Shadows & Sorcery #31
Welcome to the thirty-first edition of Shadows & Sorcery! Today’s post is a paid subscriber one, but true to my promise, the first story is available in full to all readers, and this will continue with every issue onward. If you like what you read here, grab a 7-day free trial and read all 150+ stories in the archives!
Now, last week I said the subscription price would be changing here, and it is - kind of. Substack actually requires there to be a $5 per month minimum on subscriptions. But I’m getting around this by running a monthly 60% off sale, meaning you can subscribe to this newsletter for only $2 a month for LIFE. So technically the price hasn’t changed…but it kinda actually has. If Substack tells me I can’t do this every month til the end of time, I’ll stop, but I don’t know why they would.
And that new price will include my serialized novel, THE PATH OF POISON, which is still in the works and will be debuted in the near future…
This week’s edition contains stories of dark magics and gateways, blasphemous rites, things from beyond the veil, and a place so terrible you’d wish it was beyond the veil.
The stories are:
Sorcerer’s Cavern
Hunters of Defilement
Dragon Mountain
Church of Dark
Forbidden Temple
Sorcerer's Cavern
The deep valley winds its way for many leagues, its tall slopes, sometimes gentle, sometimes steep, are covered in carpets of grasses, smatterings of trees, dark flowers and bushes that sigh with a perpetual creeping breeze. The air is never still here, and it wanders in odd paths. The valley is pleasant, but wild, and the general feeling among travellers is that although they appreciate its untamed beauty, it, or something in it, does not particularly desire to be disturbed by carts and campfires.
There lies hidden in its many twists and turns, off the usual paths that provide a quick way out of the region, an overhang quite low to the ground. Rock faces are not uncommon here, so this unassuming specimen goes unnoticed to all but the learned, or sometimes the unlucky traveller caught in a storm. Indeed, there are few accounts of this place even amongst the cloisters of the academies. Those that exist are kept under lock and key.
Under this overhang there gapes a low, ragged rent in the earth - a cave mouth. If followed, this mouth leads through a somewhat tight passage, requiring the generous use of torches. Still, it would be difficult for even an amateur to pass over the evidence of many feet who have trod this place. It leads, ultimately, into a spacious cavern strewn with natural pillars and boulders of moist stone. Water drops from the unseen ceiling above into deep, cold pools out of which just spikes of ancient stone. Quite naturally, no breeze flows here, as it is all but cut off from the outside world. Yet, like the outside, the air can only be described as unquiet. And the reason, they say, is because a Grand Gate was opened here, and was never closed.
Some centuries ago, a conclave of elite scholars, after spending a king's fortune on the accumulation of old lore from across the world, created the first formal structure of what had been since the dawn of time referred to as "magic". All magical practice, they said, was the opening of a gate, literally. In times past, magicians and folk practitioners would perform their arts in liminal spaces, that is, doorways, crossroads, gateways, places that were passed through and not remained in. But, others would create liminal spaces, they would construct artificial gateways, and these were often sacred spaces where religious experiences were had by a congregation. The form of the gate took many shapes, but it always at least somewhat recognizable as a passageway. This explains the forked heads of a magician's staff these days. But these doorways needed keys, and the world over discovered them through endless trial and error. The sorcerers of the first academy collated the various practices and discovered that certain shapes made before, upon or even through gates, via a diagram, carving, or even the motions of a hand, opened them. They are now referred to as sigils. Their counterparts, the spoken sound, the whistle, the bell, the compound sound-phrase, are passwords.
But there were some issues. Firstly, where did these gates lead? The heavens. The ancestors. The spirit realm. The underworld. Many names, perhaps, for the same thing that no one truly understood. Secondly, throughout their research, one factor became immediately clear: the human body may be used to create the key, but it must never be used as the gate. This was a lesson many peoples independently learned the hard way. Truth was, you never could tell what exactly was coming through a gate. Sometimes it really was just an impersonal, elemental force, and these could be difficult to stem the tide of. Sometimes, however, it was alive, and it was intelligent, and it was dangerous beyond description to use one's body for such a thing. Lastly, and this is a quirk still poorly understood today, that it is extraordinarily difficult to close a gate someone else has opened. It would appear keys are imprinted with something of their maker.
This is the problem of the place known in certain esoteric circles as the Sorcerer's Cavern. This place was not some small crack in a door, it was a yawning castle gate, where through whole legions might march. A Grand Gate, an extremely dangerous work that took months of preparation, a gate from which miracles were freely plucked, but also, not just a one-way gate like most spells, but a place where a magician may themselves pass into that other realm.
This is the truth known to high ranking academy magicians: the valley is infested with forces from beyond. They move in the air, crawl through the earth, they lurk behind the trees and rocks, and there is not a second in that place where one is not being watched. There was a time in the recent past when sorcerers secretly gathered at that place, for it was conducive to the opening of gates. Nowhere else in the world did the veil slip away so easily. Things on the other side sensed the presence of their kind, and were helped through.
Scholars once believed the cave mouth was gate, but they know better now. There is a very definite source, on the edge of a pool of black water, unimaginably deformed and mutated. The grey, mottled flesh is covered in rare sigil marks, and though it's hard to tell, examination determined it was laid out in a way which might be construed as making a gate. Some sages have guessed that this long-dead wizard passed through, and came back, having died before they could close the gate. The head must still be filled with knowledge. Nevertheless, it still acts as a portal for powers to pass through unhindered. It's only a matter of time before something of that world, and not merely its denizens, gains a foothold.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Shadows & Sorcery to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.