Shadows & Sorcery #38
Welcome to the thirty-eighth edition of Shadows & Sorcery!
This week’s free tale is, like last week’s, a little on the longer side, and I hope you like it! The rest are a mere $2/m away, but hey, when you sign up you also get a 7 day trial of the full archives, so why not try it out? There’s nearly 200 stories to read!
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Next, I’m pleased to announce that the first chapter of my long-fermenting serial novel “THE PATH OF POISON” will release alongside issue 40 of the newsletter - that’ll be a two for one, completely free for all release! At the moment, I’m planning for chapters to be sent out monthly, and whether or not they replace flash fiction I haven’t completely decided. Not every chapter will be free, but don’t worry, free chapters will contain summaries of any previous paid ones.
Lastly, take a look at this genuinely stellar piece of art by local Irish artist Jessica Sharkey! You can find more of her work over in Instagram @jessyphus
Today’s tales include a strange encounter in an even stranger city, we follow some rather unscrupulous fellows in an old burial ground, we peer into the eye of a magician’s tempest, we learn the fate of those marked by dark sins, and we overhear a conversation from two old warriors…
The stories are:
City of the Cosmos
Graveyard Ash
Storm of the Sorcerer
Sinner’s Sanctum
Ancient Shadows
City of the Cosmos
She had been rushed through the streets since stepping off the barque and onto the blackwood port of Velhodún - the City of the Cosmos. The sight of the vast black spires reaching above the silver-blue lit streets, and into an eternal dark firmament where black spheres silently hung in front of swathes of cerulean nebulae, wasn't something one could prepare for. The city lay at the far end of the world, and though it saw much foreign traffic, the journey was long and expensive, available only to the rich, or the desperate.
Velhodún was a city of astrologers. It was a place close the cosmos, to unearthly places, and the tops of the highest towers were said to have stars balanced upon them. Consulted by the lords of lands the world over, they nevertheless denied none their art: any chance to glimpse the current of fate and discern destinies was welcome. Thus did Shemaz meet Val, and come from the deep deserts of Tel Tov to stand in the cosmic city.
Val led her gently by the arm down a smaller street, where figures in soft black cloaks were now leaving, their eyes seeing, she thought, things no one else could. She got that feeling a lot during the voyage with Val. At first it was mysterious. Now it made her feel like she was never alone.
The buildings either side were like canyon walls, and there was a certain dampness to everything. A slight mist trailed across the smooth stone ground. At the far, far end of this side street there was a fork - the right side curved out into another street, but the left side had steps that ascended to a door. That could be it, she thought, the end point of a six month trek across the world.
Something caught her eye then. She had been half-entranced by the glimmer of nebula above when something like it drifted into her periphery. She stopped, and looked. Where there ought to be a simple, lightly decorated wall, there was instead something like a shapeless splotch of the eternal night sky, inky, with stars in its depths. There was something about the way it receded into vastness that made her want to reach out and test it.
Her hand was inches from the dark when, all in a single instant, words spoken with dire weight months ago flooded to the forefront of her mind, the gentle and distant mien of Val dropped, and a squirming, rugose thing composed of limbs emerged from the mass of cosmic darkness before her.
"Should the stars shine anywhere but above - run!"
Water seemed to slosh and splash to the ground with a fierce cold rising from it, and Val pushed Shemaz away while bellowing a word in the tongue of Velhodún that rung like a bell. Val had affinity for the stars of his home, just as Shemaz had for the winds of her own, but the same stars hung over all the world, while the winds of Tel Tov blew there, and there alone. She was utterly powerless in this far place. The ringing seemed to resonate in the very stone itself, and immediately the thing, whose shape and movements seemed anathema to the eerie beauty of Velhodún, began to falter, and flail about with pain and fury.
The shout came again, and again, and Val flashed a glance to her only once that burned a blazing emerald, and Shemaz ran until she stood at the top of the steps, other figures gathering about the alley entrance. She stood and watched the people as they remarked upon the terrible visitation of the Vermin.
"Velhodún...lies close to the stars, my friend," Val had once said. "But the worlds above are not our worlds, and they are alien to us no matter how deep we peer into them. That is the eternal quest of the Velhodúni, to make familiar the current of fate which drives us from afar, but never to pass over and become one with it."
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