Shadows & Sorcery #2
Welcome to issue 2 of Shadows & Sorcery! Below you’ll find tales of mad science, mad magic, and dark powers.
Today’s stories are:
Depths of the Archives
Huntsman’s Fire
Cemetery of the Offering
Ritual of Chaos
Memories of Saints
Depths of the Archives
It is the living legacy of a dynasty all but lost to the ages. A beetling jumble of towers and domes, filled with shafts, spirals and snaking burrows, levels that ascend to perilous heights and creep deeper into the earth than is thought healthy. The Archives are a reservoir of knowledge spanning millennia, the low, squat city having lived in its titan shadow since it was a meager hamlet supporting a small body of dutiful scholar-monks. The interior of the Archives is a sprawl of cramped hallways, precarious walkways, and cavernous chambers, all of them lined, piled, and verminous with scrolls, unbound manuscripts, leather tomes, metal tablets, and clay carvings. Additions were made over the centuries in haste as sages the world over came to study, donate, and copy. The Archives were, in antiquity, renowned as the preeminent center of all learning in the known world, a place of wisdom that touched upon divinity itself so mighty was it. There were cells for reading, and as the Archives grew in all directions, bunks for scholars to sleep in on extended visits. Breakthroughs in thought made certain places within shrines to the intellect, and they amassed works based on the legend of which sage or which teacher had revelation in that cell. The Archives, however popular, had their quiet spaces, well out of the way of throngs of students who devoutly followed their mentors through the vast labyrinth. In such places were deals struck, information passed, less savoury knowledge shared and indulged in. It was only a matter of time before the Archives began to slowly grow a reputation as a haunt of sorcerers. Word spread of conjurations and experiments performed in the deepest and most far off sections of the Archives. Accidents were had and slowly but surely, over a span of many long years and the declining attention of dying lords, the Archives began to moulder in darkness, untouched save for its topmost accessible passages, long cleared of anything new to learn. But as of late, interest in the Archives has risen, and romantic notions of lost knowledge and the wisdom of the ancients has gripped those with wanderlust, and parties of seekers and glory-hunters delve into the long untrodden depths. Many do return, most empty-handed, but some surface with a handsome grimoire or illuminated scroll from a forgotten religion. And still others do not return at all, because they were claimed by the conjured horrors the sorcerers of old could never call back down, or because they could not leave, and have added to the growing population of lunatics who roam the lightless passages obsessed with long-dead secrets.
Huntsman's Fire
In centuries almost now beyond reckoning, Rathfane was but a loose hamlet of farmers straddling the borders of the Wyrmwoods. In those days of superstition and illusion, huntsmen returned from days-long voyages into the Wyrmwood interior, and brought back nothing but stories of shambling horrors and sickly mutants. Cloven-hoofed things stolen from the forest to be livestock were rakish and birthed unsavoury creatures. Their meat was poorly knitted and nauseous, little of it at all fit for consumption. When witches began to steal the blood and bones of what the huntsmen brought out of the forest, there were lit the first of what would become the perpetual cleansing bonfires for which the town is known today. The slowly growing number of townsfolk gathered about these fires to watch the corruptions be burnt away, all against the foreboding black wall of the Wyrmwoods. As this became more and more tradition, the people of Rathfane began to look upon the woods with antagonistic eyes. Still-twitching bodies were cast into the licking tongues bleating, and the hateful cries, some swore, were answered by shadows on the threshold. The smoke carried a foul smell. The bonfires became both ward and beacon to whatever dwelt in the Wyrmwoods, and as time passed on, Rathfane began to trade with people further afield, sending out the tough, dark timber of the treeline for wholesome beasts and produce from as far away as The City. During this later age, the first walls began to rise, too, and the watchtowers were erected. The tradition of huntsman remained and evolved - the bounty of the Rathfane hunters was a feast only for the bonfires. Over the years, the fires were consolidated. The first bonfire has never gone out, and the embers of the others have been added to it. Sometimes it sits in fitful smoulder, at other times is rages and reaches high into the sky, sending hideous shadows scurrying from the walls of the town. The huntsmen travel far now to track horrors that wander from the forest, and their resilience and zeal is known across Brackenmere County. For the huntsmen and their solemn duty, thee fire has become a beacon and symbol of unshakeable persistence, devotion and hate.
Cemetery of the Offering
At the height of its reign, the Archoniad offered hundreds of souls a day to the Pulse. The power of that cosmic heart thrummed across the sprawl of their empire. Priests everywhere, from the lofty chambers of lordly heirs to mouldering sewer-slums, channeled divine miracles through the frothing hot blood of their holy veins. Armies of zealots, warrior-clerics and Pulse-mutated knights, invigorated beyond human limits, tore themselves to shreds dominating the lands around them, erecting seven-angled ziggurats upon which were slain steady streams of thralls, feeding raw lifeforce to the almighty Pulse. Split blood, rent hearts, death-shudders, the Pulse demanded offerings of life in its wildest state, that raging moment before it is snuffed out. Desolate cities lay in their fervent wake, and small lands looked to the horizon in more than mortal terror. And yet, the Archoniad fell, and the Pulse grew silent. A practice in the Archoniad was to solemnly inter those who been spent for the Pulse in a single vast graveyard which grew with the spread of the empire. Half the world was a necropolis during the last great push forward. In this blighted era, an alliance was formed from one hundred tribal powers who saw the advance of the Archoniad and made to either stop them, or die in the attempt and rob them of their offerings. The tribal warriors were fierce beyond compare in the face of ritual slaughter. Swift-shooting short bows, devastating slings, spears and lances, steel-rending clubs and massive catapults, the technological might of the last of the free peoples came together and held back the tide of the Pulse. No mutant knight or divinely empowered miracle-worker could contend with this most desperate desire for survival. Theologians gathered together inside Archoniad walls and determined to call upon the offered corpses to rise and defend the power their own lives helped create. Weeks passed and the theurges sent a thrum across the Cemetery of the Offering that all but ruptured the earth. To the horror of the tribes, the bodies of the offered began to rise and shamble, but to the horror of the Archoniad, those bodies now began turning against them. In an indescribable scene drawn from a nightmare, at the dawn of a decisive battle, knights and clerics found themselves beaten and devoured, forced to push back against the ever-growing tide. Over the course of a few weeks, what had taken centuries to build was torn asunder as the Archoniad fell to the fury of their offered. Nothing and no one was spared, and after some time even the tribes began to look upon their unlikely comrades with unquiet eyes. The Cemetery of the Offering no long truly exists, but the wandering shells of the offered sometimes tread upon it and shudder before they are re-slain and re-interred in healthy earth.
Ritual of Chaos
It was in an era marked by historians for its decadence and moral decline did the royal magisters finally step over the boundaries of acceptable behaviour. Magical practice in those days had not exactly become commonplace, but neither did the hermit-sorcerers or astrologers live in fear of ridicule or harm. It was not unusual to see the signs of elemental conjurations, stargazers, or indeed the myriad cults which began to form in the atmosphere of spiritual fervency. Although the Lords Livronne of those days put up a half-hearted attempt to curb their spread, it was more likely for a degenerate noble to run off and join them, or in some cases, harbour them. Into this age did the old tradition of the royal magisters begin to speak more openly of the stranger and darker rites that had seen nary a whisper in decades, if not longer. Esoteric theologies with cosmological implications far beyond the mild notions of the popular Triple Trinity. The order of the royal magisters had been the ones who systematized and clearly defined, with the aid of the Temple, the layout of the universe. There was the Higher World, consisting of three realms: the Celestial, wherein dwelt the planetary and lunar powers, the Astral, wherein dwelt the Constellations and Great Stars, and the Ethereal, wherein dwelt spirits and those angels who came down to the world. The Higher World, or Upper World, was responsible for the movement of the universe on a macrocosmic scale. Then there was the Lower World, the chthonic realms consisting of a dual trinity of elemental planes: worlds of earth, stone, and wood, and then worlds of water, fire, and air. It was the abode of daemons and elementals, and this Lower World influenced and gave form to much of the world upon which humanity dwelt. That human world was the Middle World, the plane of change and motion and definition, through powers were expressed and passed. But there was something else, something behind, something beyond these three worlds, something in which they themselves dwelt and were ultimately formed from. It was the Old Chaos, the Primal State, the Prime Mover, the Incidental Cause. It must, by necessity, continue to exist in some form in the Middle World, the Axis Plane. And so were born the Chaos Magicians, who used neither sign nor name, but invoked by degrees a wild and creative power inherent in the Middle World. Those who touched it found themselves rebuffed in their Ethereal travels by the spirits, who dwelt in a circuitous stasis, and could neither fathom nor tolerate the warping aspect of a magister who had touched Chaos.
As they began to consolidate much of their new knowledge and power, the Chaos magicians took for themselves a tower and devised in secret, far away from the prying eyes of the Interior Ministry of Livronne, a grand ritual of mystical aspect. It was designed not to conjure, like the Higher and Lower magics, it was designed to connect and unify. It required initiation and experience, and a long campaign of secret seeking of candidates. Naturally, knowledge of their existence leaked into the outside world, but neither fast nor far enough. Eventually, with bolstered ranks, a great number of them took to their keep and shut themselves within, unbeknownst to themselves, never to emerge. What their rites and subrites consisted of, there is only supposition and dark rumour. What is known is that a grand old tower in the old eastern capital of Livronne suddenly vanished, and in its place was left a warp in the very air, a scar in the sight as if either the world, or the human mind, had glimpsed something beyond its ken and quickly shut it closed. It is needless to detail the long period of violent conflict between the royal magisters, the army of the Livronne kings, and the remaining Chaos magicians. The old order of magisters finally met its end during the war as popular distrust of sorcerers flared to an all time high. Chaos magicians wreaked unbelievable havoc. Captured magicians tortured to the point of madness revealed a final devastating secret: the ritual was still ongoing - it would be, forever, due to the nature of Chaos it was unbound from time. It would never end. And so, the old capital of Livronne was abandoned. The ritual, supposedly, still continues outside time, and yet still in the world, always and forever. Parties of Livronne cavaliers and Habrautschen knights still brave the eerie and desolate old capital, whose name most Livronne won't even speak, often with an ambitious and well-paying magician in tow. Most return cowed and with shaken voices telling stories of the sightless murk and treacherous aspect of the very ground itself. Whether the Chaos magicians themselves were removed from time is unknown, but those priests acquainted with their history often spare a small prayer for the hope that they died centuries ago.
Memories of Saints
The brain is a wondrous organ. Ridged and rumpled with a lifetime of unique experiences and memories. There are no two brains entirely alike. Indeed, every raised portion is a memory, an instinct, either a genetic inheritance from ages past, something learned in infancy, or a lesson seared in only moments ago. And these ridges are accompanied by valleys between them, each one's depth suggestive of clarity or time elapsed. Ridges may have ridges, with crags and depressions of interlinked experiences and associations. The brain is a physical manifestation of an entire lifetime. And just as those experiences all happened, so to do the memories themselves have a physical, measurable presence. This is the most wondrous thing about this most wondrous organ. These memories, these ridges, can be replayed, not in the mind of the subject, but through mechanical physick can they be interpreted and projected back into physical reality. In the early days it was learned, a cost paid in lives, to differentiate true experience from mental disease. There are still shuttered clinics in the depths of the city where mechanisms project half-rotted hallucinations. But the true worth of this practice, which has validated all costs of research, is the study of the memories of saints.
The church is an old institution, venerable and tottering in equal measure, and might have begun to fade into obsolescence had not the bright mind of a young cleric thought to trespass upon sacred ground and apply a cerebral translator to the preserved brain of a long-dead saint. This saint, whose legend was a life of pious proselytizing after a divine vision, was removed from their tomb in the cold catacombs and experimented upon in candle-light, in the ancient passage far under the church. It took hours removing the organ, mapping and replaying various groups of ridges, moving into the deeper valleys, but when that initial memory was struck upon, the city was never the same again. A wave of revitalization surged through the streets and the people, and the tombs of saints were thrown open and the cobwebs cast away as people flocked into the naves and before the altars to see the memories of those who had witnessed divinity played for them in profound clarity. Saints, as a people, are notoriously eccentric, and perhaps it was only natural for mania to set in. The memories did not exactly conform to the stolid and hoary dogma of the church. Revealed to the people were ecstasies and ritual madness from times long past, brief but blistering scenes of otherworldly visions, visitations from holy messengers, mystical unions, divine monsters, and theogonic implications that set the mouldering theology of a thousand years ablaze. The church splintered, old guards confirmed in their faith, primitivists who went into the wilds to relive the primal days of the old cult, crusaders with light their eyes who brought bloody truth to old enemies, theurges who chanted names and scrawled holy signs. But around the hearths of old scholars, who could divine the deeper mysteries of the saintly memories, the one troubling question oft repeated was where had all the saints gone? Why had the world remained content to dwell upon a handful of old visions and never once had to add to the ranks? What did they do in ages past that no one did anymore? Only time could tell, they thought, and what brains from preserved saints they could dig into. And for each new saint sawed open, every new vision found and translated, every new chance risked, some hoped they would never find the answer.