Shadows & Sorcery #21
Welcome to issue twenty one of Shadows & Sorcery! Today’s edition is a paid subscriber post, but never fear, if you want access to this and the 100 previous tales, I happen to have a few lifetime paid subs left to hand out - for free! So just send me a message here on Substack or on my Twitter and we’ll get you sorted out.
In this issue, you will find stories of a very forbidden temple, a meeting place between heaven and earth, and a few places to steer clear of when out adventuring…
Today’s tales are:
Cathedral of the Crypt
Drowned Wilderness
Ruins Demon
Tower of the Saint
Undead Lake
Cathedral of the Crypt
They say a thousand kingdoms have stood where this one is now. Inevitably, every one of them has come upon the vast crypts below. Great stretches of high passages that descend for leagues upon leagues, lined with stone sarcophagi and wooden coffins, the dusty, desiccated remains within often spilling or peering sightlessly out. There are yawning chambers of subterranean graveyards with dry, cracked earth. There are entire funerary complexes with streets and tomb towers reaching into their cavern's blackness. Architectural styles of ages almost beyond reckoning blend in strange ways, marking the discovery and influence of new kingdoms.
And naturally, along with these discoveries, the first explorers come into contact with the dead who roam the necropolis. The strange dead, the alien dead, whose humanity has long since departed, are left with only the sediment of a soul inside them to wander amidst the eternal serene dark. They are not hostile, not mindless, but they suffer not the trespass of the living, and take great pains to instruct the inevitable new land above in their ways.
The crowning feature of the crypts are the many temples raised by the dead of aeons, and chief among them is the colossus known as the cathedral. In most cases where a land above discovers the crypts, a powerful mortuary cult forms among the living, venerating the immortal undead below, beseeching them for ancient knowledge and wisdom from beyond the grave. This cult is often used by the undead as a proxy to interact with the living.
The dead keep their own cult secret, but secrets slipped by tolerant corpses paint a picture of a venerable faith formed over countless centuries. The beliefs of the living are naturally carried into the tomb lands below, and various bits of theology have been appraised and moulded and syncretized into a faith that spans epochs. The dead to not worship the gods, they say, they commune directly with them, for they are already dead and no veil separates either party.
Living priests of the mortuary cult have sought, time and time again, entrance into the undead faith, but are universally rebuffed. At long last, however, the undead conceded they sometimes required a ritual leader, as the dead slumber for centuries at a time. Yet, no living eye is permitted to gaze upon even the lowliest temple. A special caste of people forms in the cults above, those who are ritually slain in accordance with the undead commands, to serve faithfully as priests in the grand cathedral where pantheons of ages past come from far times and far spaces to speak with their people. The cathedral is an immeasurably vast dome, an almost wholly empty space supported by hundreds of pillars, buttresses, and vaults to create, it is said, a structure more impressive than the living could ever muster, for dead limbs do not tire or break.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Shadows & Sorcery to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.