Shadows & Sorcery #6
Welcome to issue 6 of Shadows & Sorcery! This is a paid subscriber post. Below you’ll find dark cults, lonely graveyards, and two strange chasms…
Today’s stories are:
Memory Chasm
Forbidden Cemetery
Sinner’s Shadow
Primal Chamber
Sinner’s Chasm
Memory Chasm
It was almost entirely hidden in the treacherous, undulating plains. A straight descent deep into the earth. The caravan had slowed to crawl for the past three days in the frigid heath, and frost and begun to form on every surface. Several of the bodyguards would nearly have been lost were it not for the sudden outburst of invasive thoughts.
Something was going on. Everyone was too busy trying to control the constant yet irregular barrage of images. Dismas and Hurow were the least affected, though even they couldn't shake off the sensation of slithering in the head. So, with rope secured upon an outcropping of rock, they were lowered into the chasm, trying to gain footholds where they could on the slightly damp sides.
The deeper they went, the harder the flashes came, and the longer they remained. Mental fog lifted, and each man saw clearly their own memories involuntarily dredged up. Faces from crowds, the names of towns, childhood friends, favourite meals, old lovers. People they had killed. Hurow said it felt like something searching at random. Dismas replied, it felt like something bubbling and about to burst.
The chasm was exceptionally deep, the light had failed some while ago, and the rope had ran out. The sky was a hair-thin streak far above. And yet, they couldn't stop, not now, not when it seemed that a vision was just the verge of emergence. Something vast, and maddening. So, they undid their makeshift harnesses, and dropped into the sightless space below.
Neither man admitted it, but the memories that came forward now were not human memories. Images of things scarcely imaginable. The first beings to see, and the primal world they saw. Moments when instincts were set into the flesh. They had long since collapsed to the ground, turning over each new impression as it surfaced with wordless comprehension. They crawled across the damp, rough clay until they were as the memories themselves, experiencing sense-impacts that had no organ to convey them. How long they crawled they had no idea, and no concept of the world above remained. After an eternal regression, something beyond sight now came. Something, they felt in their souls, beyond life.
How they found their way out only they could guess, and they were not communicative, at least not at first. Dismas was the first to speak, and speech came slow, and formed itself into something coherent only over the span of several hours back on the road. There was nothing down there. Nothing that could be seen or felt, anyway. Just darkness and damp. But they knew. That was the trick of it, it made you think, made you remember. Go far enough and you remember everything, and you can't stop. It took a long night and a lot of coin in a tavern to tease out a hint. Before he walked off into the night, Hurow said he remembered how he learned to fear what he feared. How we all did. Don't worry, he said, you know too. Dismas lay his head on the table and began to cry.
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