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This week, we learn the tale of the Tomb of Sacrifices and their dark masters, we get a look into the life and land of an Altar Knight, we visit the strange streets of the City of Witches, we get a glimpse of a future where all that’s left are Blazing Echoes, and we join two Hunters of Witches on their dire quest…
Tomb of Sacrifices
There was nothing more precious in the world than a life. Each soul was a blazing locus of passion and potential. The lands positively thrummed with the promise of force, revolution, and strength. But so few could achieve the heights of power that each body was afforded by the universe. So, it fell to the sorcerers to release it themselves, to save it from fading into nothing upon death. They knew that, stripped of all its absurdities, all magic was predicated upon a single, simple concept: sacrifice. Symbolism, ritual, the obscure practices of occultists and witches the world over were limitations, because, the sorcerers believed, people were afraid of power and control. Afraid to take into their own hands the decisions of entire lives. Even high nobles relegated so many of their duties and responsibilities to servile sycophants who were just following orders.
The black clouds that crossed over the moon that night were not the rain clouds promised by the cunningfolk, who burnt up little piles of bones and herbs in sad little ceremonies. When the dawn's sickly pallor leaked through the haze of the miasma, the duchy's people awoke to a nightmare. Black fogs rolled across the land, choking, burning, scratching, livestock and wildlife left lifeless in their wake, and upon every single person, a warp of the flesh upon the breast, or the stomach, the shoulder, the neck, maybe the arm. A mark that soon came to be known really was a brand.
Across the towns and dales, no church prelate or palace magistrate could be reached, let alone found. It was if overnight, the clerics and nobles had been scooped up and devoured by some silent colossus. Without their leaders, the people feebly returned to their duties as best they could, while others thought it best to search every chapel and manor for signs of their lords. But everywhere they went they found only an eerie emptiness, papers left on desks, meals uneaten, beds unmade. At last, however, the duke's manse was reached and a handful of nimble folk clambered their way over the walls.
They spoke only this upon their return: the duke was dead, the archlector was dead, and they had now new gods. They then slipped into the bottoms of alehouse mugs until death found them.
Wherever they walked, the marks felled the afflicted with spasms of pain, which the wandering new gods said only they could soothe, and for some they did. The folk begged and prayed for succor, and the gods blessed their little fields with benedictions of blood in exchange for agony. Cowed by their power, the people obliged, and for many months, nights of seizure-wracked nightmares ended in the disappearances of loved ones, for whom the people prayed, and the gods merely smiled. The sorcerers needed them to comply, to continue on, and breed for them generations of souls to come.
One day, two young boys, doing nothing more than enjoying what childhood could offer them in this land, got lost and came upon a hidden bluff that lay near the base of the hill upon which the old ducal palace sat. Upon the grey rock face, two innocuous wooden doors were ajar. They crept inside, only to be met first with a stench that stained the lungs it entered into, and then with a vision only a lethal fever could produce. The bare, blank stone walls were stuffed cruelly with human corpses, shoved in as if still in the spasms of an unquiet death. Slit and sundered in every conceivable way, blood, bile, and more had run down from the tight shelves of flesh into the spaces between the stone flags and there congealed. The boys barely escaped as something from within rushed to seize them, and they never slept a sound night again.
It was a tomb of sacrifices. A charnel crypt where the waste of vile rite was kept as a testament and seething locus of darkest power. And it wasn't the only one. Over the span of several days, secret searches uncovered dozens of tombs at the base of the palace knoll, filled to the brim with the remains of friends and family vanished in the night, as well as the nameless things which had taken them and dwelt in the dark there. Word spread fast, and the new gods heard it too. The people of the region called for exodus, but in truth the duchy was a far flung branch of an isolated kingdom in the wildest regions of a distant empire. There was nowhere to go, and they were marked, all of them. Someone would notice, sooner or later, from outside. All they could do was flee south and fortify. But the tombs yet had spaces to be filled.
A full year had passed since the night the duke and the court had vanished. Troops had marched through the embattled camps and meagre fortifications the marked exodus had created, and had been met with the masses of conjured and flesh-wrought horrors that emerged from within the tombs to claim what the sorcerers had decided was rightly theirs.
In time, there was not a scrap of land in the duchy that had not become scarred and burnt and pitted with cannon fire, scorched earth, and monstrous sorcery. Sodden trenches ran for leagues like blasted-open warrens where fatigued humans from the duchy and armies from beyond scurried and did battle with tomb horrors. In the first years, two sorcerers, still then recognizable as human, were slain, but hundreds died for it to happen. While armies from beyond continued to employ magic in their campaign against what they saw as a rebellious element, the marked ones did not. They had come to regard magic as utterly abhorrent, and their cunningfolk and alchemists were either burned or shamed into exile.
The lay of the land had become thus: siege camps had become squalid towns, flooded trenches had become new fetid rivers, old rivers had broken their banks and mixed with the blood and corpses of massive battlefields to create lifeless bogs. Great fires fed by no natural fuel still roared incessantly in other places, blotting out the sky and creating regions of searing heat. Supply lines for the seemingly endless war had become highways upon which people had settled to try and eke a living from the soldiers with passed constantly to and fro.
But the marked ones would not leave. No offer of asylum or relocation could shift them from the place they had carved out for themselves, with their hands, with their deaths, it was their domain that the sorcerers sought and would never claim, though every battle fought only made their enemies stronger. Hatred had made its home in the collective heart of the marked people. The agony of their warped brands, which twists and flares when the inhuman sorcerer-gods walk the battlefields no longer cows them, but lends them a bitter strength. Their eyes lay upon the shadowed palace on the knoll, and what lay within. Ironically, the sorcerers, in their grasp for power, had brought out in common humanity the will to survive and cultivate strength.
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