Shadows & Sorcery #40
Welcome absolutely everybody to the fortieth edition of Shadows & Sorcery!
Not only is this the 40th edition of the newsletter, contained within this very email (or webpage, however you read it) is the 200th story written for this newsletter. That’s a lot of flash fiction, folks.
As such, this edition is free for everyone to read, a full five pieces for your pleasure.
And not only that, but the first chapter of my serial fantasy novel “The Path of Poison” has released alongside this! No need to sub to a new newsletter, it’ll be published under this wonderful brand.
So, to my free readers, if you like what you see here, this aint stopping any time soon - subscribe for $2 a month to receive all future posts as well get full access to the tons of stuff sitting back here waiting to be read!
This week’s monumental edition has us follow a desperate chase out into the Sanctum Hills, into the murky study of a strange antiquarian obsessed with the Eternal Ruins, we learn about the odd burial customs of the elves and their Forest Catacombs, we fear the return of the Blighted Moon, and we get a glimpse of the Palace Shadows…
Sanctum Hills
The wind bit cold, a slate sky stretched into oppressive infinity, and far behind them came the shouts of hunters. The sceptre had remained wrapped in black cloth, just as the sorcerer ordered, despite their overwhelming desire to see it, to hold it, to use it. This was to be expected, apparently, though neither of them really understood just how much it would haunt their thoughts. But with the borderlands now gained, there was some ease on their minds.
Wild and intentionally left uninhabited, the borderlands of Livronne were a buffer between a buffer. The continent was home to three ancient, vast, bloated empires. Their edges were frayed and bloodstained from millennia of conflict in which everything between several miles to several yards were lost with each brutal conflict. Each power came to recognize its limits in time, and thus were established wild borderlands that represented their furthermost limits. The small areas between these borders were old, free lands, historically allied to one of the empires out of necessity, though they never were conquered, mostly due to the continued presence of other powers trying to take over. And between these free lands were the Sanctum Hills.
Having come about as a refuge for free land folks escaping the wars that constantly passed through their homes, once conflicts began to die down, the range of hills never quite lost the sovereignty they had been independently granted dozens of times across the ages by each empire in rare moments of goodwill. Thus had they slowly turned from safe haven, into no-man's lands, and then finally into nests for traitors and bandits. The Sanctum Hills became spoken of only with disdain, but those who made use of its neutrality knew well that to strike from law each and every proclamation of its freedom was a task no imperial bureaucrat was willing to take.
Hooves thundered through the bare earth main street of the nameless hovel, kicking up dust. Folk ran from their small fields and huddled under meagre porches while cloaks with royal insignia billowed in the fierce wind. Right behind them, the dim shouts which had followed the riders then roared into immediacy as harsh cries that told the folk to make way. A rifle's sudden crack and boom flooded the quiet country for a split second, causing birds to take to the air in great clouds and children to shriek as parents sheltered them. A choke of agony was cut short as a man leapt from horseback and ran to a figure with a royal cloak and without hesitation struck the throat with a thick saber. A moment passed as the body was inspected, and a curse spat to the ground as the other hunters circled anxiously.
"He doesn't have it, keep going!"
The sceptre, he thought, the sceptre, just stop and use the sceptre, they'd catch up soon, the horse was tired and there no time to let it drink and rest. Use the sceptre. He thought to himself between the urges if their - well, now his contact, would be able to handle the thing. Legend had it that the sceptre was like a magician's idol, but it didn't just call a spirit to it, there was something housed in it, something only a lord of the right lineage could use. Sounded like sorcery, but to the Lord Livronne, the lord above all lords, it was a manifestation of their own imperial might. Maybe it was testing him. Maybe it was trying to kill him. Or possess him. In any case, the thief didn't dare even look at it.
The horse could go no further in this state, but he could. He unsaddled the beast and left it by a stream, the saddle and reins in a ditch. The black-wrapped sceptre stayed in one hand, hilt of his sheathed shortsword in the other. Now came a run across the heather-strewn plains and into the cold Sanctum Hills. His goal was in sight. The hunters had no power in that place, and unless they cast off their royal crests and shed their honour by killing him there, he'd be safe. Nestled within the rolling summits was an outcast's haven, one of many, where hired killers and sorcerers gathered to ply their trades to the desperate.
The thief ran low and swift. The land was filled with small pits, depressions masked by tall grasses, ridges with ragged trees atop them, and all was a gradual rise to the hill which now began to block the sun. All of a sudden there was a crack like thunder, and the sound of an impact far too close to him. He couldn't see from where, but he knew the hunters fired upon him. Another two sounded, and the thief cursed and ducked under a low mound. A sodden, fern-covered channel ran for a ways between several rises in the land, he now saw, and he followed it. Only a few more times did the hunter's rifles break the heavy silence of the countryside.
Looming above him was the vastness of the Sanctum Hills. But between the rugged land and the heavy foliage of the hillside was a stretch of smooth, open grass. The hunters were quiet. The thief whipped around. They couldn't be seen, but likely they saw him, and were waiting for their mark to make a move. That hillside was bound into their honour, no matter how much they hated it, or how badly they wanted him dead. The actual delineation between the Sanctum Hills and the free state he had passed through was, at best, hazy. That mattered. Honour can only be stained through volition, not ignorance. The only thing they knew was that hillside was off limits. Before that, it was fair game.
He weighed his options back and forth in a matter of seconds. May as well try, he thought. But as he'd been thinking, and looking about, he hadn't noticed the elite hunters of the Lord Livronne surrounding him.
"Give us the sceptre, and we'll make it quick."
He froze. Faces behind rifle barrels emerged from the brush. The formality of mercy. He jumped up and staggered back a few steps. He knew the hillside was too far off.
"Don't even try it," said another as the thief's hand fell to his shortsword. He moved back a single step and a rifle went off over his head. His seconds were few. What seemed to be their leader stood up and walked forward, hand out, ready to receive the sceptre. The thief didn't even think. In one quick motion, he turned and flung the sceptre behind himself...and onto the slope of the Sanctum Hills.
One can only imagine what it was like to hold the honour of being an agent, chosen directly and implicitly trusted by the Lord Livronne, to comport oneself with that honour and cow your prey with it, only to see it ripped from your soul in a matter of seconds. The sceptre had just left the bounds of Livronne's ally state. It had been successfully removed from the whole of the empire. Rifles cracked one after the other like spat curses as the thief burst into a run and swung low to pick up the black-shrouded sceptre, carrying himself up the hill as fast as his legs could carry him.
Eternal Ruins
The letter came at midday. Ella had been expecting to hear back from Telhast weeks ago. Must mean the trip to the Capital Archives had been more of a success than expected. She walked up the steps of the venerable manor townhouse, and relayed to herself some of the past events in preparation for the excited outburst she knew was going to receive. Telhast, her friend and researcher at the Academy, had stumbled upon something of an archaeological mystery, which he'd become consumed by. Believed it would raise him to the highest echelons of university society. The old ruins were a constant inclusion in the footnotes of academic texts, but they were so small, so slight, so worn, that no scholar had ever devoted more than a couple paragraphs to their admittedly odd aspect.
She was met at the front door by Telhast himself. He usually employed two trusted servants (whom he referred to as his "hands" for he didn't believe in servants) to help maintain the old he house he'd saved from dissolution. That was the first thing she noticed. The second thing she noticed was her friend's mien. He only glanced at her when he said hello, before his eyes shifted back into the distant stare he'd had when he opened the door. Maybe the trip to the Capital hadn't been so successful.
They sat in Talhast's study. Normally it was an antiquarian's dream, with two great bookshelves stuffed with old times and bound manuscripts. Tables held old statues and carvings. There were even small tapestries where space allowed. But the sun that came in the tall thin windows made the place look, well, tired. Particles of dust floated in the hazy beams, and everything seemed worn. It didn't just seem untouched, it seemed mouldering.
They sat in two high backed chairs next to a dark fireplace. Telhast massaged his brow. She knew well enough to let her friend prepare himself. He looked like he needed it. His face was covered in scraggly, unkempt beard, his eyes had that squint about them that belied exhaustion. He sighed, his eyes wandered, and finally he began.
"I won't go into detail about my time in the archives. I starved myself half-mad in there. Every time I wanted to move on, suddenly there was another clue, and I had to keep going. The archives go deep, Ella...it's like going back in time." He began to shake his head, agitated. "But they don't go back far enough. Did you know the oldest layer of the archives, at least a mile under the earth, date back before the Semey dynasty of Kúr? I battled with department heads and magi to gain access. Academy credits and favours went pretty far, but I, well...I sneaked in anyway." He stopped and seemed to search in his own head. "It doesn't make any sense," he looked right at her. "I've held tablets carved by people who've been dead for ten thousand years, Ella. And even they mention it." He stopped again, and his eyes were asking if she understood, if she really understood.
"So," he continued, "I left the archives exactly when I said I would, my head aflame with it. I went out to them, the ruins. I had copies of every physical description, every footnote and annotation. They all match, all of them. Ella, not only has this thing been here since the dawn of recorded history, but it was old even then. It has never changed, at least not enough to matter. And I had to learn if...an idea held water. The reason I'm back so late," his eyes sprung up and a nervous spark entered them, "is because I went out and...consulted a...necromancer." He whispered that last word. Ella didn't physically react, but she was sure even he could feel what she was feeling.
"You know we've dated bodies from primal burials, we were on that investigation ourselves when they unearthed that bog man down south. Well, I went out with my, ah, aid and found some...thing, someone. I don't know the details of it, I don't want to, but the necromancer found something not even the Academy heads knew was there. There'd be no sign of it this far up. You know there really is a thrill in it, it's awful, but seeing this person, pulled from out of the mists of time beyond reckoning? Well, I think I understand why the Academy makes you take that oath, and why every old codger in the place calls necromancy a pure blasphemy. But I've lain eyes on a person - I suppose a person - from before the pre-Kúr, and it took a monumental effort to even to speak to them. Heavens, do you know how they looked?" something of the old enthusiasm was creeping back in, but Ella did not like it, "absolutely nothing like what we know of the Dynastic Kúr and the first Veug kings. But I was able to ask, whoever it was, for it was quite desiccated and rotten...what did they know about the ruins they'd been buried under. They said they didn't know. The gods must have built it aeons ago."
"I've dug through the memories of beasts that haven't walked the earth since before humans first came to this land. I've sifted through impressions in the fossilized sense-organs of things we wouldn't even recognize as living beings."
"Telhast," she said as gently as she could, taking second to register all he'd said, "are you telling me..."
"Yes," he breathed. "It has always been here. An eternal ruin. History is a lie. The Capital Archives are the brain of an idiot. The Academy are children fumbling in the dark. This...room we are in is a falsehood to me now. But I don't know where to begin to re-writing everything."
Forest Catacombs
Elves aren't really immortal, you know. Sure, they talk about ancient times, and they've certainly walked before the dwarves came out from the ground - a chatty elf might even tell you a tale about their own experience of it - but they aren't immortal. For one, you can kill an elf. You can chop 'em up or burn 'em or what have you. The bodies die, but the stuff in 'em doesn't. No, they have...not really a spirit, or a soul, like a human. More like a dwarf's "inner alchemy", the liquid you've seen them drain from their dead. But in elves it's a little different, because while dwarf-stuff can be spilled and ruined, the elf-stuff only, well, goes bad. And then it can't be fed to a tree no more. Or, rather it won't be.
Yeah, that's how they do it! What, you've never seen the gravewoods before? Nah, not surprising, they don't like others seeing them, 'specially not humans. Pft, why not, he says! Friend, the tavern we're in? It's made of wood! Now you're getting it. Mind you, wouldn't want to sit in a taven, let alone live in a house, made of gravewood. All that...elf-stuff in it, going mad, can't grow, can't be reborn, can't be tended.
They do tend them, yeah. But not like a caretaker in a cemetery, no - and no, not like a gardener - it's more like a shaman. You know, the fellas who talk to ghosts and the like. So the elf shamans, or whatever they call them - scary fellas, too - they walk around the gravewoods talking to the trees. Or rather, I s'pose, the stuff IN the trees. They soothe it, is my understanding. I mean, I can only imagine what it's like experiencing death however many hundreds of thousands of times but never actually dying, and then getting shoved into an inanimate tree. And there's more than one elf's stuff in a tree, packed in there tight. It's all memories. Experiences. Personalities. Then it emerges again as a new elf, or old elf, or whatever. Lots of old elves in one new elf. Thousands upon thousands of years walking around when you see one. No actual new elves, apparently, just different combinations. They don't reproduce, you see. No, I mean humans have children, and dwarves get to together and carve new dwarves, and all that masonry style genealogy kinda goes over my head, but still, they have children, or close to it. Elves? Same ones have been wandering around since a tree decided to get up and start walking.
So when one dies, and I mean gets destroyed, and the stuff in them becomes useless, that's a loss beyond imagining. Imagine the old temple in Highmarch, if those walls could talk about the first Voerlunders who set those stones, and one day it got smashed to dust, never to be rebuilt. Yeah, that, and maybe a million times worse.
Blighted Moon
The heavens are practically alive with celestial forces. Just look up on a bright navy night and watch the black spheres revolve serenely overhead like polished marble, the nebulae slowly swim like sorcerous storm clouds, and constellations gently shift with the motions of astral spirits. The sun washes burning gold across the skies while the moons wash the lands with cool darkness. There is only one black spot upon this realm, and the name of its legend is a byword for woe.
Madmen worshipped it, and all the lands under heaven rallied against the growing threat. A god of rot, an unthinking force of unceasing decay with no rebirth and no end, a perversion of change and motion, the mouldering titan which may never die but will degrade further and further until time itself becomes as a loathsome charnel house of infinite putrescence. For them, it was immortality and freedom from shackles, but for all those saw and felt the touch of blight, it was an eternal curse that seeped into the core of the soul.
Across the paling sky did it swim, sending its flaking flesh down as rotten snow. Sickness ravaged countless people. The Waymakers, those who delve into the arts of cosmic motion, could not reform or give any fresh outcome to the blight. It was anathema to them. Quite simply, it was stagnancy without end. In time, the ministrations of the rot cults had been crushed and their nests purified. The rot god would never descend, but its mark had been left. There was only one thing to do: redirect it. But where?
The Waymakers looked about themselves in a desperate search for answers, and with dread finally gazed upwards, speaking in horrified whispers of what they must do.
The river in which the lives of all living things flowed was suddenly diverted, and for several generations, the lands healed as the blight of the nameless rot god was cast upon a lone moon, and shot into a far, lonely void. But not even the Waymakers could have predicted the depths to which the rot reached, and one day, nearly a century after the small moon had been sent away bearing a dangerous prisoner, did something else return.
At first, it came as an odd hue to the sky over a stretch of cold countryside. Then it became sickness in the animals, and then the people. Vile mists descended, giving the land a pallid hue, and causing crops to wither and soil to become putrid. When the Waymakers came to investigate, one old magician broke down into tears at the sight, and it was after a long night's research in a forbidden section of the archives did this new generation of Waymakers learn that the moon which had taken the full brunt of the blight in the past had returned from its sojourn, the rot having decayed the moon's natural path through the void it was cast into.
Indeed, only with study did they learn just what the rot had affected. Not only were its celestial motions broken, but it appeared at increasingly random intervals, the Waymakers unable to discern a pattern. The decay was omnipresent, and affected every single aspect of the thing. The mists it exuded and the sickly beams its vomited forth carried its terrible powers. Wherever it was seen, disease manifested and the skies turned the colour of rotten flesh, and the longer it lingered, the more aberrations it caused in crop growth, animal birth, and human minds. Mutants crept through city streets as people were driven mad by nightmares. Where it lingered most was where the dead began to rise, the cycle of life itself falling to pieces under the gaze of the blighted moon.
Mercifully, the one thing it did seem to follow was that it was still merely the decay that had been passed from the rot god, not an actual source of spreading rot itself. It could do no more than what was in the moon. What was not upon the moon was upon its beams, and what was not upon its beams was upon the land, and the people, until shifted back. Many tense councils were held about how to stop its movements, where perhaps it might be stalled, and how to seal such a place away. A decision was reached that the five Grand Masters hope may never see the light of day. Until the time comes, valiant orders of Waymakers chase the moon as it manifests, and redirect as best they can its effects onto surrogate targets, away from living flesh and arable earth. And if not, slaying and casting into the heavens the lamented remains of the victims.
Palace Shadows
No corner of the palace was without its shadows. Every alcove, every vaulted ceiling, and every hidden passage hosted a secret darkness that kept the palace a true bastion for over two thousand years. There was not a single shadow in the entire structure that was cast by the enchanted torches throughout its halls or by the rich light of the sun. Every one of them was a living being, always watching, always waiting.
To become a palace shadow had variously been a punishment and a reward through the years. Traitors, killers, even certain thieves were bound by royal sorcery into a corner of the palace as payment for their grand transgressions. But so too were knights, heroes, and even monkish orders bound to the palace in eternal, willful servitude.
So fearsome was the palace's reputation that no assassin dared ply their trade in it for centuries at a time. When they did, either through arrogance or foolishness, the shadows were there, ready to emerge and destroy the killer, and it was always an event that the palace made as public as possible.
Alas, the kingdom's royal necromancy was ultimately no match for the full brunt of an invading army. The fierce horde breached the city defenses and crushed the vanguard who bravely held them back for several days. With the palace in sight, and full of barbaric vigour, the horde finally spilled into the grand structure, blood trailing on their feet. They were met with no final royal guard or champion, but instead the rushing black forms of the palace shadows. At first repelled, northern alchemists had the army bombard the palace, reducing so much of its splendour to ruin. They placed intricate sigils upon the place, and freely looted many millennia of artifacts from the dead hands of the royal family.
The capital has been uninhabited for centuries now. The city is rubble, half-reclaimed by the virulent nature of the central lands. Upon a low hill, however, there still stands stark in the dusk light the shards of palace pillars and snaking foundations. And amongst them, emerging from now ancient alchemist's sigils gone unmaintained for an age or more, are the shadows watching and waiting for any glory-seeker or old enemy to tread upon the sacred halls of their prison.