Shadows & Sorcery #29
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This week’s edition contains tales of haunted temples, strange landscapes not what they seem, cosmic powers best left untouched, an old knight’s fearsome lore, and the repercussions of an old sorcery…
This week’s stories are:
Cathedral Graves
Hill of Ruins
Forbidden Flames
Archives of the Knight
The Cemetery of the King
Cathedral Graves
The cathedral wasn't always such. There was a time when sky peered down instead of high, vaulted ceilings. The corridors of the cathedral interior were once the streets of a town. Many walls were once town walls. There are countless foundations of homes that now support quiet liturgical chambers and shrines. Wide steps ascend old levelled hillsides beneath. And of course, the graves that dot the cathedral are the graves not only of the clerical deceased, but the ancient down dead.
Sturdy stone walls and warm wooden pannelling, each kind beautifully decorated with intricate patterns and designs, they wear their weathering with pride. The cathedral is home to a body of clerics, as well as the high priest - in effect, it's still a small town, though not quite a monastery. Vast quantities of it are open to the public, who are encouraged to use it as a social center as well as a place of worship. The residences of the priests are clustered together along a few streets, and are mostly treated as other private residences are. The clergy often invite friends and visitors to their quarters.
The cathedral is arranged thus: a grand main street stretches from one gateway to the other, curving and undulating very gently, splitting off from this main street are the two sides of the town, the slightly elevated north end, and the mostly level south bank. Each side has three large streets branching from the main street, between which are a great number of covered passages and hallways leading to residences, shrines, reliquaries, administrative chambers, old walls delineating small districts, and the twelve temples of the cathedral. Between these main streets are a number of smaller pathways, too. There are also sections of colossal support pillars and buttresses that hold the vaulted ceilings above.
Amidst this, somewhere in the north end, is a sizeable graveyard only properly visible from the chorus galleries which wind their ways up the vast bounding walls of the cathedral. Although there are small grave clusters all about the place, mostly on the main street and around shrines (honourable burials in holy ground), this is the only proper graveyard in the entire cathedral. It sits between two treasuries, completely inaccessible otherwise from the outside world. It belongs to the old town, from some eight hundred years or more ago. The town was home to one of the first enclaves of the faith the cathedral is now center to. The regional cult from before was an extremely ancient form of ancestor worship mixed with nature worship, the general idea being that one came from and returned to some vast bulk of life beyond "the veil", and that human experience and knowledge was taken back to that place upon death. Hence the world around and about them was of them, and they were of it. A world experiencing itself.
The new faith brought with it more abstract concepts, and the old faith of the town was quietly subsumed by the celestial realms they found themselves surrounded by. But that didn't seem to quite be the end of it. As the cathedral grew about and over the town, rumours would filter through the priesthood and workers of hauntings. And not just one every few years, there were times when a dozen or more were being reported in a span of months.
Investigations from high priests throughout the years, through both official and personal channels, led to the idea that the dead had become lost. They did not rest, they did not continue their onward ascendancy beyond, and neither did they return back beyond their "veil". Something of the new faith's prescence had apparently disrupted a process, or the powers called there during services and festivals did, and the dead dating from the days of the cathedral faith's arrival had never been able to complete their posthumous journey. Clergy throughout the centuries had taken steps to try and curb the hauntings. Exorcisms, banishings, staking of graves, in the end they felt they had been too forceful, but alas what was done was done. The ghosts hadn't been human for a long time, they were isolated, and had, according to some of the older clerics, become quite strange.
It's not exactly an uncommon sight these days, to see an odd figure watching from an alleyway, or peering from behind one of the grand pillars. Figures rise and fall to the earth in the graveyard, though few are there to see it. The clerics who live in the cathedral are trained to ward them off, but take great steps not to hurt them. Visitors to the cathedral sometimes get told the story should they happen to encounter one inside the home they are guest in, for the spirits do intrude, seeking something only they are aware of.
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