Shadows & Sorcery #200

One hundred editions ago, the red wizard Carloman descended into the depths of Baletor with Casimir, Paladin of Imaal.

One hundred issues before that, Shadows & Sorcery debuted with its first ever issue.

In between each one, countless wizards, cults, dark gods, eldritch forces, mysticism, magic, deep lore, vast chronicles, moody episodes, energetic events, and more than a few experiments.

Two hundred editions of dark, high, weird, and gothic fantasy flash fiction, nearly eight hundred individual stories, a score of short stories, as well as nearly forty serial chapters. All in about four and a half years of nearly weekly publishing.

That’s a lot. Perhaps too much. And so it is for this reason, among others, I am going to continue writing Shadows & Sorcery, whether one person or a thousand is reading it (though a thousand would be pretty nice). I am gonna take a week’s break, though, I wrote this week’s edition in its entirety in like two days after some extensive research and outlining. Let me sit down for second pls.

Very quickly, did you miss last week’s edition of sacrificial magics, destiny-shattering quests, and god-enslaving wizards? Check that out here

Now, Issue #100 was a full length short story, and you know what? So is this. But Carloman, that lovable scamp, got a short story very recently, so I changed things up and challenged myself to unearth a setting I’d developed quite far, wrote a few stories in, and then just never did anything with ever again.

This week, we’re taking a trip back to the savage, lurid, bloodsoaked lands written of in the Codex Barbarion, where grim, thirsting gods demand battle for their favour and blessings. Please enjoy this simple day in the life of one poor bastard doomed to live in this world...

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The Eighth Arm of the Eighth Legion had been awoken early by an attendant priest to worship the new sun. A fortnight’s marching through the twilight wilds of Áéa, enwreathed in a repellent incense-smoke to guard against the shadows of lurking demigods, had taken its toll, and they had risen from their bedrolls and beast skins with zeal and thanks, for it must be that the gods favoured them to send this new invigorating star. Imperial presence was lacking in the southern reaches of that warm, verdant land, and they, as well as a handful of sellswords promised coins of gold stamped with the emperor’s name, had answered the call. They had drunk fully of the fruits of the earthy little villages during the the life-sapping dim days and long nights, and were thankful for the obligation to give it, for Áéa was not a province, at least not yet, but enjoyed the civilizing presence of the Legions of the Empire of Regnum Regis.

But as the sun began to bleed a golden hue across the unclean grey of the uneasy dawn, its rays revealed not favour, but challenge. They had camped upon one of the many undulant hillsides which dot the southwestern land, looking out over the sun-speckled coastline, and upon that coastline were shown the towering black shadows of Khanalfar black galleons. The fresh, perfumed winds of Áéan country were suddenly cut by the unmistakable sickly, wafting tendrils of the Dark Ones’ noisome narcotics. It was a raiding party come to enjoy the bounties of the peaceful coast, striking while darkness still engulfed much of the land.

The commander of a meagre twenty-five men had raised a horn to call the others across the wilds—a fatal mistake, for the battle-horns cut a sharp cry for leagues around in the hands of a skilled user, and all it did was alert the slavers and raiders to an easy prey. The Khanalfar had been whipping themselves into a frenzy for the last several days in eager anticipation of the hunt. There was a lot of good stock to be harvested here, they knew. Tall, lithe, of corded limb and rich, purple-hued flesh, they strode clad in black and gold finery and not a single scrap of armour—they flaunted their immortality before the scrambling, squat forms of human warriors in battered iron discs. They struck neither to kill, nor to maim, but to cause painful yet easily mended wounds. Their blades were thin, curved, wavering, their clubs slender and smooth, knobbed like tree-limbs or with short flanges which caused shocking agonies when struck against bone. Their long faces bore jeering grins and their ears curved out and up like devil’s horns. For all this splinter of the Eighth Arm knew, they were devils, sent by the gods to enact righteous judgement for their lax enforcement of the Imperial frontier.

Such had been the thoughts and images that raced through the head of the legionnaire as he had crashed and slid down the cold mud of the hillside, slavers cackling in ululant alien tongues behind him.

The Deep Green lay in the distance. It didn’t have a name, just a description. A deeper, darker, richer green than the sun-soaked Áéan country, spread out like one vast, sodden blanket beyond what sight could muster. The southernmost portions of it crumbled away into a profusion of half-sunken islands, it was said, the itself rotting. The Empire hadn’t penetrated into it much at all. He could understand why as he crept through the dense undergrowth, grateful for the iron greaves which took much of the brunt of the thorns he was forced to wade through, each step disturbing what he was sure was centuries of festering muck, drenched by the incessant rain from the wavering canopy overhead, a sky unto itself.

When it wasn’t forests of short, broad, grasping trees and their carpets of slime and dirt, it was stone, stained and streaked with damp and moss and lichen, choked by vines blooming with fragrant and, he was certain, deathly poisonous flowers of drooping purple petals. They must have been buildings at some point, he thought, as he caught his breath under the cracked and rotting remnants of an archway, worn smooth by what may have been centuries, if not millennia, of storm seasons and the scuttling of great black insects. There never was anything more than these rib-like arches, or weird circles of crumbling, ridged pillars, or shattered obelisks, or square daises of pitted, scum-splashed stone emerging from muddy pools. It wasn’t a dead land, but it certainly didn’t seem alive either. Not in the way even the cold, soundless northern steppes were.

Through this he fled for a full day, stopping only to discard more and more of his sweat-soaked armour as the oppressive jungle stench began to make him wheeze for breath. The only thing he’d kept was a girdle, iron greaves, and his blade. The Empire trained their soldiers in the use of the short blade, but there were few things he’d have offered or promised to the gods for a broad-bladed spear from his homeland of Shenua. Aye, a great spear to thrust past their defenses and to strike right into their rotten hearts—leaving them to be devoured and defecated and re-devoured eternally alive by the creeping horrors and vines and roots of this emerald hell—to silence the mocking laughter of hunters who knew no exhaustion. He found rest only in the deepest part of the night as he listened to their drug-fuelled debauches, and even then, they found him in his sleep, and then again during the dawn when all had seemed quiet. He couldn’t even begin to guess at what deep wells of vindictive and sinister glee they took in tormenting a lone imperial conscript, but swore to the gods on the rancid slime of every dozen-legged thing he made sure to crush under his heel he would do all in his power to make them pay for it.

He got the chance to fulfil his wish quicker than he’d have liked.

Sweat flowed down the drooping points of his black hair and past his eyes as he darted his gaze around at the three sinewy Khanalfar which emerged to surround him. Sleepless, ageless, deathless, the only saving grace was that they were few in number across their dreadful Great Armada. They crept forward, bearing in their dextrous fingers spiked chains and weighted shackles—aye, he’d been fine game for them, and he was still of use to them as sport. Their swords wavered like flames and ripples, cruel and cunning things against which there was little useful technique. He might have deflected a strike or two on his disc armour, but that was all, for he had heard tell of Khanalfar blades raking across iron plates, leaving deep gouges in their wake. They stood tall, prideful, arrogant, and wicked. Within the stark sun and deep shafts of shadow, their drawn features and long-toothed grins were especially hideous. The best he could do was deny them the satisfaction.

But it wasn’t a Khanalfar slaver that rushed past him then—a blur of dirty, matted, greyish hair exploded with a howl from the treeline and slammed into the closest slaver, hand entirely covering his head and smashing him into the mud with a wet crack, repeatedly, as another fell from on high with a guttural hooting, leaping about, crashing its fists upon the earth. The Khanalfar were stunned. The legionnaire saw these things, for just a second—like men, perhaps, but bent of back, with massive shaggy manes covering their heads and shoulders showing only a grinning maw of twisted tusks and fangs jutting from red gums—and then chaos erupted as clawed hands flew out to tear off Khanalfar limbs, as swords sang and passed through the ape-thing flesh, throwing out gouts of shining red upon the lush dark green. The mutilated form of that first Khanalfar tried to rise, his brains slopping from his crushed skull, the body twitching and slipping as it failed to stand. One of the apes tore a chunk from the slaver’s side in its gore-encrusted teeth and cast him down again. So much for the might of immortals. But the legionnaire hadn’t time to dwell on the rush of vengeful glee that rose somewhere behind his panic, for the ape was upon him then, and it was only his panther-like reflexes, flooded with primal desperation, and lean frame, that let him duck under the beast’s grasp and slash backwards, tearing through the thick hair and skin of its leg. The Regic swords were good for that, at least. It skidded across the ground and onto its back, scrambling to right itself, but the legionnaire was upon it first with a shout, falling to the side as his sword, held to thrust down, found its mark just under where the ape’s ribs ought to be. He sprang back from the mud and leaves as the flailing claws shuddered and pawed at the sword, hilt deep in its guts and lungs. He fell to one knee and looked about. The other ape had just finished tearing the still-gurgling heads off the other mangled Khanalfar bodies.

The favour of the gods came in many curious forms. A surge of might in battle. A rushing heat in the limbs on a wearisome quest. A whisper of danger on a dark path. An extra coin in a soldier’s pay. Dreams of a home unseen for a decade to spur one on. Or, as it appeared to be now, three jungle warriors flying from atop the trees, their keen spears piercing through dense muscle and bone with such ease as to effortlessly anchor the remaining ape to the spot. One came in, a hulking, strong-limbed fellow with an axe who caught five claws to the chest as the ape struggled to free itself. He dropped, but a heartbeat later a heavy throwing blade flew like a thunderbolt and all but cleaved the ape’s head from its neck in a single blow. In his long marches to the south, the legionnaire had never seen such a display of raw speed and might as he had in those mere few seconds.

She was of ebon from head to toe, like a living, striding shadow, limbs like taut cord, wearing banded hair, clad in irregular wrappings of dull linen held fast with golden beads—to assume the form of the jungle, and the motes of sunlight which filtered through the dark. Her eyes narrowed as they beheld the filth-caked and blood-streaked Shenuan legionnaire, far from his home, and the empire to which he was subject. And then her eyes passed to the dead ape-man, an Imperial Regic sword hilt-deep in its torso, and a single brow raised itself. She took in a breath, and spoke.
“You have the gods’ favour. But that iron armour is useless against the beasts. Better off you are with the mud. Take back your blade, and return to your empire.”
He knelt there for a moment, honestly not having expected a barbarian of the Deep Green to speak even a word of the Imperial tongue. But it was a strange day, or two. He went and wrenched his blade from the still form of the ape-man.
“You see those sad piles of Khanalfar meat,” he said as he wiped his sword on a broad leaf, “slavers to the north and west, and jungle filled with these things to the east,” he nodded towards the ape. “Might you know somewhere else for a lost legionnaire to go?”
She did not answer him, but looked to the corpse once more, and slowly up to her to remaining compatriot who had stood silent. That glance seemed to be an entire conversation and decision in and of itself. She turned back to the legionnaire.
“Help carry our dead, and a place in our camp you will have tonight—and for tonight only. Come.”

Limbs strapped to two lengths of peeled away jungle bough, the dead tribesman, chest torn asunder, was carried between the legionnaire and the silent man, while the woman slunk ahead, two thin, rigid spears in her hand. Their blades were long and slender like needlepoints, sharply tapering from a reinforced base surmounting a slim and unadorned shaft. His homeland of Shenua was famous for its spear and pole fighters, whose elite warriors had been known to best ten or more opponents singlehandedly—Regnum Regis had, at one time, terrible trouble incorporating them into the empire. These weren’t Shenuan spears with broad tapers, diamond tips, leaf-shaped blades, or hooking flanges, but all the same, he thought he would have loved to get his hands on such a singular tool of slaughter and its technique. The people seemed rather proud of them, too, considering their profusion around what he now came to see were the outer fringes of the encampment. More than a few bore the rotting heads of apemen, too. A warning—or challenge—to the beasts that dared approach that even they could understand.

He was eyed by every single person as he made his way through the camp helping bear the corpse. The settlement dwelt within a high circle of tumbling square pillars veiled in moss and vines at their apexes, and strung together with long lengths of cord to enclose the space. More apemen heads, limbs, and unidentifiable bones hung from these cords. He had at this point become somewhat accustomed to the stench of the jungle, and reckoned that if he hadn’t, the wafting air of rotting flesh would have done him in. As they passed through jagged lines of tents and meagre huts, filled with staring eyes, they came to a great open center space, where he and the silent tribesman were instructed to set down the corpse. In the middle of it all was a rough stone dais upon which was, unmistakable as aught else, a throne—its top adorned with the skulls of apemen. The woman spoke to two of her kinfolk, nodding in the direction of the legionnaire. A moment later a hollowed horn of water was thrust into his hand. He took it with as much as thanks as he could muster, not quite realizing just how close he was to collapsing on the earth. He found a seat, though, and drank deep as he watched a curious proceeding.

The Deep Green was not a land entirely unknown in the empire, but precious little had ever made it to the northeastern province he called home. His time in the legion had passed to him rumours, all of which flooded back to him now. That they lived in perpetual war against the shaggy beasts of the jungle was clear as day, but what he witnessed now was a rite of such sombre and noble caste he felt ashamed at the pangs of superstitious fear that had taken root in the back of his head. What he assumed was their leader emerged from a hut, a tall, iron-limbed man, broad of shoulder and long of limb, tears running down his face. He knelt down and with surprising gentleness, held the hand of the dead. He was a man of distinguished features, and his brow bore a deep melancholy, he was clad in a bejewelled waistwrap and vambraces, and he spoke to the corpse in his own language, as if speaking to a dear friend. The touch of a knuckle upon the body’s shoulder, and then lightly upon his own breast was, the legionnaire swore, a profoundly solemn oath.

The body was removed by two attendants as the chief took to his throne, wiping away his tears, and bade the legionnaire come close. The woman came forth, too, and began to translate. He was thanked with deep respect by the chief for killing the beast that had slain the man. He had borne the ancient blessing in his bosom, and was a renowned warrior. He was sad they were unable to retrieve its head. The woman explained something of the legionnaire’s situation to the chief, who he was told agreed he deserved at least some respite for his good deed.
“But,” she said, “the hunters will not push into these woods, and they will drop the scent swiftly. You must leave once they lose interest—a dying sun has wandered from the far south, and its deaths brings upon this land a red sky and waves of the bloodlust.”
A pang of terror suddenly swelled in his chest. He went still. Gods, she was talking about a battlemoon.
“No doubt the Khanalfar were enflamed by it. The beasts are already enflamed by it. Soon, we will march into the warlust against them. The moon’s cresting will consume half of the Deep Green, you will not survive, and we have no ill bearing towards you, stranger. You must be gone.”

The sun then passed elsewhere into the world, the gold replaced by silver as stars stared down upon the reeking vastness of the Deep Green. Great torches were lit, belching thick black smoke out of which other tribesmen emerged, some bearing their own dead, and at each one, the chief knelt and spoke. No corpse went without his tears before being taken away in a silent procession. By the end of it, he seemed to be able to naught but sit upon his throne, and brood over the pile of ape heads that had been cast before him—a scant recourse for the loss of his kindred. But for everyone else, it looked as if it were one of the rare few times they were able to rest. They ate and drank and laughed and danced, but the legionnaire reclined in the shadows, nursing a curling drinking horn of their fragrant wine. A battlemoon. The very name weighed upon him. In Shenua, now a world away, bandits rode forth to pillage, generals made their greatest assaults, and assassins stalked the ancient streets, all timed in accordance with the emergence of maddening battlemoons. But here? No generals, no lords, no imperial soldiers or legates, just the lawless, wild, free darkness of the Deep Green, and whatever dwelt within he had yet to encounter. One legionnaire against a blood-lusting cosmos of spear-tips, talons, fangs, stingers, and poisons.

The night’s proceedings, however, did work to at least distract from his growing anxieties. He had noticed the chief had partaken in none of the night’s feasting. It seemed that something else had been prepared for him. A great stone trough of meat, billowing steam from the grills, was taken to him, and as it was set down, and as he slowly descended from his throne, and took up a length of it in his hands, he bit into it, and from all around him came a cry of—the legionnaire couldn’t rightly place it. Lamentation, exultation, rage, defiance, all these were mixed into the cacophanous ululation which resounded across the entire encampment and most likely a league into the jungle. She came to him then, the woman, and spoke as drums and rattles began to chatter.

“It is his mournful honour and duty,” she said, brow furrowed, “many of the men who returned dead, he must take their power into himself. He will have to live with this, as have those before him, and so will those after him.”
The legionnaire looked on, suddenly aware of what he was witnessing.
“Aye, it must look savage,” she continued, “and perhaps it is. But there is nothing else for it. We have now but the merest scraps of the old blessing, and the share of it within we Ranka Lasu is paltry.”
“And if he were to be slain?” asked the legionnaire, his eyes fixed upon the funeral consumption, overcome by a sense of grim sorrow.
“One of our number would take what could be taken. But if he was lost to the jungle...” She didn’t finish the sentence, and the legionnaire didn’t make her. He wondered how many already had been. What they must have been like so long ago. And how their blessed numbers had been eroded by the ageless, ravenous jungle deeps.

The chief retired, to mourn in private, the legionnaire was told, once he had consumed all he could, and in his wake, the tribe came alive. Fires roared into the air, and shadows leapt before them in silhouette. A score of drums beat in feverish, alien rhythms as flutes and horns sounded between calls and chants. The heavy, sickly perfume of braziers of incense began to fog his brain as the smoke created a scene born out of the dream of a lunatic. The tribesfolk, the Ranka Lasu, had cast off their linens and cloths for mud and flesh to cavort amidst the burning smoke and the leaping fires like the images of god-sent demons. Even the apemen who crept close to the perimeter were frightened away by the bacchanal more wild than the darkest mystery cult ecstasies of Regnum Regs. There was laughter, screaming, grasping hands, leering visages, and a stamping of feet—and the legionnaire was pulled into it, his body mostly restored, only to be spent once again inside the churning flames of the orgiastic rites of the Deep Green that called out for the favour of thirsting gods.

He didn’t know when he had collapsed, but when he awoke, it was to silence. The jungle hadn’t once been quiet during his pursuit, but now, nothing stirred. Nothing called. Nothing chirped or chittered. And as he rose from under the awning of a tent, he saw, above all, through the rents in the jungle canopy, the baleful crimson firmament born of the battlemoon. The camp was empty. He had been forgotten, or mercifully left behind, as they had left to march into their warlust. He too began to feel the energies of the sky begin to make his blood rush, for the gods had charged those under their light with war.

He cast his eyes across the camp. Just to be sure. Just to be safe. Low did he creep, eyes forward but ears trained on the distance, as he had been taught. He musn’’t let the fear overtake him. He slunk to the edge of the camp and stopped. Some, but not all of the spears remained. He pulled one from the half-dried muck and tested it in his hands, spinning it, feeling its weight. It was finely balanced, exceptionally constructed, firm and rigid and reinforced in all the right places. It would take a lot of punishment—it had to, considering what it was used to hunt. The needle-pointed head had an edge, and was quite thin, but it wouldn’t be a problem. It was all he needed to fight his way back and across the Áéan border, where the battlemoon wouldn’t shine, where what remained of his Legion dwelt, and he would be free of the cloying dark of the jungle.

He strode through the nameless depths, each step measured, each leap cushioned, every sense aflame. Shards of red stared down through the jungle canopy which wavered and shook with an eldritch wind. When the green opened up, he saw it there—a great black featureless moon—the battlemoon. The skies were alive with god-sent forces all across the world. Suns vivified, impassioned, enraged, they burned and drove forth, they made aught grow and spread, but moons fostered melancholies, obsessions, mysteries, darkness, and most of all, madness—it was good to wage war when maddening moons crested high, for the gods sent these things to communicate their wills, and through their enactment did those in the world gain their favour.

And yet, horror gripped his heart, though he fought to hold it back. There were the sounds of conflict echoing through the green. Shadows sometimes rushed past trees, there was howling, screeching, growls, thumping feet, crashing and cracking branches. The jungle floor would choke on rivers of blood this over long and supernal night, and come the sweltering morning as the moon crumbled and spat its corpse down on the world, feast upon the festering remnants of war. He swore he would not be a part of it, though he bore no ill will to the Ranka Lasu, and hoped they would not cross paths. But whatever faced him would fall, as the gods demanded, as his survival sought, and the favour it would bring would be relished.

He had little to help guide him through the brush, just remnants of flashes of certain ruins, certain gnarled boughs and trunks that struck him as monstrous in his prior flight, as well as the mangled corpses he stumbled across. It was hard to tell how fresh a body was in the green, for many afflictions can cause many effects upon flesh, but he guessed as he could, and avoided that seemed to have just fallen. Their slayers, ape-thing or tribesman, could be too close for comfort. Twinges of shame came to him at such thoughts—but he repelled them with thoughts of comrades with whom greater battles could be fought, vengeance for whom would bring glory and favour, and he promised the gods an Áéan demigod for their satisfaction if they but guided his feet through this mouldering, noisome darkness.

But they wanted to test his resolve, he now saw. Convince us you deserve to live, they said, as though speaking through the Ranka Lasu warrior that now emerged from the treeline. He winced, thinking he might recognize the man’s face. But it was battle, and a blood-red sky peered down upon them to drown out all else in its sanguimantic radiance. A boyhood spent with a spear in his hands allowed him to deftly parry the incoming thrust from the grim-faced tribesman, clashing the spear-shaft aside, sliding his own blade around and under, and shoving his opponent’s upwards—but the man leapt to the side as the legionnaire sought to bring his blade down in one heavy thrust. The enemy’s spear, encrusted with gore, came at him—he hadn’t a second to react, and so rushed in, the tribesman stumbling, over-extending himself, receiving the legionnaire’s spear pommel in the chin. He reeled back as the legionnaire fell back, readying another strike, but the man recovered, and swung his spear out in one wide, wild, one-handed arc, sending a sharp shock through the legionnaire’s hands as the spears connected. There came another swing, missing, which landed in the mud. The legionnaire knew whoever landed the first strike would land the final one.

He fell in again with one almighty spring forward, aiming for the man’s bared chest, spear braced—only for it to be caught in the man’s own hands. The legionnaire was stunned. The man’s hands spewed blood as they ran along the spear’s keen, slender edge. No time to lose. No time to hesitate. He’ll let go and grab me, the legionnaire knew it, he could feel it. So he ran forward, through the tribesman’s grip on the blade, forcing himself with his heel dug deep into the mud, and watched the blade shoot through his opponent’s ribs, and through his back, the spear halfway through him. Blood slopped from his mouth, and his hands twitched as they tried to grasp through the mortal agony. The legionnaire, immersed in his swift technique’s motions, stepped in, hand at the halfway point of the shaft, and with his foot, kicked the man away as he withdrew his spear. The man fell with a gurgle and groan, and a second later, was silent, as the needle-pointed blade shot through his skull. The legionnaire wondered, idly, if the man bore in him a scrap of the ancient blessing, and prayed the gods had at least been merciful enough to make it not so.

The favour that combat had brought him was what carried his aching feet into the hinterlands of the Deep Green, where hot marshes hid him in their haze and thick, scummy waters, from both hunters, mad warriors, apes, and the baleful rays of the battlemoon. He emerged from the all-consuming mists into a sprawling, rolling, vasty plains with the merest hint of a sea breeze, and a bright cerulean sky. He fell upon the soft, dew-soaked grass and knew that at least some measure of peace would be his before the gods demanded once again war for favour and blood for glory.