Shadows & Sorcery #23
Welcome to the twenty-third edition of Shadows & Sorcery! This is a paid subscriber post, but if you’re a free subscriber and the following preview has piqued your interest, why not shoot me a message here on Substack, or over on Twitter if you’re on there, and get one of the last few lifetime paid subs I’m handing out? There’s now over one hundred stories ready and waiting to be read at your leisure!
This week’s edition contains stories of an unlikely cult centre, the desperate rites of a warlike people, powers beyond human ken, black market relics, and the dark secret deep below a distant keep…
This edition’s stories include:
Prophets of the Deep
Sea of Sacrifices
Forbidden Dark
Saint’s Ash
Lord’s Private Asylum
Prophets of the Deep
They had two choices: take punishment rotting in the duke's dungeons, or become a convict. It was a humourless play on words. Conviction, zealous faith and also bondage for transgression. Somewhere on the distant mountain horizon sat a fortress where these special prisoners were sent. It wasn't one of the eastern reformatories, no, it was what they called a penitentiary, where faith would pay their sentence.
It was a grim place, a grey bulk upon grey rock under grey sky, with whipping frigid winds in eternal assault about the walls. It had a reputation as a place people disappeared into, and escape, if even possible, led only to a barren expanse of perilous crags ending in uninhabited cold bogland. A single road led to it, itself an arduous journey across wild leagues.
The penitentiary was not always thus. Two hundred years ago it was a frontier prison where criminals would be sent to mine ore. But something happened, and over the span of a decade, the prison was transformed, through the continual petition of its worst criminals, into the penitentiary of today. The origins of this change are still hotly debated in some circles. It is believed by some to be a cover up or lie on the part of the prison to get more workers, and some believe it a sham perpetrated by the inmates to gain some measure of flexibility.
The prison has light exterior security, for within is a veritable maze of open shafts, different levels, and snaking passages going right into the mountain itself. The prison interior is its own little world, with customs, traditions, laws, and of course, faith.
The convict cult is a hard one. It is the glue which binds the convict society, a label they wear proudly. Its code is utterly unyielding, but with the rigidity comes focus, drive, purpose, it keeps convicts 'on the straight and narrow'. It permeates everything, from sleep and other rest periods, the labour in the deep mines (the mountain has yet to dry up, addressed in the doctrine of grace which provides hard work for the convicted), meals, communication, and more. But it is also fraternal, the convicts are equals, and keep each other as honest as can be. And it provides boons, apparently, in the form of purification.
They follow the words of a series, or perhaps a collection of enigmatic figures referred to as the Prophets of the Deep. Presumably, though this is pure conjecture as no convict has ever revealed the full details of the cult, labourers of two centuries ago happened upon something (it has been guessed to be an artifact or even slumbering power) which impressed them or bound them into this faith. It would seem decrees or blessings for certain things are disseminated through the convicts from an unknown source. There is not a single convict in the penitentiary who is not at least nominally part of the cult, those who refuse it are shunned, terrorized, perhaps even done away with. Convicts who serve their time are reminded that they will always owe a debt to the word of the Prophets, and to keep their brethren in their hearts while they labour in the world, and that a place is always available to them should they return.
Some convicts don't want to leave. Institutionalization is a phenomenon for old prisoners, who lose all sense of the outside world beyond their dungeon cells or reformatory chambers, and it is a common occurrence in the penitentiary. But in this case it seems to be less alienation, and rather that the convicts don't want to be separated from the word of the Prophets. Small settlements of convicts appear around the penitentiary every so often, of displaced ex-convicts. They do not last long.
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