Shadows & Sorcery #22
Welcome to the twenty-second edition of Shadows & Sorcery! This is a paid subscriber post, but I’m still offering a few free lifetime subs to those who sign up and contact me here, or send me a DM over on Twitter. This is only necessary since I need to manually input emails for free paid subs. If you are a free subscriber, considering shooting me a quick message because an archive of over 100 stories awaits you, to dip in and out of at your leisure!
Today’s edition includes stories of a frightful crypt-ridden hill, savage cult rites, an ancient oceanic mystery, the strangest band of knights you’ve ever read of, and a dark secret underneath a monastery…
Today’s tales are:
Tomb Knoll
Crypt of the Altar
Chasm of the Sea
Knights Undead
Ruins of the Giants
Tomb Knoll
Out in the rocky plain, with its short, sharp bluffs, deep clefts, its little mires, there rises quite suddenly a rugged knoll, around and upon which there once stood a grand, fortified town, but where dwells now only the mossy ghosts of old walls and foundations. The hill is not especially tall, but it is steep on one side and pitted and misshapen on the rest. Sometimes it is crossed by treasure seekers, the keener of which spy ruins beneath the aged ground, and inevitably investigate.
The many small depressions upon its surface are soon cleaned of their accumulated grime, and seekers shout with excitement that they've uncovered stonework - ancient, weathered, crumbling, but nonetheless shaped by mortal hands. Such a lonely and forgotten place must hide all manner of secrets, they say.
Into the lightless, dank tunnels do they go, trodding upon moist earth and mud pools. The masonry making itself somewhat apparent here and there, but finally so do the stone slabs ad sarcophagi, each one filled with black, rotten rages. No faster a friend is there to the treasure seeker than the old tomb, especially that of an entire vanished people.
After some time in the cloying dark, the seekers will retrace their steps. Most are intact as they return to the blearing light of the outside, but sometimes spans of them are obliterated by long trails or piles of mud, likely due to the uneven and loose nature of the tomb corridors.
Some inspection of other pits and openings yield similar results. And as more are explored and lightly mapped, it becomes clear that not only is the entire knoll covered in the maws of tombs, these tombs appear to have opened onto the each other, creating a vast sepulchral honeycomb through the entire great mound. There are sections of sunken stone floors, or oddly intersecting tunnels where architects of an older age clearly misinterpreted old charts and opened into existing crypts. But there are other features harder to explain. Smoother tunnels connecting catacomb halls nowhere near each other. In fact there are almost as many of these as deliberate tombs.
What becomes common deeper in are the charnel remains, strewn in profusion across the hallways and piled within vault chambers, and not all of them, the seekers begin to panic over, are browned with rot and age. A flight ensues from the cursed tomb knoll, and following the hasty, chaotic footfalls there comes now the increasingly clear dragging and pitter-patter of naked flesh upon open earth.
Out of the countless hidden tunnels there emerges sinuous, lumpen forms the hue of off-colour meat, with arms of grotesque sinew and bowed heads slavering and sucking. Should a torch pass too close to one, milky eyes peer with knowing from a face that holds far too close a kinship with humanity for any mortal mind to endure.
Perhaps one or two seekers throw themselves into the sane light of day, screaming and tearing at themselves to rip away soft hands that are no longer there. They flee into the distance where shame and horror shroud them like a funeral pall, and it is only between gulps of ale and beer, in a warm, fire-lit tavern, do they even dare to whisper hints or intimations of why that city was abandoned, or why things have learned to walk, that ought to crawl.
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