Happy Birthday, everybody! This fifty-second edition of Shadows & Sorcery marks ONE YEAR since issue zero of this newsletter. Every single week for a whole year I’ve banged out some crazy nonsense and you’ve been reading it. Over two hundred and fifty pieces of dark fantasy flash fiction right here, in your palm, on your lap, in your mind! Hasn’t really hit me yet, but I’m celebrating nonetheless!
This week’s issue is free for all to read, and on top of that, I’m having a 90% off sale for paid subs—you can read this newsletter, in full, for life, for about 50c. And that price will never change. It’s yours, if you so wish to take it (and take it I hope you will!), and of course there’s also the 7 day trial you get before you pay anything, too.
But that’s not all, because as I said last week, I’m handing out free full subs to anyone who braves my dank lair and messages me, literally just shoot me some words here on Substack or on Twitter and your account gets a free upgrade, or I’ll add your email into the full subs list.
Why not add to this already prodigious backlog of dark fantasy goodness, and try out the first three chapters of my serial, The Path of Poison? The fourth chapter is coming soon, so get acquainted with our boy Sepp and his adventure so far here, here and here!
And hey, like what you read? Please take a second to leave a like! All you gotta do is hit the little heart near the top of this email (or page if you’re on the site), it helps me out!
This week, we face down the Knights of Madness, we peer into the Divine Abyss, we brave the Warlord’s Dark, we learn how to cleanse Blighted Ruins, and we witness the power of the Ritual Knight…
Knights of Madness
Black smoke hung in the air, its haze dimming the sun throughout the day, and at night turning the stars sickly. The countryside was ash and cinder, the embers smouldered but faintly, flashing briefly in strange patterns as bleak winds roared towards the battered edifice of the stained castle. Upon a single thin bridge did several baying warriors roll a battering ram, reinforced with crude iron bands and heaped cadavers. And around this, for several miles, did hordes of howling, chanting madmen rush and fall over each other trying to clamber up the sheer walls, the first ones slipping into the moat, a cesspool of whitened, bloated corpses, and the others dashing quickly across their drowning comrades' backs.
No simple illness of the brain afflicted the warriors below. This was madness--twisted, perverted, screaming yellow madness, that each and every one of the crazed fools had willingly given themselves over to. One could almost see their hallucinations, skittering and gibbering incessantly at the edges of consciousness. Freakish altars, idols, and painted monoliths, before which wild blasphemies of blood and debasement were done daily, leered at the castle whose decayed stateliness was an affront to their warped desires.
Within the cracked stone and wooden supports, ragged-eyed soldiers in stained, patch-work armour stopped their ears with filthy linen strips to drown out the pounding battering ram. Some grasped frayed holy books and symbols, some stared into torches on the walls, some simply sharpened blades close to cracking. They could feel the wind creep across the ceiling, whispering things from outside. The words were trying to find a way in.
No shining army was rushing to their aid. The border had been lost a month ago. But this castle remained. They had never fled. They never could. It was either retreat into a wave of ten thousand maniacs, or defend what they were told was a beacon of reason and light in the dark of madness.
A commander in a gilded helmet that had lost all lustre gazed through a half-shattered lens over the battlefield. Many times in the night, had he seen the warriors having ceased for the moment, only stragglers continuing their singular assaults. Campfires like obscene stars fallen to the ground would be scattered across the blasted landscape when the night's black veil fell. Madmen danced around them, and their forms made unspeakable shapes. Now a stark day belched its uneasy light through the smoke-fog, and the commander saw something new.
From out of the dense haze there emerged several shapes, loping, hopping, leaping, shrieking, above them was a great banner with tears and shredded edges, displaying a tableaux of symbols that made the eyes hurt, and twisting in agony over the four things that marched to a mad rhythm, clad in the finest coats of plate warped and shorn as if some interior fire of seething force had blasted outwards. They each carried a unique weapon: a massive scimitar with a thick blade that looked fit to cleave bone, a set of wicked axes with teeth and wavering backspikes, a spear whose tips looked designed more for torture chambers than battlefields, and a two-handed maul which dripped even now with gore.
Knights of Madness, come to stir the ailing horde that didn't know it had already been winning.
The battle was over. The castle had just become a tomb.
The commander fled weeping while his subordinate set his jaw firm and ascended the short steps to the great horn, and blew, before collapsing to the ground, pounding his mailled fist into the stone. Deep within the castle, weary soldiers listened to wave upon wave of monstrous chants flow across the field outside as the Knights worked their power upon the shattered minds of their horde. Some knew what it meant, those who didn't mobilized and were met only with laughter as they roused their beleaguered comrades.
Shapes scarcely believable as human cascaded across the charred plains and corpses began to choke the moat, crushed and compacted into a sick red mulch. Bodies were heaved upon the ram and it finally split the sagging gates. Madmen screeched and bellowed as they prayed and followed their illusions into the courtyard. The Knights followed, laughing and roaring, slaying dozens of their own number as they chanced upon them. Weary, wounded soldiers were dragged from their beds and offered to phantoms, knives were plunged into flesh, skin was flayed with excruciating care for the canvases of the insane seers, and crouched creatures, little better than ghouls, supped from cracked skulls.
Arrows rained down, boulders were thrown, the bodies were piling up in the yards and into the warren of passages inside the castle. No barrier, flesh or stone or wood, could withstand the Knights who seemed to follow every assault, the small gaps in their helmets showing the foaming grimaces and bloodshot eyes within. In what was once a dining hall, unarmed soldiers were thrown onto tables and torn apart with bare teeth. There were bodies that might never be found inside secret hallways.
A soldier sat in a corner. Glazed eyes looked out of a slit in a visored cap. What was happening here was happening all across the realm, right now. He watched things eyes weren't meant to see and blinked the tears away without a sound. And then, a shape made itself known to him. A great knight in black and gold armour, with long twisting spikes that looked like fiery warping, a flowing cloak of deep, warm red. Two eyes looked out of a helmet's mask thrown back. The eyes were like stars, and the flesh had been taken and moulded into something new and beautiful. The knight extended its hand, and the soldier looked around once more. He saw warriors moving with such graceful freedom as he'd never seen anything move. He took the knight's firm grip, and was pulled upwards, feeling something slither into his head.
Divine Abyss
You can just feel it, you know? I bet if you took a foreigner here who didn't know about the abyss, they'd be able to feel it. Feel what? Well, the—yeah I suppose it is hard to put into words. Like there's...not something physically massive, no, but something very deep. It's the feeling you get staring from a high place, only you can feel it before you see anything. Very unassuming little church otherwise, though it is in an odd place. But I suppose there's temples in all kinds of odd places in the world. People will build a church on anything these days!
No, it's not affiliated with anyone, or anything. It really is just its own thing. None of the popular cults ever absorbed it. That's what convinces me, more than anything I experienced.
...
That it's the real deal.
Oh, I'll tell you, but don't blame me for what you do afterwards. I'm a very spiritual person, you see, grew up right in the middle of Teloven. I'd see monks and phylarchs and ritekeepers of a dozen different shades every day. You'd take up with some of them, learn a prayer or two, move on, move around, usually find your little niche. But I never did, I kept wandering. I went really far, too, climbed a mountain or two, took a three day trip into the wastes, met some extremely strange fellows I was convinced had been touched by something, maybe they were, they seemed to know an awful lot and could even do some things. But they didn't have what the abyss had.
Came upon it at dusk, deep in the forests. Everything was dripping after the storms, but I quite enjoyed those, the land wasn't treacherous so I just soaked up the elements. Wasn't that cold, 'specially not down in the forest depths that stay warm. Then, out of the light mist and leaves, like I was being shown, like I had come through something...there it was, revealed. It's a long building, not terribly wide, has some bulges at the side where I think the monks live. But the big main area is tall, long but rounded on top, ending in a half-circle dome at the end. The floor is all natural there, rocky, uneven, mossy, some plants around it are tended to and harvested. And in the middle is where the abyss the lays. A great big crack in the rock, a split. It doesn't look like the result of erosion or anything like that, no. No, it was made with force. From within, I'd bet.
I became pretty friendly with the monks rather quick, actually. From what I understand, they don't receive many visitors due to the, ah, sensation of the area, and those that do become cowed with awe. Hard not to be, so my enthusiasm must have been a strange novelty to them, and they brought me in for a talk. As best we could, we discussed the church, I explained what I was doing, and they found it most amenable. So I was taken to the abyss, and had things detailed for me I'm not sure I understand even now.
It starts as roughly carved steps. The monks sit around the outside and on the steps in their meditation. Just...listening. There is a sound, I think. Maybe it's more a feeling. Maybe it's neither. The steps, they go down a long way...or maybe they don't. See, I've been calling this thing an abyss, that's what the monks call it. Or rather, in full, they call it the Divine Abyss. It's the object of their attempts at communion. With what, who knows, maybe the abyss itself, something in it or emanating from it. Or something else. Yeah, you're noticing a pattern with it. Very hard to pin anything down. I think that's why it's legitimate.
The dark is different down there. Call it the blackness, call it the darkness, the language has no term for it. The darkness has a different texture, and this is so real that you feel you can...touch it. And it's not really...dark. Not like a night time black, no. It's very rich—in light. It's like I have the sun coming from behind me to "light the darkness". There is nothing there...well, I guess there is nothing there for the eye to percieve—it's an abyss—but there must be SOMETHING for the light to illuminate. I describe it as a velvet: it's infinitely flexible, it's infinitely mobile...and it doesn't resist you in any way—well it does a little. It resists you enough to make it feel like you could reach out and...and touch it. The dark. It's like a very thin water. Except it doesn't have a temperature, and it's not wet. That's all. But it's like...it's like, as you move through it, there's...something. Something, the hands, you know, something you can feel.
I was so utterly focused on that feeling, that passage, that I didn’t notice I...well, I wasn't walking down steps. I had been studying my hands through this web of diffuse light that shone upon nothing. But now I wasn’t walking on anything. It was for just a moment—a flash of a second, but I was somewhere else, drifting atop a vast mote of light in what I can only call a cosmos where I saw countless other motes. And then I was falling back upon the steps. The monks helped me up, and were smiling.
I get why they called it divine. But I don't know what it is. I don't think they know either, they're just a bunch of humans who built a church over it. But of the the thousands upon thousands of things in the world you could say that about...there's, yeah, there's something down there. Wonderful, terrible, alien. All of it and more.
Warlord's Dark
If it weren't for the comforts and pleasures of settled life, the Macha people of the northbank would likely have remained happily stalking their woods for all time. But even though you may give a hunter a warm hearth and all the drink in the world, you can't take the wilderness out of that blood. The woods are their home, and they have remained in its embrace, striking out from their longhalls and fire-lit huts into the misty vastness for days at a time to gather from the forest's abundance. They haven't had to settle too deep. As such, the hunter is the premier profession of the Macha, looked upon with as much respect as their warriors and chiefs and dryador sorcerer-priests.
A heavy knuckle rapped upon the door three time before it was opened by a rather thin, older man with shaved head and long, dropping moustache. He wore the loose belted tunic and kilt of his people, as did the two who stood before him now, and behind them was the grey robe and grey mane of the village dyrador wise-man. The man's nephew and his nephew's mate looked like they just run three leagues in three minutes, covered in dirt and small scratches. He bid them enter. The young woman refused, placed her cheek on the young man's, looked to the dryador who nodded, and immediately departed in another direction.
"What's all this about, Buchal?" asked the older man with gruff concern as he sat with the lad and the wise man in his hut. "Why'd ye not go to your father? There trouble?" The lad was silent for a moment as he took a long breath.
"Yeah," the lad sighed. The older man's brow furrowed.
"Where'd yer woman go?"
"I told her to fetch mallets," spoke the dryador through a length of long scraggly beard.
"What for? What've they done?" He turned to his nephew, "Were you two not out hunting?"
"We were, but...look, uncle, I had to come to you. You're a hunter. You'd know what to do."
"About what?" His nephew looked away, as if he didn't like to speak the words.
"Uncle, I think there's something out in the woods."
The dryador bent into the ear of the old hunter, and whispered the tale the girl Konna had told him.
Buchal and Konna retraced their steps as Olam followed. At each of their sides was a mallet borrowed from Buchal's father, who worked stone in the village. Crush it, the dryador had said. The wise men, who live almost apart from society, always kept a close eye on the hidden things around them. It was said they often consulted hunters about it. Out of the three of them, Konna seemed to be feeling it the worst. She had grey eyes, which marked her as connected to Locod, the great god of the water and the past. Many dryador wise men were grey-eyed, and the finest storytellers and loremasters venerated the water god. But all Macha have that wildness in them regardless of marking. Both Buchal and his uncle were brown-eyed, marked by Cannoc, god of the earth and the present. Almost all hunters had those eyes.
As they neared what the two had found, there was a change in the air. They could all feel it, but only shared glances to say so. The forest was disturbed. Cannoc did not walk here, and Gaoth the sky god was not looking down. The trees and the earth were holding still, and the Macha that moved there now fought against every instinct in their bodies to hold with it. The sun seemed dimmed, as if a deep cloud had passed over it, and shadows gathered upon the ground. A place not even the Dark White Ones, the hidden folk of the wilds, would tread upon.
Down a low depression in the forest floor did it dwell. The land seemed almost the sag with its weight. It looked just as Konna had described it to the dryador before they sought out the hunter. A shapeless lump with a cracked stone face peering from the deep green growth. Buchal called his uncle up front. Konna held her mate's arm and they shared an uneasy look. She remembered when they'd come upon it, creeping towards the stone front, and the horror the girl had felt when she swore she heard something huge shift within, and an eye peer out from the great central crack.
Olam slid slowly down the incline. The vegetation had been removed by the two earlier. He himself had passed through this spot a few times and noted its oddness, but trusted his gut and let it be. Likely Buchal was trying to impress his woman with some simple machismo. Couldn't blame him, but he could have chosen a better spot for it.
The carvings were exceedingly strange. It was a grave, a particularly old one, too, many like it are found upon hillsides and hilltops throughout the entire clanhold, bearing intricate glyphs utilizing all three Macha alphabets to tell family stories. But this one was different. The grave was low in the ground, and it told no story, no glory, no note with which a family or even an individual might hold themselves apart from the rest. The central Stave had a single point from which seven lines radiated, three on top, four on the bottom. At the end of each was a triangle or square, each with a rune inside of it. Between the lines were runes with omach line-script as annotations. He recognized the symbols and the sounds, but for the life of him they didn't look any words or names he knew.
Buchal and Konna had tentatively joined him. Olam unhooked his mallet, and they followed suit. The great crack running down the middle of the stone face was worn smooth with age. Olam bent down and laid a free hand on the bare earth, in a quick, silent prayer. He then took the mallet in both hands and with a shout crashed it into the crack. Buchal and Konna did the same. All of a sudden, a split flew across the face of it and they took a step back. Olam pushed it in with his foot. With a muffled thud it hit the earth inside the tomb.
A stench that they had barely noticed before rushed out to meet them in full. It didn't stink of the death common in the wilderness, nor of anything fresh—it was the mustiness of deep age. It caught in the throat and had to be coughed out. Konna suddenly grabbed the other two to the side.
"Do you not see it?" she said with disquiet lacing each word. She jumped back as a great black snake slunk out. Buchal kicked at it. The serpent didn't even take notice. Such a thing is why one brings grey eyes with them, thought Olam. He wondered, though, if that snake alone could have been the source of the shifting she'd heard earlier. They looked into the dark. It seemed more like a solid wall before them than shadows. They hadn't brought any torches, so the somewhat meagre light outside would have to do.
It was low, and they had to crouch and kneel within. At the far end of the tomb, something else was crouching. A corpse that glistened darkly despite the age it should have. It sat like a beast on its haunches, and piled before it were rusted, corroded weapons of cruel aspect. But the leering cadaver and its torture instruments weren't the worst part—standing out starkly in the dark were a series of small alcoves in the earthen wall behind it. In each one, they saw, were intricately carved statuettes, or rather, idols. Of what they didn't know. They weren't the Nuad of the Macha, and neither they weren't southern foreigner gods. Gaping maws, faces of leering eyes, everything carved to resemble pulled and bloated flesh in horrible realism.
It was a warrior's grave, but perverted, inverted, the Macha celebrate clean slaughter and noble battle, but what was honoured here was murder and bloodshed. Olam broke each blade and shaft under his knee there in the tomb. Konna repeated what the wise man had told her, and Olam said he'd do it while the others worked in the idols. The old hunter knocked the mummy over and crushed its neck with his hammer until the head came off. He shoved a piece of the tomb face between its bared teeth, and placed the head between the knees. He couldn't help but the notice the deformed nature of the corpse while he worked. Long limbs, curling sharp fingers, and patches of what looked like snake skin.
They took one idol with them, for the dryador. The rest were dust now. Buchal removed his tunic and wrapped the thing up, not wishing to look at or touch it. The stone was rough and warmish in his hand, and he hated the idea that it might give like flesh under his grip. They returned with nothing more than some curious looks from their neighbours. It felt good to be back in the ringfort village, and even better in the dryador's house. Konna was the one who spoke to him, although Olam, as a hunter, could clarify a few things. The wise man examined the idol for a few moments before speaking.
"Aye. Some old warlord's tomb. Back from when Macha longships cut the waves and raided the south. We are proud of our might, but it let bad men do terrible things, and shadows in the forests, not our Nuad, called to them when they did those things. Buried in the ground, you say? Naturally. It was best you ruined him. I will defile this icon, you may go."
Buchal and Konna spent the day in the longhouse after that, and then with Buchal's father. She only admitted that night, as they shared a mughorn of drink and stared into a fire, they talked.
"I swear I saw it move."
"What move? You mean-"
"That...corpse. Yeah."
"Won't be moving again after what uncle did to it."
"Who do you think it was, anyway?"
"Pfff...who knows. Some old killer, like the dryador said."
"You know what they say happens with killers in the grave..."
"Aye but we know how to deal with them don't we?"
They were quiet for a moment. The fire snapped, and Konna spoke again.
"What do you think happened to that big black serpent?"
"Cannoc will trod on it and kick it into Locod's lake!" he laughed as he put his arm around her. She smiled at that, and said a little prayer into the last swig of mead as she downed it.
Blighted Ruins
When winds from beyond the sky brought down black breath in a dozen different forms, seven gods slew themselves so that their lifeblood might fall upon the sickened world in holy rains and fogs. Eventually, the blood all gathered in red mires that dwell in far places, having sunk there naturally over the centuries, and what little else remains slowly congeals within reliquaries in temples. But not everything was touched by the great sacrifice, and every so often someone uncovers another place that still seethes with something from the Time of Poisons.
Several shapes in black robes move towards something sitting in an open field. They wear tall, cylindrical hoods with placid masks upon them. Some bear golden, intricate thuribles on dozens of thin chains in gloves hands. Rising stark and lonely from the wild grass of the plain are what appear to be several stone arches. Tall and thin, they stand free with no walls between them, those having crumbled to dust long ago. What remains doesn't look like it'll last much longer.
As the figures approach the ruins, they begin to inspect the stone. It looks wrong. It flakes to the lightest touch, appears porous as if burrowed through, and the stately grey is stained with brown and beige. Blight. One of the worst of the outer poisons. Many of the dark winds that blew were violent in nature, things which spread madness, or caused wild growths, or living rot. But the blight was a creeping death, slow and silent, and it got into everything: the food, the people, the ground, the stone. It made whatever it touched weak. There are scenes recorded in town chronicles and from wandering poets of piles of ash still trying to pull themselves through ditches, or young folk suddenly stopping in the street to cough up clouds of dust.
The figures look to each other. Under the all-covering masks, looks of concern are flashed. One of their number produces from a case a candle, flint, and steel. The candle is set on the bare stone ground of the blighted ruins, a flame is struck and the candle lit. From the case is removed a long golden wand, the tip of which catches the candle flame, and then each thurible is lit. Within them resides a small measure of congealed godsblood, gathered during the great sacrifice, not out of foresight, but out of zeal. The thuribles begin to smoke heavily with a thick red mist. Those without a censer remove small pocket books and began to wander the exterior of the ruins, bowing as they recited prayers in memory of the dead gods.
Swung in time with the prayers, the thuribles stain the blight and envelope the ruins with their vital crimson mist. Red runs down the stone in fresh drops, gathering in pools at the bottom, seeping into the stone. This place was once likely used to store blighted corpses, and such remains may even now exist as inert dust between the cracks. Let them be soaked with blood.
The figures eventually depart, their black robes slightly damp with holy blood. Thuribles stored away, their measure of congealed divinity spent, the purifiers walk backwards slowly from the ruins, looking upon a scene from dark history that one day shall mercifully be forgotten.
Ritual Knight
The din of battle could be heard for miles around. The Marches were afire with war on the Vemark border. The Moravites were making their grand assault into a new land, and the place they first wanted to set their boots on was across the ancient banks of the Semac river, the ancestral home of their ancient rivals.
But not a single soldier would ever set foot on that land.
The pikemen had been pushing back all efforts of the Vemark to advance in their clashes with Moravite infantry. It was a brutal and effective tactic of constant distraction and wounding. Eventually the Vemark began to fall back, and found themselves knee deep in the slippery riverbed, speared and hacked to bits by the enemy. Mounted cavalry had no hope of crossing quickly, but the commanders weren't yet ready to let Moravite feet find purchase. Through the smoke of the battle that passed the river, the advancing Moravites saw something which made them stop dead in their tracks.
In a wide open space, an armoured figure stood, arms out, amidst a circle of white-robed people. Thick, lazy smoke wafted in great pillars from braziers between them. The armoured figure was a knight in the regalia of Vemark elites, but with curious additions. From the waist there flowed a great crimson wrap, upon the legs were tall boots inlaid with blazing blue gemstones down the shins, and upon the arms were wide-cuffed gloves, themselves inlaid with curious stones and strips of shining metal. The face, however, was covered by a helmet with a fearsome visage, a snarling monstrous triple-eyed humanoid with fangs and tusks peeking through a great growth of steel beard. It picked up now from the ground a long-handled mace whose flanges seemed too decorative for battle, and a long kite shield upon whose face was an intricate sorcerous sigil. Upon the whole body of the warrior which now strode forth were crackling arcane designs, struck into each plate and forming a divine, theurgic microcosm.
The Ritual Knight thrust its sceptre-mace into the air, and the clear blue sky rumbled with a thunder that could be felt in the chest.
The Moravites immediately fell back on the defense. The knight waded into the river, its lower robe trailing upon the water. A Moravite soldier attempted to duck forward and behind the knight, but he was met with a smack of the sigil-shield and before he could recover, the head of the knight's mace was rushing towards him with searing light, sending the Moravite into the opposite bank. The others didn't hesitate, and two pikemen immediately thrust at the neck, while the four closest warriors went to rush their opponent.
The knight lifted its left foot…and brought it down, the gemstones flaring to wild life, the water exploding upwards, and each Moravite suddenly dropping dead into the river, a look of extreme agony upon their faces. The forces which had amassed on the invading bank took a step back as the knight emerged from the river. Mounted soldiers on the Vemark bank looked on in awe. What they didn't see was the Moravite archer pick up a longbow from the earth slowly, draw an arrow with rippling muscles, and loose it at the knight.
The red third eye of the mask flared to life and the azure theurgic plan upon the plate shimmered brilliantly as the speeding shaft burst into splinters upon impact. The knight drew its sigil-shield up beside it and held the mace out to the other side--a gem upon the glove flashed, and a streak of fire came to life upon the weapon and shot with blistering speed into the bowman, who was engulfed in white hot flame. Turning instantly, the knight swung the mace several times at the gathered Moravites, loosing streaks of fire with each motion.
When the cavalry burst across the shallow sections of the river, the ritual knight dropped to one knee and laid the sigil-shield upon the ground, face up. Over the complex cosmic design, the mace was waved several times over as certain words of power were uttered, ringing in the ears of every invader, and finally the sceptre-mace was struck upon the shield face, and an iridescent wind suddenly descended upon the battlefield, casting the Moravites upon their backs to be slaughtered helplessly by the crusading cavalry.
The spectacle of that day is remembered in Moravite histories as proof of Vemark heathenry and witchcraft, and the reason why they've never attempted to claim the lands for themselves. The secrets of the ritual knights spells and enchantments have been dearly sought but never uncovered, and this perhaps is just as well, for the nightmare of a battlefield of god warriors haunts the minds of scholars even now.
Congrats on your 1st year! Here's to many more.