Shadows & Sorcery #37
Welcome to the thirty-seventh issue of Shadows & Sorcery! Now, this one’s a paid subscriber post, but I have a jumbo-sized free story for everyone to enjoy, honestly just because it was going that way and I didn’t try and stop it. There’s four more stories afterwards, too, including two stories that somehow became one. And remember, not only is it just $2 a month, you also get a 7 day free trial which gives you access to the whole archives.
I’ve been trying out some new styles in recent editions, I’m hoping they’re going down well - if you like it, let me know! You can leave a like and/or a comment on the website. Or talk to me on my Twitter, I’d like to hear from you all more!
I also want to share more art from awesome local Irish artist Jessica Sharkey (Instagram: @jessyphus).
This week’s issue brings us on a mini adventure with a trio of sellswords in an abandoned ruin, we visit an ancient bulwark, we learn why certain sites in the land can no longer be visited, we witness magical manifestation, and learn the true value of fire…
The stories are:
Consumed Ruins
Chasm Keep
Sorcerer’s Dungeons
Crystal of Offering
Fire Graveyard & Crucible of the Crypts
Consumed Ruins
The rain fell in thick sheets, obscuring their vision. There were short moments when it thinned - though it never stopped - and it was only then could they see the rising moonlight falling upon the wide, curving bluff, illuminating the ruin which huddled at its base. Nothing good was ever revealed by moonlight, but they had little choice in this perilous weather in a perilous land. They walked sideways down the awkward sloping earth. The wind sometime kicked up, sending gusts of chill air to slam against them, and one sent the trio stumbling into the ruins.
What remained of the ceiling was enough to act as shelter, poor as it may be. The remnants of moss-laden walls jut from the grassy floor, mostly in low, long fragments, but some retained their shape and function a little better. In their rudimentary search, they couldn't determine just what this place used to be.
"Bit of an alcove here, this'll do," said a fellow whose features were all earthen: dusky, clay-red skin, hazel eyes, and oaken hair held back with a silver band around the forehead. He took from a pack now a length of wood with one end wrapped - evidently a torch, and a small red stone. Undoing the wrappings, it was revealed the head was covered in thick black pitch. The fellow placed the red stone upon the tar, and breathed over it. The red stone dropped into the fellow's palm as the torch suddenly sprang to life, sending welcome warmth across the two other faces - one was a woman with bronze skin and amber eyes to match, while her hair was short and sandy. The other had bloodless, pale skin, while his shock of hair was like black, and his eyes were the colour of storm clouds.
"Bless that old wizard..." said the woman with a small, weary smile. The pale man did not speak. His face was uneasy as he looked around. The earthen man, Kais, slumped to the ground, mostly dry. His wife Casa followed him, taking her shortbow from her shoulder. The pale northerner continued to stand and watch.
"What is it, Karel?" asked Casa with concern. The man wore his emotions on his sleeve, and Kais and Casa had learned over the years to pay attention to it. He was as brunt as he was astute. He gave a slow sigh, as if he didn't like what he had to say.
"This place hasn't seen light in a long time." The words came with a dread that only a Dunmharu warrior of the death god could deliver.
"The torch is burning just fine," said Kais, "no need to worry, just rest." Karel only glanced back at Kais, his face ghostly in the torchlight, before leaning against a wall. It was as far as he'd give in.
Kais passed around some salted meat from a small pack. Karel took first watch, as he usually insisted on. Kais would be next, which he also usually insisted on. He and Casa had been sellswords together for years, but he still pampered her whenever he could, in his own way. After some idle chatter and old stories, the Dunmharu took his cloak and stood a short ways from the couple. He looked out into the dark, lightly rubbing a small slate rectangle that hung around his neck - the gravemark of the Dunmharu death god, deliverer of deserved rest - and muttered a prayer in his harsh tongue:
"Delay our sleep, frost-lord, so we can rest in our homes..."
Kais awoke with a start. Something had shook him. He didn't know how long he'd slept. It took a second to focus, but he saw it was Karel. His pallid features shot a glance backwards.
"What- what is it?" stuttered Kais, his hand clumsily reaching for the flat tipped cleaving sword at his side.
"There's something here." He was already crouching around to awaken Casa. Kais looked to the torch they had set into the bare earth. Night had fallen in full, and he noticed with a sudden rush of panic that the though the torch still burnt well, it illuminated absolutely nothing around it. Only the bare outlines of the ruins were at all visible. He jumped up and heard Casa suppress a gasp. Karel shot a look to him that said "I told you".
Kais stood by his wife. She was re-stringing her bow while her eyes shot around. Karel held his slate gravemark in one hand, and a cruel spiked morningstar in the other. Three moons were visible overhead, and they sent no beam down, but seemed to be as eyes through which something else watched them.
There was a sound. It wasn't the rain, which sounded far off, muffled. It wasn't the wind, which was stifled and only crept weakly through the ruins.
"Come to me"
A fleshy padding on wet stone.
They immediately rushed and stood back to back, searching the lightless vastness that seemed to stretch further than it ought to around them.
"You need only ask forgiveness"
The voice sounded like ripping fabric.
They had moved only a little ways from the torch which still stood upright in the earth. Casa was facing it. She saw then something appear. It didn't step into the light, but rather seemed to let the light flood over it for a moment. Flesh so devoid of colour it couldn't be natural. Black streaks were cast about the exposed arms and face like something had been splattered across them. The eyes were simply empty spaces. The black-stained lips were forming words she couldn't hear. She didn't want to hear them. Casa snarled and loosed an arrow. It ceased to show itself the second the arrow reached it, clanging onto bare stone.
The others spun around to her. She looked to them and said only one word, and they understood: gnostic. The ruins were what certain sages, including the old wizard they had once crossed paths with in a far off land, called 'deep' - that is, consumed by dark. Lightless places become congealed in shadow, and things from other places worm their way in through them. There are madmen who learn of this, and these are folk known in certain secret, dire circles as gnostics, the seekers of a vile transcendence.
And there was only one way to kill them.
"Kais." She spoke barely above her breath.
"Love?" came the shaky reply.
"Do you have the pitch on you?"
"Yeah, why-"
"Dip one of my arrows in it, stick the red stone to it."
Kais took a second to register the idea, but when he did, a grin spread across his face. He only stopped when he felt Karel lunge forward with a shout.
"Dunmharu, the north calls you," came the tearing fabric rasp. Kais pulled his comrade back, and the Dunmharu almost swung at him. The earthen man drew an arrow from his wife's hip satchel and dipped the steel head in the small pitch pot. He then pressed the red stone to the sticky substance with his thumb while incomprehensible whispers snaked through the air. There was a was sensation of tugging at their skin that made them pull back and shift, and for every movement, it grew in force horribly, reaching deeper under their flesh. Kais ran his hand with the arrow in it along his wife's arm in the dark. She reached back and took it with a whispered "thanks, love".
Casa's dark gold eyes almost shone in the deep. She thought back to the old wizard who had left the stone as a parting gift. She took a breath and held it in her chest for a moment, and then blew sharply on the pitched arrow head and stone. The instant her breath met it, the arrow head leapt into flames, and in the flash, a bent figure in a mass of rotten rags reared up in shock mere yards away. Casa nocked and drew the bow in a single fluid motion, giving herself two heartbeats in which to aim and loose.
A streak like a falling star twanged and thocked into the chest of the gnostic madman, who became embraced by bright yellow flame. A cloud of flaking shadow billowed from the form that stumbled back pathetically and collapsed writhing before it went still on its side, curled up like a dead spider. Though the night did not lift, the vastness did almost immediately. They'd been a mere hair's breadth away from terrible harm, and some part of them knew it.
Kais returned with a bundle of usable firewood under his arm, and the trio piled it around the corpse, and with their remaining pitch, set it alight, to burn the dark away from the ruins. Kais remarked that the old wizard would have been proud of them, and Casa smiled as she agreed. Karel thumbed his slate idol, and asked the death god to see this soul to some form of peaceful sleep.
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