Shadows & Sorcery #3
Welcome to issue 3 of Shadows & Sorcery! Below you’ll find stories of strange cults, stranger lands, and dark visions…
Today’s stories are:
Catacombs of the Sorcerers
Cemetery Shadows
Valley of the Night
Mountain of the Sacrifice
Memory of the Dark
Catacombs of the Sorcerers
Passing through the biting winds of a certain mountain land, a traveller might suddenly come upon the frost-rotted remnants of a city half-drowned in ice. The streets are buried, doorways and windows boarded shut, the stone is chipped and crumbling in parts, in others worn and smooth. There are wide courts with toppling monoliths set into curious places, there are half-ruined towers opened the howling air, and the interiors of what structures can be gained only serve to create more questions.
What might have been homes are huddled, squarish, single roomed cells of plain and spartan furnishing. Holes in the roof let in a beam of illumination, and small depressions in the stone floors suggest a meager fire pit. Some of these cells contain the fragile, rotting bulks of wooden shelves, and there are spaces set into walls that may have once housed something of importance. After a more thorough exploration of the city and its secrets, these things all taken together reveal their true nature. The key lies in the numerous entrances into the leagues of catacombs beneath the city streets.
The mountainside is honeycombed with them. A lightless necropolis dwarfing the burying grounds of all other lands, every wall is lined with tightly packed remains. The flimsy shrouds of robes, piled talismans, carven statuettes, pouches of occult mixtures, esoteric scrawls, all this and more litter the ground and alcoves wherein these dead are interred. A clear hierarchy begins to present itself as chambers are discovered wherein a single body holds obvious prominence, or a number of bodies are set into ornate mausoleums, sometimes at rest, sometimes in high back stone chairs. Others are held rigidly upright.
Treasures lay as a carpet upon the grounds of these chambers. In the firelight, the catacombs shimmer with gold and silver, the faded ancient reds and purples gain some measure of life, and shadows slither across the rugged stone in ways that suggest independence from that which casts them. To those versed in arcane lore or with the right sensitivity, it would seem they were the people of the city above, not merely a race with an exuberant mortuary cult, but a race of sorcerers, and such revelations often leads to panic and flight from the passages. To those blissfully ignorant of the terror of their enlightened companions, the form of a corpse-walker sliding from its recess and its curled fingers mindlessly working spells soon lends a measure of clarity.
Few bands pass through the city now, but the same conclusion is reached by those who do: that land is cursed. A seething locus of dark potency, where nameless magics were worked and terrible prices extracted. The city and all within it are as symbols of virulent occult might. The very power of the place makes the dead restless, and unquiet corpses are driven mindlessly by the whirling forces they made in life. They say that happy is the tomb where no wizard has lain, and happy is the town at night whose wizards are all ashes. Upon glimpsing the nameless mountain city, one can't help but appreciate the sentiment.
Cemetery Shadows
Across the gentle rolling dales of the south-west there sit a number of small, pastoral villages. Attached to these villages are a number of small churches, and attached to these churches are graveyards. Untouched by the grand conflicts of many centuries, this bright but cool land has developed its own peculiar slant on the popular faith of the region. While the High Temple sought to free itself from the shackles of a mouldering and symbolic pantheon, now professing a complex theology of generative principles and motive forces, the country churches never quite abandoned the old faiths.
Synthesized quite organically, the cult of the region is a decentralized landwight veneration in which these spirits serve as the ordering forces spoken of in High Temple doctrine. Detailed but not complex, the landwight cult names and records the spirits dwelling within the fields and glades of the dales. One aspect of the sweeping hand of the High Temple that stuck, however, is the common belief in the transmigration of the soul to some other state of existence. But in typical syncretic fashion, though the soul may depart to stranger realms, it leaves something behind. A shadow. Local belief holds they are pieces of the departed entrusted to the landwights, and indeed that may be the case, considering such shades are supposedly reported nowhere else in the land.
The most famous account of the cemetery shadows comes from the rambling confessions of a band of enterprising graverobbers over two hundreds years ago. Having struck out into the farther corners of the countryside after being ousted from the cities, they stole across the small boundary walls of one churchyard by moonlight. Fresh graves are easier to unearth, but rural cemeteries are crowded and have little planning or structure, and so it took some time to hunt down a headstone that suggested a measure of wealth. Having applied their protections, coerced from a sorcerer, spades were slowly sunk into the loose topsoil and heaved aside.
One of the thieves was resting against a small tombstone, for graves are buried deep and all involved need to be in a condition for escape at a moment's notice. The thief suddenly noticed something stirring in the long grass. It took only a moment to discern the nature what now diffused itself from the dark earth, and what was, seconds later, joined by at least a dozen others. Some variations of this story end with the thieves meeting grisly ends of either ironic or simply gruesome aspect, but the more "official" versions end with the thieves meeting the local priest at dawn before the church, their tools broken at their feet, begging forgiveness and confessing their deeds.
All manner of vague superstitions and minor folk stories surround the shadows, like gathering about the houses of those about to die, being called up by family members to learn the location of treasures, or holding their own religious ceremonies in the empty church, and more. Whether or not these events occur is immaterial, for the shadows exist, and exist only here. It is not uncommon for the rare traveller to spot shadows rising from and vanishing into the ground, and huddle in the village tavern telling tales of ghosts at which the local folk merely laugh.
Valley of the Night
Some leagues beyond Minosmir, but long before the mountain of Baletor comes into sight, there lies a singular stretch of wilderness. Sparsely, if at all inhabited, the popular roads lead almost directly away from this region and instead in the direction of the easternmost canton of Silverden, before plunging again into a more gentle countryside further north. The land out east is of course a famously flat vastness of heath and steppe, rugged and open, its rises are rare and often so low as to be hardly noticeable. Minosmir dominates the range of short hills, Baletor straddles the one great mountain, but there is one other landmark of note, though few like to discuss it.
It is more of a depression in the earth than a true valley. The rises either side of it have a strange look to them, as if two hands had dug their fingers into the earth and pushed the land aside in two great and irregular mounds. The valley between happens to be the most direct path between Minosmir and Baletor, travellers need only traverse the relatively shallow basin, instead of going around or passing over the hills. But nowadays knowledge of the region is more widespread, and any who manage to find themselves in that bleak place favour the arduous procession over the jagged hilltops, or to skirt them entirely, instead of risking the interior of what has become known as the Valley of the Night.
As one descends into the minor depression that constitutes the valley floor, the air becomes chill, the light begins to wane, and nary an hour's walk inside, no matter the time of day, the sky turns to a deep, starless night. Travellers who sleep there find to their horror the sun never rises, the air never warms, and no wind blows. Eerie silence pervades the entire valley, and it is said there is a sense of tension in the stillness, taut, and like it could snap any moment.
Torches cannot remain lit, campfires wither, there is a dampness that stains and chokes. In the deepest section of it, said in dreadful whispers, things dwell. Sometimes it is infested with mounds of coiling serpents, and after a desperate wading and hacking through, they seem to vanish. Sometimes it is verminous with movement, more felt than heard, a constant and unplaceable impression that a great number of things are stalking around you or things pass just overhead, before going utterly silent. there is a sense of an ever-present something always approaching, but never closing in. And though it cannot be confirmed, some stories state that members of travelling parties simply vanish, as if plucked from their feet into the dark.
It is surmised that it takes approximately a little over two days to pass through the valley, mostly due to the slowness of progress. One knows they have left it when the sunlight returns, or when stars shine healthily in the sky. Certain scholars have mused darkly and quietly about the nature of the Valley of the Night. It presents all the aspects of that terrible outer dark that lightless places manifest if left untouched for too long, where nameless things worm their way into the world and where the gaze of unspeakable forces falls. If the reason for this simple valley's corruption dwells within it somewhere, it will likely never be found. Perhaps it should never be found.
Mountain of the Sacrifice
In an age before the coming of the Living Communion, those of the cold desert worshipped the Brazen Bull. A hard faith for a hard people in a hard land. The bronze horns adorned the banners of the armies, the altars were piled with ox skulls, and the Bull gloried in the sport of men, giving fertility and fury to the devout. The cult was the backbone of the tribe's expansion and domination of the Magi and their slave armies, as well as the man-eating warriors of the cavern lands. In the center of the tribe's capital was a single toppling mountain which even to this day has associated with it a myth of the golden age of the Bronze Bull's cult, the story of the sacrifice on the mountain.
The tale is emblematic of the cult's brutal nature. Indeed, very little of the Brazen Bull's faith carried overly esoteric connotation, much of it was symbolic association or a more primal and shamanistic 'sensing'. Its many stories were no exception, and the cult had a vast bulk of lore, much of it simply representing the indomitable nature of the its members, or the fierce power of the bull god.
The tale begins with the Warrior who, after a successful raid on a Magi settlement, battles its reigning sorcerer-lord and enslaves him. In a fit of religious fervour, the Warrior declares he will sacrifice the Magi atop the summit of the mountain, Ram-Zúd, the steps of the Brazen Bull's sun palace. To the cold desert people, there was a distinction between offering and sacrifice. An offering was just the simple giving of something of worth, a display of wealth more than generosity. But a sacrifice was to lose something important and was a deeply meaningful gesture. An enslaved Magi lord was a valuable resource, as their secret powers were often turned to the favour of the cold desert tribes.
The tale describes, at length, the various ways in which the Warrior counters the Magi's various attempts at escape via sorcery. There is the landslide, the beautiful siren, and the darkness, each of which is defeated by the Brazen Bull's attributes of strength (or endurance), virility, and bronze fire. Each attempt ends in a comic beating of the Magi. Eventually, through biting winds, long marches, and nights of starvation (or fasting), the Warrior drags the nearly dead Magi onto the blunt summit of the mountain, in the warmth of the sun. Taking two sacred horns, the Warrior blows on one to announce his act, and then plunges the second - carved so as to have a handle - into the chest of the Mag. At the very base of the Brazen Bull's sun palace the Magi's corpse bursts into white fire, the Warrior glimpses the golden steps, and the tale simply ends as he begins his descent back down the mountain.
Memory of the Dark
We all have it. You have it, too. A memory at the very center of your mind. A memory of the Dark. It is faint, dim, like the murk it recalls. Sometimes, it rises of its own volition in quiet moments in lonely places. Sometimes it surfaces when you feel you are being watched. It is the backdrop to every dream you ever had, and recedes when you drift out of sleep. It can never be forgotten. It must never be forgotten.
The sages have breathed the heady vapors and relived their memories. Each breath takes them further back and reveals the past. Finally they reach the center, and their hearts rush as the memory opens in crystal clarity. The dark is not blank, it is deep. It is made of many darks.
The Dark before life, before light, is where we learn to fear the things we fear. It's where we learn to survive, and to trust in that basest part of ourselves. There is knowledge of other powers in the memories. We look back one more time before we are formed in the light, and everything within it looks back at us. Every sage must make the inward journey themselves, for no other will ever speak of what they've seen in their memory of the Dark.