held reign before there were voices to intrude. Humankind adores and wants for sound and space, and the reaches of the north afford either too much or too little. There is no end to the icy black trunks of its twilight forests whose trunks reach so high as to uphold and pierce the firmament itself. There is no end to the sparse, rust-hued tundra, where shifting mist-banks reveal only more stark steppeland, broken alone by the emergence of singular, lonely monoliths, serving only to make they who see them feel small, alone, and in the open.
It is either flesh or resolve that fails first in those who go to the north, and in those who survive perhaps a month, even they, beaten back by inhuman desolation and indescribable sublimity, always come away, it is said, with something different about them. There’s a term for it in the hard tongue of the north, for foreigners who leave with a mark upon their spirits, which when translated may mean something like “enchanted”. But that would be far too gross an implication. If taken literally, the word they use to describe those who have seen the north for its own truth, and have come away with it in their souls, means “taken by the mountain”.
Tomb of the Dark
Carloman had seen the likes of this a hundred times over. Possibly more. Probably more. A grave, dug in innocent earth, and filled with something bad. Half-hearted rites of fire or benediction, a sky burial ceased in haste, a mere drop or two of anointment. Oh, he couldn’t blame them. Even the most obstinate and devout priests were still human. No one wanted certain things in their midst for longer than absolutely necessary. A bad memory out of sight is a bed memory out of mind, right? The act of burial, the act of returning to the earth, or leaving behind something of yourself for your kin, where it occurred, was a gamble hiding under a genuine gesture. He knew that.
So why was this one different?
Because it was in a city? No, he’d seen worse wandering city streets. Because what was lurking in this tomb was particularly abhorrent? No, he’d seen all kinds of things crawling out of catacombs—destroyed them, too. Because it had gathered around it this gaggle of dangerous fools? Well, that wasn’t new, but it was rare. Wasn’t usually something like this gathering people around it. Wasn’t like that the last time he’d found one. Hmm. That was it, wasn’t it? It was smart. Aye.
The dagger point at his back returned the wizard to reality. As did the glint of three slender spikes atop thin-bladed axes pointed at him from out of the hazy shadows, each held by a pallid Voerlund aristocrat-and not all of them young idiots, either. Only their hands and eyes emerged from the lurid, dirty ochre radiance spewed forth by three legged, high-lipped braziers. There was nothing of warmth in it. Whatever fuel was being consumed—not changed, as like healthy fire—was unclean, desecrated. The only kind of illumination that would do for this place, no longer a chamber of sleep before passage into rebirth, but a temple to darkness older than the wheel of return, and the world that spun on its axis.
There was a sound then in the deep beyond the damp stone arch they all stood within, where the wizard had been ambushed. The aristocrats only seemed further steeled by the dry padding that announced its coming, looks of callous mirth crossing their red-ringed eyes as the filthy, hot, ochre half-light crept over its form.
The only kind of light a vampire could withstand.
It was hunched as it moved just within range of the braziers, not as with weight, but like something that might pounce. From a skeletal form shrouded in tatters emerged splayed, taloned feet and arms with gnarled fingers. There was something swollen and perhaps slightly too long about the neck. Its nose and eyes were ragged pits surmounting a lipless mouth of thin, puckered flesh over grey gums and long teeth. The only hint of colour upon the thing’s entire form was the gore-drenched maw that drooled long strings of blood. It bore the mark of its feasting with pride, to show what the rude matter of the Demiurge’s blasphemy was good for.
The second he’d descended the steep flight of time-worn steps and entered this dark-choked chamber, a dense shadow had washed over him, their cold, clammy hands had grabbed him, and wrenched his staff from his hands—luckily unbroken. Not that they’d have an easy time with that. But it was gone from him, he held not the gods in his hand, nor did they support him. The axis which turned the world had been cast to the ground before the enemy, in a space that was more than half of the Outer Dark. There was scarcely more bleak an omen he could have received.
Carloman may not have been entirely defenseless, but the odds were so rarely stacked against him as they were now. It only took a second to turn the tide of a battle—or die.
The vampire did not come forth immediately. Could be this thing’s power was not in its force, could be it knew even in this state Carloman was a threat. Or it could be it just wanted its slaves to do the deed. It remained just within the unnatural light so that only the merest hints of its features were outlined in sickly orange. It had no eyes, but he knew it looked at him. The Voerlunders did, too. Just what lies had been spun to them as this thing fanned its hunger, savouring the horror the come? Nothing for it other than to kill this thing and make sure it stayed dead.
Then it spoke, and Carloman’s skin crawled. He almost stepped back into the dagger. Like deep snow crunching, like thick ice cracking, like dry wood snapping, muffled amidst the dulled storm that was the thing’s exhalations. Carloman recognized them as words, and was glad he did not fully understand them. But the moment its guttural clicking and retching ceased, the wizard felt the dagger at his back lift—pulled back, so that a full strike might sink as deep as could be into his back. And the moment he felt it connect and shudder off his flesh, Carloman wheeled about and drove his elbow into the novice gnostic’s jaw. The dagger clattered the dank stone earth, splashing in the thin pools that gathered between the old flagstones.
Carloman was not a fighter, but he had the bulk to deal one good hit, and he had the knowledge to impress a Macha chieftain with a display of sorcerous might that awarded him a body of woad armour—his absolute last line of defense, and one in which he trusted implicitly. There was, somewhere within him, a profound satisfaction as the blow connected. The fellow must have been fairly limp for the wizard felt him crumple, and heard him hit the ground.
The vampire didn’t move, but its slaves did.
He didn’t waste a second—one hand flew to his chest where hung the charms about his neck, under his robes, which they’d managed to neglect even looking for. He couldn’t touch them directly, but it didn’t matter in the moment—the red of his robes may even aid in his working. The other hand stretched out, fingers crossed and entwined, placed in his vision over his staff, and he bellowed three words of fire in an old occult cant, words distilled from symbol and language to evoke in its purest sense the rush and flash and blast of fire. The gem which sat inert in the serpent mouth of his staff flared to existence for a mere second, the words awakening the sympathies within the primordial, crystallized flame of the gem.
That made the vampire flinch, and it made its slaves cower, grasping at their eyes, their axes falling.
The undead itself didn’t hesitate—from its throat, through the gurgling of fresh human blood, came a thick, clicking, rasping language of darkness, and the three-legged braziers around the tomb chamber leapt to life, the sickly flames raising up their tongues, sucking in whatever ambient light remained in the room. It was like a cloud passed across Carloman’s eyes, and in response to such, hand still on his amulets, he invoked the name of Gaoth, Macha god of sky. The cloud shifted, but the darkness persisted. This place may not have been far underground, but it was far in influence from the world above. In truth, Carloman was himself one of the sole aspects of worldly presence in this deep. Those fools enslaved to the vampire’s will were on the brink, if not falling already, and for how long, only the Aeons which had set their sights on their souls knew.
The red wizard Carloman and the vampire then engaged in a magician’s battle. If the dragon was the bloody claw and gnashing fangs of the Dark, the vampire was its suffocating grip and leeching maw. Dragons commanded powers of darkness with force and cruelty, vampires compelled with malice and venom. They were the archsorcerers who whispered shadow magicks to gnostics in places of ruin and death, and for every spell and soul under its control, the lust and gluttony which had festered in their life, and bloomed in the grave, was enflamed anew, and they were granted the power to further feed it. Arcane words of light and fire and breath, fragments of Manatarian Sun mantras, Minosmirii hymns of glory, calls for the passage of the titan Macha Cannoc who is C’noch ar den Talav, the setting of the Serpent’s Coils—each one was met with wordless invocations of eternal darkness, of lightless caverns and their biting chill, of the sunken grave’s creeping miasma, of the dark beyond the stars which flays the shackles of the material world, the slither and grasp of the demon, and the crushing weight as of a great hand not upon the flesh, but upon the soul. Carloman’s eyes flared burnished gold and the vampire’s grew to points of absolute black.
Carloman’s crimson robes began to shimmer as he called forth the heat and fire and passion and blood their rich red held within them, an aura of fire to encircle him and to burn the jaws of what sought to close around him. The things tatters began to melt into the dark around it, giving it the impression and thus power of profound immensity. With every passing second, with every flash and flicker of light and dark, of fire and shadow, of gods and demons, powers waxed and waned, the balance shifted, marks and impressions were left upon the space with every look, feeling, and thought, competing for primacy to reassert the strong stone on ancient Voerlund soil, or to melt away once and for all this blemish upon the eyes of the Aeons. In the midst of their combat, two of the vampire’s gnostic slaves suddenly vanished in a blot of shadow. In any other soul, especially one as sensitive as the red wizard’s, the pang this aroused would have been one of horror and shock—a fatal mistake. But Carloman had seen too much of this hungering dark to be anything but angry, as he had been since he’d learned the Truth all those years ago.
He held out his hand and hand roared the name of the World Serpent in the most ancient tongue of Voerlund, from the time before the Serpent turned stepped back from the dire follies of the first empire, before the Order of the Coils descended below the eyes of man, a call to an primordial oath between Guardian and Ward, and his staff flew from the ground and into his hand. A surge of emotion rattled his very breath, and he let it flow upon the gem of fire, which burned then with all the rage of the ancient fire from which it was plucked. The clean and mighty flame began to melt away the sickly, sapping luminescence. In the words of the dryador sorcerer-priests of Macha, Carloman bid the wind of Gaoth to pass through the Serpent’s Coils and cast aside the noisome stench of mouldering shadow. He bid seven Heroes of Minosmir muster a charge, spears and lances at the ready. And as if answering his summons, a gale wind galloped through the tomb from outside, making the dark flicker. Night may have been falling, but Carloman called the Sun back from its wandering to the far lands for just a moment. He bid it warm the winds, and the Firstborn Flame to send its embers on them, too. And in response, a golden, red-gleaming force joined the gale and charge, streaming down the tomb steps, filling the air with rushing points of living red.
The vampire screamed—a howling shriek far more of fear and hatred than pain. This stain upon the world was seeking retribution—he could feel its tendrils reach out into the world, begging aid from whatever bits of lightlessness it could force into its service. It wouldn’t get very far.
Upon ground that was not of this world, Carloman strode forth, and took the gem from the mouth of his staff. The fires that raged in the deeps were the bulwarks against the shadows that had taken root when a secret guardian feared its transgressions, and was cast down, and this gem was part of that bulwark. Through his fingers, beams of bright orange light played. He gazed upon the parasite thing, a glutton whose hunger had found no satiation in its miserable life, and had been bade continue to gorge when it died. With one final growl, Carloman faced it, and it drove its talons into his neck and shoulder, its red-drenched maw stretching open, the skin tearing to reveal a snake’s fangs, the flowing tatters beginning to enfold them both like wings and tentacles. His eyes of gold met its pits of shadow, he spoke one sing word of fire, whose every utterance by the wizard had only made it grow in force, and with surging flames enveloping his very hand, Carloman shoved the gem into its misshapen chest. The vampire hadn’t even a second to curse him as it burst into white hot fire, reduced to a wet ash that fell to the damp stone of the tomb, dead.
Two gnostics lay shivering on the floor, eyes fixed upon the red wizard. What to do with you two fools, he thought. He’d dealt with people like this before. Made sure they’d never spread their cruelty to anyone ever again. But those kinds never looked upon Carloman with fear, like these two reedy, snivelling cowards. What to do, indeed. Leave them to wonder for the rest of their lives? No, as much as he’d rather clap them across the chops with his staff, he’d better give them the other side of the story the vampire had spun for them. And make them help with the fire that would need to burn here for many days.