Shadows & Sorcery #197
If you’re one of the people who opens these emails or goes to the site every week to at the absolute least skim my writing, it means more to me than you can imagine. There’s people who receive these who haven’t read a single edition. I don’t get that, and I think they’re missing out. So thank you for reading.🙏
Anyway, did you know every story in this week’s moody little three-parter actually counts as true and proper sub-1000 word flash fiction? I didn’t, until I checked. I skirt that line cuz I’m a rebel.
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This week, we plunge long into the Sea of Magic, we venture deep into the Desert of Sorcerers, and we journey into the far reaches of the Ice Wilderness…
Sea of Magic
Across the rock-strewn plains of short, dun copper grasses and hard, dark soil, down the long sodden moors where mournful winds passed on their ceaseless journey from end of the world to the other, and past the craggy lonely shores of stone shards and shattered shells, there roared a strange sea. Its waters lapped in waves of luminous cyan and cerulean upon the rocky inlets and spits, and rose up like great shining shrouds of azure and teal beneath deep opalescent skies tinged with its fantastic spray.
Great arcs of seafoam rushed across the stone expanse when moons were strewn across the heavens, and as the waters receded they left in their wake shimmering pools from which curious objects emerged. For thousands of years, the sparse, disparate tribes who dwelt amidst the damp crags and coastal highlands ventured down during low tides to explore that borderland of the eldritch deeps, and found in their searchings things of strange and alien make revealed to them.
At first, it was tools, or things like tools. Things with edges keen beyond their reckoning, that never chipped, never dulled, and others weighted with impeccable skill. Then other things came. These gave them a reliable source of fire in the perpetual moisture of the coast, as well as heat for huts without flame in the winterfalls, and coolness in the cloying summertides. There were things that let fly shining bolts to hunt the sea-fowl and skittering beasts with, things to let the people swim in the air, and things which made the weight of great rocks seem as naught.
After sea-storms that crackled as with thunderbolts, the titan ocean peaks left the jagged coasts strewn with odd materials like lengths of shining stone that bent and moulded to the strike of other things from the deep. With time, such things made for the tribes their walled villages, for they continued to battle throughout the ages for the riches the sea threw up, to be claimed by might and cunning. But too with time did their conflicts cease, and the eyes of united tribes begin to peer outward, beyond the grim coastline, to the iridescent sea which for generations beyond measure dwelt deep in their dreams.
They did not go out into the waters lightly. It was a source of the nethermost mystery to them, the wellspring of their survival in a harsh land, but also what allowed them to wage war for the first time in their existence. What it meant, what it wanted—if it wanted anything—was something not even their finest sages could guess at, and there were in the lands of the tribe none more versed in the gifts of the sea than they. They tested themselves first. Small excursions on woven rafts, and then small vessels made of sea-stuff, each time learning that objects from below had some sort of pull to the water, or the water had some effect upon them—they couldn’t rightly tell, but after months of hesitant experimentation, the first low, long ships, wrought from sea-borne metal, set loose from a far-reaching spit of dark slate shingle.
Those boats were the first delvers, they who discovered that like called to like, who spent days upon the waves, using sea tools to drive and pull, combing through the shining azure swells for the things which cascaded through the tumult of that vastness, pulling them up with certain tools they brought with them. Treasures and wonders were piled into their vessels and heaped upon the floors of chieftains, who sent the delvers back out with more to gain more. Fleets scoured the billowing waters, all but living at sea, edging further and further beyond the sight of their grim land.
And then, one day, under a high, pearly sky, a vessel vanished, and the first loss of life at sea was mourned for a full fortnight.
Until, that is, they returned, humbled, and to humble. Sages leaned forward to their tales, eyes a-gleam, while chieftains sat back, and brooded. The sea did not end, said the delvers, nor did it ever calm. And yet, amidst the restless swirl and churn, they could see. See where? See what? it was asked by a dozen hushed tones. Below, it was spoken barely above a whisper. Far below. The sea opened its sight to them, and stretching beneath for leagues uncounted was a great village—a village of villages, greater in size and scale and span than the mightiest works of the tribes.
Within might be ancestors unknown or destiny unguessed, but what was within beyond all doubt was power, and after what seemed an age of delving, the gaze of the tribes looked, for the first time since they had risen on two legs, inland...
Desert of Sorcerers
Across the arid wastes of thin, towering pinnacles carved by a wind that has blown without cease for a thousand thousand years, up the beetling slopes of a parched, freezing spine of mountains, and down past the undulant, sandy foothills there echoed the ancient, mournful song of a strange desert. Its sandflows crept in the winds as thin waves of ochre and brass, and crested high in broad mounds of rippled umber with shadows of hazy slate. Indeed, there was a shimmer to the sands which the ever-wandering air kicked high into the xanthous sky, making all above seem a mad, molten gold.
It was a lifeless expanse that exacted a heavy toll from any animate thing which clung to the searing vastland. Only in the twilight between the frigid darkness and blearing day could aught truly move, but when came that time, the dunes were alive with the rush of claw and padded foot. Hunts were short and brutal, and though they were rarely without success, they were never without sadness. Only two things were a constant for human life in this place: death, and what came from the deeps.
The people of the sands, who knew no land beyond the edge of their world which was the star-scraping mountains, were a hard and fearsome race, gathered in small clans of three or four families of little number, who fought for supremacy within, and survival without. They ranged the twilit desert clad in storm-blasted plates of chitin, the visages of demons seen in the sand-swirls shaped onto their leather masks with the legs and horns of lurking scorpions and beetles, and small bones of humans. Since the earliest times, life had been the trade and plunder of flesh more than anything else, save for when a certain wind sighed from the inner wastes, the scrabble was on to secure the curious treasures that emerged from the silt of ages.
At first, it was weapons, or things like weapons. Things they knew as blades, but with edges more keen than they had ever thought possible, which shone like sand-polished stones, and which never chipped, never dulled, and then other things like picks or hammers weighted and balanced with a skill they’d never before seen, so much so that a child might tilt them and sunder a boulder. Then came other things which produced flame with ease upon almost any surface, and others which produced coolness in the oppressive high heat—tools which, if used correctly, were capable of producing an amount of moisture in one night that would take a score of twilights to gather.
In times past, the scarcity of blood had demanded sacrifice so that some strain may persist, but the desert did not foster war. And so, as the generations came and went, the mysteries of their hard land gradually eroded the desperation of the clans, and their relic sages came together on calm twilights to trade, and talk, and plan.
The relics which protruded from the sand had some effect upon it to repel and attract—this was known, but to what extent, the sages had little experience or room to guess. Bold strategies for expeditions into the storms were thus formulated, and success after success at deeper penetrations into the violent tumults was found, complete with retrievals of hitherto unknown relics that allowed for even longer excursions through the billowing dust. During the longest of these, however, something new was spied. It came at the end of several days inside a great stormcloud which ravaged as far as the outermost settlement of the clans. It looked, for all the world, like a pillar of stone, the kind of which existed in a few places amidst the barren foothills of naked stone, only coated in some fashion with the same material as the relics from the sands, which they felt had been freed for a time from the otherwise choking desert. That there was a connection was instantly undeniable, and that the meaning must be uncovered, a foregone conclusion.
A hardy trio of delvers, equipped with the finest relics of seven mighty clans set off into the sands when once again came the strange sighing wind, and for a full fortnight went unseen, unheard, until one early twilight they returned, all but empty-handed.
They refused to speak of what they had found to either chief or sage, even under pain of extraction. All they would say, all they would but barely intimate was that they had found more—far more than spires and pillars of the like kind. No, they had found leering behemoths of darkish relic metal. Towers, domes, and spaces which dwarfed into obscurity every clan’s holdings a thousand times over. The desert folk were a taciturn lot by nature, moulded by the harsh hands of their world, but easy generations of abundance had enlivened them, but now, this revelation instead awoke an old reservation, even suspicion, even, perhaps, hostility.
That ancient expanse, the delvers said, and would after say no more, was not alone in the world, and they had not been slowly consumed by the passing of epochs, no, but had been buried, for they of that age had failed to destroy them...
Ice Wilderness
Beyond the shimmering seas of cyan and cerulean, the sodden shard-coated coasts, the dank moors and wet highlands, past the lifeless shattered bandlands, soaring mountain wastes, and ever-burning desert, far surpassing these lands and even more silent, empty expanses of cold steppe and sunken valley, there dwelt a land of ice. A veritable crystalline eternity of unbroken pale and shining silver, opal, and alabaster snow blankets, broken only by the almost iridescent steel-veined ice and sapphire rime that mirrored the stark navy sky and its single, staring, distant sun. All about, jutting from the crunching snow at least a shoulder deep, were slender crystal growths which grew and burst in utter profusion, almost like plants, while under the leviathan arches and shelves and cliffs of ice, themselves like apses and domes sundered open to the sky, entire forests of icicles rose from the frozen ground. Pallid mists flowed like wandering lakes in which hair-thin crystals floated serene, shattered into innumerable motes of light at the merest touch of another. There was no sound, no scent in the air. The unending rimelands, a place from which either world came, or to which it was going.
Such was the sparse, cold, silent world of the frostfolk. They were joined only by the great shaggy beasts which lumbered across the frostbitten wastes with their own volition, and were their monsters, their gods, their providers—fierce, grand, mighty, and precious. The ice, too, provided a wealth of material for their reverent ritual hunts: icicle spears and rimelump hammers with fur-wrapped shafts, as well as drums to call made of tight skins, and protection in the form of thick leathers and bones, both of man and beast—no greater honour was there. Their peoples were spread thin and far, but knew how to pass each other in the ageless circuit devised by their ancestors to old homes where stories came alive in the mingling of sun through carved ice. They were a contended people, in accord with their both tranquil and wrathsome land, they wanted for naught and sought nothing more, they sang, they drummed, they fluted ancient bones with chill air, they rose from birth and descended back into the beasts their children would consume in a perfect cycle.
And so, they wondered, huddled in the warmth of the packed snow caves, lined with thick furs, who were these strangers who came wielding strange powers and making frightful displays?
The frostfolk watched from their hunting spots, hidden in secret snow shallows and between titan ice spikes, the creeping shapes that ranged across the rimelands with abandon. Possessed doubtlessly of some great fervour and passion they were, but the cold bit them all the same. They were unable to live on the land, to hunt, to take of the ice, they relied on things with flashing stars and sunbeams, and which seemed to radiate a miraculous heat. But in time their efficacy began to wane, and even then, the strangers refused the aid of the wandering frostfolk who walked their ancient circuit, instead giving only two things: talk of dire warnings or of majestic wonders, spoken in halting alien tongues through their tools. In all likelihood, merely wild fancies of those discontent with their own lands.
One by one, the ice got to them, and many persevered as best they could until they retreated with sense. But in time, they returned with greater and more terrible devices, at the heads of which were madmen who roared and waved about hideous tools. What could they want in those empty places where neither folk nor beast passed, for no purpose existed to do so? Soon, all would know, for sunbeams and fire and more that the frostfolk had no name for flew and killed and screamed. The ice had never taken more than the folk had, nothing more than what was warranted by the foolishness of their ancestors or those who did not heed its warnings, and now these others had woken it up.
To the rimelanders, the ice and the snow and cold was a hard but fair world that demanded respect. To those lone shapes which disturbed its eon-weighted slumber, though, it was something much more. And thus did the old magic once buried at unspeakable cost rear its head again, and pass once more into the world through what had once been blameless and innocent flesh.