Shadows & Sorcery #25
Welcome to the twenty-fifth edition of Shadows & Sorcery! A full quarter of the way to one hundred, crazy huh? Now, this is a paid subscriber edition, but free readers can avail of a 7-day free trial which gives complete access to the entire 100+ stories in the archives! If you like it, why not shoot me message here on Substack or over on Twitter and claim one of the last few lifetime paid subscriptions?
In this edition we have tales of a grim, haunted mountain, two dark lakes hiding darker secrets, the frightful custom of an extreme nature cult, and a library where the late fee is your life…
Today’s stories are:
Mountains of the Graves
Submerged Glade
Drowned Tower
Church Wilderness
Iron Archives
Mountain of the Graves
Why the mountain was chosen, none can say even now. The reason is likely lost somewhere within one of the many thousands of graves which infest its surface.
There are spans of the mountainside, figured in miles, which appear from afar like scales so utterly plastered in fallen grave-slabs are they. But there are too the great empty sweeps where the dry, decrepit land has fallen away to reveal fields of jutting stone sarcophagi. There are bluffs and beetling cliffs composed entirely of piled headstones. There are silent villages of chained mausoleums where fortress-like crypts leer over meagre, huddle cairns.
Very few new burials are made on the mountain. Most of it is so absolutely packed with ancient dead one can't step an inch without passing over a dozen graves beneath. Some in the past have made a pilgrimage to the summit of the mountain, either out of some vague reverence, curiosity, or to find virgin burial earth. None have returned. The mountain is home to many such final resting places, open to the sky. New burials, when they happen, are around the base, and have in recent decades begun to creep off the mountain itself and into the surrounding land.
Being one incalculably vast necropolis, the mountain has its parasites. What should be a silent, albeit grim place of slumber is all too often animate with the chattering and clacking of ghouls, the loathsome not-quite-dead humans who have taken to the devouring of corpses. Tribes of them sometimes creep across the countryside by night, out of their lightless realms beneath, staking out a place on the mountain where they might make helpless prey of the dead by moonlight.
On the lower slopes, a few isolated, individual gravewardens dwell. They wander the twisting lanes and crevices that the larger mausoleums create, slaying the ghouls who squat amongst them. Many become quite old there and lay within graves emptied by their enemies. Necromancers have approached these wardens in the past to seek entry to commune with the dead, but they are rebuffed with a barely restrained hostility. The wardens might know something of the mountain, or merely feel it, or think they feel it. Regardless, disturbing the mountain's slumber usually ends in merely adding to its number.
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