Shadows & Sorcery #20
Welcome to the twentieth edition of Shadows & Sorcery! This is a special milestone (last time I said landmark??) because it means I have written 100 pieces of flash fiction for this newsletter, which is just mad really. So this edition is free for absolutely everyone to read and enjoy - and if you like it, consider grabbing a paid sub to read the 95 other entries…free, forever. The offer is STILL going, and all you need do is contact me here through Substack or send me a DM on Twitter and you’ll have instant access to the archives. Never be without something to read again!
In this issue, you’ll find tales of the strange rites of sailors, primal humans, and those desperate to ward off the Winter, plus you’ll learn just what the elves are keeping in their palace…
Today’s tales are:
Church of Fire
Tomb of the Sea
Palace Forest
Altar Keep
Undead Dragon’s Cathedral
Church of Fire
The hinterlands are flecked with frost for leagues upon leagues, the earth is dry and cracked with cold, and the hilltops are crowned with ice. Wind laden with frigid mist whips across the landscape. And yet, life shows here and there. Small, tough grasses, and tall thin trees with dark green spiked leaves stand defiantly in the encroaching Winter. The lush, deep rainforests beyond, cooled by the fresh breeze of a sapphire sky, have the solitary Church of Fire to thank for their continued existence.
Wanderers in that cold frontier know when the church is imminent. Breath disappears from the air, smatterings of short grasses and shrubs shoot from the pale earth, and sitting quite out in the open of a great flat expanse, is the stoic church itself. Black stone and dark wood are piled atop each other in jumbled levels of peaks and high arched roofs, from which there protrude iron chimneys belching deep grey smoke that obscures the topmost spires.
The great stone doors, once swung inward, have the traveller meet with a nigh solid wall of sweltering, almost intolerable heat. So absolutely extreme is it that containers and vessels have been known to deform in seconds. Candles, braziers, lanterns, fire pits and more cover almost every available surface, forming passages through which red-robed monks wander, tirelessly tending the flames. Candelabras and even lone candles are encased in feet of ancient wax that has spilled and pooled across the ground. Braziers whoosh and send up great plumes of smoke as fuels are added to them. Torches are set into the walls along stairways. From the ceilings dangle thick-paned lanterns, swinging serenely from some unseen motion. Not a single spot of the entire church hosts a shadow, and in places the light is blinding and the flames spit dangerously.
The Church of Fire holds back the Winter. Once the seasons ebbed and flowed with a semblance of order, but after the stars began to disappear, seasons stretched and snapped back, and finally, after a summer that last for all of three days, the world began to grow dark and cold, and a great swathe of the earth was consumed by silent, everlasting ice. Appealing to the ancestor gods for guidance, the last enclaves of humanity constructed the church as an eternal flame on the borderland of Winter. The sheer number of flames contained within, their continuous linking , as well as the warm and living bodies of the monks themselves, create an intensely potent beacon of warmth, life, and force whose power radiates out like a vast wall, dissipating the encroaching frigid dark.
Tomb of the Sea
The seas are immeasurably vast. Ships set sail with the knowledge that years shall pass before they see land again. Some folk have forsaken their ties to the land and live on deck and bunk, on a listless, lifelong journey either to their final port, or to a tomb of the sea.
Centuries ago, several newly sea-faring nations independently came to the conclusion that since sailors will spend years crossing the waters, and considering the extreme dangers of those waters, there must be a way for vessels to offload their deceased crew rather than the burial-at-sea. Most seafarers deemed it somewhat dishonourable to the dead, but the real issue came from the fact such burials were not always permanent. The sea did not always take to receiving trespassers kindly. And so, fleets of colossal sturdy, and almost entirely empty galleons were constructed and pushed into the blue vastness, manned by wardens who would, every few years, change stations with other ships, or dock momentarily at ports. Ships across the many nations were equipped with special bells to be tolled when one of their crew died, to summon a tomb.
Naturally, due to food and water shortages, madness from isolation, storms, and worse fates, some of these ships came to be unmanned, floating aimlessly in the open, silent and black. The appearance of a "silent" tomb ship, which does not heed the summons nor answer calls from port-side, is almost exclusively a dreadful omen to sailors and fishers. Some take a kinder a stance and board them to investigate, but unanimously leave them and forget they were seen. Regardless, it's sometimes a blessing for vessels who are in dire need to a place to offload their dead, and don't desire for them to return from the waves.
The deck of a silent tomb ship is unsettling to the extreme. When crew members set foot on the blackened deck, they know they must venture into the lightless catacombs below and find a place for their burden. Every creak of aged wood, every hush of water against the hull sets one on edge. The sea is not a place human beings were meant to tread. They are creatures of earth and air, not water. Although not officially acknowledged by any port authority, captains know the water gets into the tombs regardless, and attempts to set the dead to flight from its domain.
There have been attempts in the past to form orders of sea-faring priests who might put to rest the wandering dead of the tomb ships, but hunting them is a tricky business and they have a habit of appearing at the worst of times. Vigilance is at high cost on the ocean, and none can be spared. Collisions have but merely added to the sea's deceased population, and it is a sight bad enough to send a fellow scrambling back to sane earth when a silent tomb of the sea emerges from the morning fog, with a shoal of grasping corpses swarming about its hull below.
Palace Forest
Elves are naturally influenced by the forms of things near them, of beasts and other races. It's something they revel in, and have placed their settlements close to those of friendly or tolerant humans, letting themselves be influenced for the sake of peaceful existence. This extends even to their architecture, which resembles in a way some human pieces of times long past. But elven culture does not assume influences, and has remained alien and impenetrable to most humans throughout the history of contact between the two peoples. These two extremes are exemplified in the breathtaking majesty of the Grand Palace.
The palace is where the lords of the elves dwell, though this is only a comparison. Rule and edicts seem to emanate from this place, reaching elven settlements presumably through the riders often seen coming and going in droves, or perhaps through something more organic. Various sections are home to the many different lords, for they hold status of a kind above others, given deference and shown obeisance, though if they even have familial units is unknown. The stonework is quite beautiful and very inhuman, sometimes there are vast, single blocks of stone carved into a set of rooms, and sometimes a whole wing will be constructed of minuscule mosaics. Elves tend to take everything as an artform to be obsessed over.
But the most striking thing about the palace, a small city in its own right, is something most humans have never beheld. One thing visiting nobles from human lands have commented on in their rare stays with the elves is the increasingly odd countenance of elves in the deep palace. Human children delight in elves springing like deer through the fields in their play, or the majestic elven lords with crowns of horns atop stags and dracomounts. To see them at high springtide or deep in a still winter has been fodder for poets and artists for generations. But the recollections of one ancient queen imply that these sights, as familiar as they are now, still bring a shudder to some for a reason all but forgotten. That reason, she said, still lives in the palace forest.
The queen, wandering one night through the moonlit sky-vaults of the inner palace, came suddenly upon a growth of trees so wild and virulent, she wondered if she hadn't somehow become lost and ended up outside. She ventured but only a short ways inside. It was a great overgrown tangle, nigh impassable, the light from the moon barely shone through the twisting canopy, but beams broke through starkly in places, giving the trunks around them strange shadows. The queen was about to turn back, an unpleasant feeling beginning to flicker in her chest, when something from her childhood nightmares crawled out of the woods towards her.
Though she made it back safely to her bedchamber, furnished with the finest the elves could give, she didn't sleep, and had to excuse herself from the entertainments the next day. A shadow had been cast over the palace and nothing seemed quite right. Like it was facade concealing something ugly and festering at its heart. And when she learned from a kindly old courtier, who could tell a little of human moods, that what she had seen was an elf? Well, said the courtier, you know elves acquire influences, of course, but they too kept samples of their older generations, purely for aesthetic and cultural purposes. Living history. But the two races had long ago come to a mutual understanding, and elves had shed those old shapes in favour of something more temperate, and had contained their older numbers away from human eyes likely to remember old fears.
Altar Keep
It began with a dream. A longbeard elder awoke with a start in the night and scrambled outside his yurt, dagger in hand, and carved into the clay the details of the vision. Long had the tribe dwelt in the barren lands, eking out life through desperate battle and even more desperate hunting. They had appealed to the sky, the earth, and even the poor little streams, to the shades of ancestors, and to anything that might listen, but only silence was returned. With no gods to guide them, no deity as parent to their race, they were scattered time and again by their enemies and the harshness of the cold, dusty realm. But now there was hope.
All they could do was search. Thus began the great journey. The longbeard's testament of divinity was scrupulously copied upon stone and vellum, learned and studied by the first sages. Hardships assailed the tribe, but it was nothing worse than what their homeland had done to them. Across salt flats, icebergs, raging seas and windswept wild hills did the tribe go. Friendships were forged and enemies made, some of the tribe even dwelt among the new peoples for their own reasons. Across the span of generations did the tribe wander, guided by the burning promise of the longbeard's vision, inscribed now upon wax and parchment. Story and myth had piled itself upon the dream, but no invention of even the most cunning bard could match the glory of the day the crooked peaks were first spied, and the tribe spent a full day and night speeding towards the source of their quest.
Upon a low mound there say a number of large flat stones, half as tall as a grown man. It was the altar before which the last generation of priests finally made communion with the nameless deity that had reached out so long ago. The tribe had beholden themselves, body and soul, to the god, and it made covenant with them, vowing to watch over them forever more. With purpose renewed, the tribe decided to set out from the wild valley and seek more peaceful lands. Taking the altar upon a massive bier, they set out for the wide, lush plains to the east. But on their first night as people of the god, laying down to rest on a gradual slope, the priests found themselves unable to commune with the deity. Panic and terror set in, and the people fled back to the valley and nevermore left it.
It would seem that this was the only place in the world the god might speak with the people. It was only here could the cycle of world and heaven be enacted, blessing and sacrifice, and so knowing their fragility, the tribe did not erect villages or a city. They build around the altar a fortress. They excavated the earth to raise it, and for centuries they flourished. Their might waxed, and they even sent pilgrims out along the old road of the journey to find and bring back the descendants of settlers and minglers, and ultimately, their holiest relic: the inscription of the longbeard, the cult's foremost saint.
The fortress is of a darkish rock, and still stands. It has been added to over the ages, and has become more and more impregnable, and the enemies of the tribe have returned, time after time. The Twin Crusades launched by the tribe annihilated the demon worshippers, and the thousand-and-one were cowed before the might of the tribe's great god. The First Writings of the Longbeard Saint are contained near the altar itself, and the holy writings of the first sages each have their individual shrines throughout the keep. Warriors of faith stand guard eternally in its halls, and grand feasts and offerings are held before the altar itself. The altar chamber itself is vast and lit by great braziers, the peaked roof with its sunbeam aperature like a miniature sun far above the only actual entrance to the outside. A faithful of the god would be quicker to give their life and soul than let an enemy even lay eyes upon this one place where the great one speaks.
Undead Dragon’s Cathedral
This story originally appeared on my writer's blog, but has been greatly expanded for this newsletter.
When the mummified remains of the great dragon began to stir, whispered rumour turned to awed utterance. Beyond the realm of death had the dragon been, and rites performed by pre-human occultists in a misty elder age had come to fruition. The fledgling species had dwelt in the shadow of the dragon for aeons. From their first moments of conscious thought as crawling amphibians, they looked upon the silent beast and had been impressed with some notion of its power. As they rose to prominence and spread, with the vision of the wyrm at their backs, the apes which bowed, sang and swung burning incense before crude serpentine images had inherited a legacy they could never understand.
They carved a seat of power for the dragon, withered and wise beyond knowing, a domed cathedral reaching high into the clouds. Of purest shimmering white stone, it stands a beacon for humanity for leagues around. The crags that once made up this land have been pulverized by age and the work of primal humans into smooth rolling mounds, crowned by the colossal temple. From this place it could hear the prayers of those in lands beyond the hills, over the mountains, and across the seas. It was not so much faith that the humans had, but a simple acceptance of this pervasive and motive force in their existence. There was an altar above every hearth, a temple amidst every cluster of huts, a shrine at the entrance of every village. It had always been, and always would be.
The dragon knew in the depths of its aeon-weighted mind the fervent prayers of the creatures that clambered below it. It knew, too, the curses and impotent wrath of the land-wights that dwelt in bogs and lakes, the forests and vales, that some men in far off lands had begun to falteringly call their gods. But every day news of the awakening did spread and humanity crowded in vast camps around the cathedral, and spires of incense lifted their claws to the heavens. Bells echoed and voices droned on the breeze. Let the little gods of swamps and mounds spit their curses, they were as naught before the Great Work.