Shadows & Sorcery #63
No way we’re already at the sixty-third edition of Shadows & Sorcery, the world’s premier dark fantasy flash fiction newsletter/minizine? Yes way! Because here it is!
I’ve taken to calling this a minizine, because it’s not really a newsletter is it? You’re here for the weird stuff, not news. Well, maybe news on the weird stuff, but that’s about it (for now).
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Hey, did you know the sixth chapter of The Path of Poison, my serial novel, got released yesterday? It did! I could have waited til today, but it was a bit late already and I didn’t want to deprive you all of reading about Sepp suffer. He’ll be alright, don’t worry.
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This week, we awaken from a frightful Nightmare of Winter, we journey out to the far off Altar Hills, we ponder upon the Stars of the Undead, we take a trip deep into the Chasm of Shadows, and we follow a fearsome sorcerer as he seek out a very particular Crystal Dream…
Nightmare of Winter
The moon that night had been white-gold in hue, its rich silver flooded with the shimmering excitement of sprites that rose in a great wave of light-motes to meet the cool body that passed so low it could almost be touched. It had slowly risen back into the star-studded dome of heaven as the sun's radiance came in a great wave across the green-gold forest of Er-Thenel. Warmth seeped slowly into the dew-dotted timbers, across the slumber-curled leaves and flowers of every colour, through the calm pulse of the sprites, and over all that dwelt within that ancient and venerable place, and finally into the home of Malo, who awoke with a piercing scream.
Out of his moss bed he lurched, gasping. It was a soft mat of loam, rich with moisture that nourished him in his sleep, and now instead of soaking into the deep green flesh of the elfolk, it trickled along the ground, seeking grooves in which to enter underground. Malo stopped and looked at himself in a small, falling sheet of water. He lay his palms within it and drank of the coolness which came from the deep earth. It shook him to his senses, but he was now alone with his thoughts, and with the vision which caused him to shudder as he recalled it in its fullness.
Malo's house had been expertly grown, every trunk, every stem, every individual leaf that formed his canopy hand-guided to form this beautiful dwelling. Its primary colours were a pale cream, with dim green overhead. There was a stateliness that befit the sage here. As with all places in Er-Thenel, the sprites passed through it in the great stream which lent so much of the forest its inner light and warmth, as well as its communication network. They flowed through all, and in truth, they were one, but often the motes of light would cluster together and express themselves in shapes similar to the elfolk. On countless mornings before this, Malo would awaken to the splendor of his fine home and the sprites whose lively pulses greeted him. And this morning was no different--save that the elfolk's mind was haunted.
Malo placed three fingertips to the sprite-stream and with a mixture of sound and subtle pollen-cloud, he bid a message be carried very urgently to Umbo, his closest friend. Malo said he would be on the way and that what he had to say could not wait, and wanted to let the old scholar know of Malo's coming in advance. The sage watched as hundreds of miniature spots of iridescence came together and shone as the thing they formed half-slid out from the stream to give a personal assurance of the message's swift delivery. Malo thanked the sprites and stood back, and looked at the stream. Then he turned to his house with its high, thin arches, the gentle waver of the canopy as the sun rose to full morning, and shuddered, seeing what was in his mind become superimposed over it all.
Across the broad, flat floor of a root-street did the sage now stride. He passed through the ambient pollen-cloud greetings and well-wishes of his elfolk neighbours, which he reciprocated, but he spoke to no one, and hoped his reticence would let it be known he must not be disturbed--there was no way he could talk to anyone in his state. He brushed inquiries away with polite but dismissive sounds. Great veins of gold cascaded through the air--the sprite-stream, far above were the emerald leaves of the high canopy with their aureate trimmings, and just beyond he could see where they parted as the azure sky looked down upon a vast open courtyard. Hundreds of elfolk were already gathering for the day's business of tending the groves, guiding the growths, and speaking with the deep wisdom of the mycelium underbeing. He passed by sages, much like himself, speaking to the stalks--he mercifully discerned nothing out of the ordinary in their pollen-clouds. But then again, that meant not even the mycelium knew about what he'd seen.
Malo arrived at the opening to Umbo's domain. With a brush of finger and pollen he asked the great heavy leaves to part so he might enter. Words were the domain of higher plantlife like the elfolk, but they still retained their other forms of speech to stay in touch with their wider order. Umbo was descending a series of intertwined boughs that served him as steps as he saw Malo. Sage and scholar exchanged pollen-cloud greetings as they drew nearer and clasped hands. The old scholar looked his friend in the eye, and saw there was trouble. Without a word he invited him up the bough-steps to the study.
Rows and rows of thin slate and old bark tablets were slid between the spaces of slender trunks that acted as shelves. There were rolls of preserved palms, large wide leaves naturally fallen and harvested to be used to record wisdom. A great variety of inks and pigments made from excess saps and other exudations from trunk and flower sat in wooden wells fashioned from trimmed stems, and they were arrayed upon a gnarled limb that passed horizontally through Umbo's house. The scholar was a great inscriber of manuscripts, and this was his sacred space. Malo tried to suppress his shame in having to now defile it.
As a scholar, the old fellow Umbo was deeply learned, a living well of knowledge and memory, while Malo was a sage, of course well-read and intelligent, but whose strengths lay in more abstract fields. Before he could speak, his friend began.
"So...I take it you have heard the news, then?"
Malo felt a sinking feeling.
"No, no I have not."
"Then what for is it you message me, friend? Is it not to do with what the gnomes have been saying?"
"The gnomes?" Malo was surprised. Gnomes were, in a way, somewhere between elfolk and sprites--amalgamations of the spirits of dead plants congealed in the earth, who move freely through it as elfolk and sprites move through air. They dwelt in the depths alongside the mycelium, that vast, ancient underbeing which connected all things in all the world, and they had some of its great but alien wisdom.
"Yes, they have been coming to scholars all morning with profound reports of, they say, shivers in the oldest part of the underbeing. I had one here not too long before you arrived, you've really only just missed it."
"I...I fear I may know what it is they're warning us about."
"Warning? There wasn't any warning, my friend, but you say there is danger?"
The sage looked up at his friend with an expression of anguish, boosted by the rush of his ambient pollen-cloud, suffused with nothing less than terror.
"I have had...a vision, Umbo." He found it hard to even speak that. Umbo went to fetch a pitcher of sweet-dew, but the sage declined. "No, you will need a clear head for this."
Malo relayed at extreme length his vision. A wandering and wordless lament of a stark, vast, pale landscape wherefrom there jutted leafless black boughs in unimaginable cold. Where all was darkness and death. This was not the World of Summertide, Malo said with tears. No, his friend replied with a distant terror. It was not. It never could be. He understood now what the gnomes had been begging the scholars to record immediately.
"What is it?" the sage pleaded.
Umbo got up and paced around his study, finally standing, facing his shelves of primal Er-Thenel lore, drawn up aeons ago from the depths of the mycelium mind, words which formed the very foundation of the forest and the world. In it was all that had made the elfolk what they were, what had thrust them from simple stalks to the lords of the woods. He felt now like he was looking at it in its completion, rather than anything that was ever going to grow again. He spoke then without turning.
"It is called Winter."
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