Shadows & Sorcery #66
I have manifested in your inboxes once more with a dread offering of supernal sensory delights—that is, the sixty-sixth edition of Shadows & Sorcery!
How about five bite-sized tales of the darkest of dark fantasy, the final entry in an ongoing saga, and even something a little different from usual—there is a delicious smörgåsbord of microfiction right under that cut, and, if I do say so myself, it is very much worth the 7-day free trial you can grab right now…
Also, the next instalment of The Path of Poison is coming TOMORROW, so you’d be prepared! Just needs a little more time in the oven (my brain).
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This week, we join those who seek the hidden and malefic Throne of the Night, we learn what happened to the land of Summertide in the wake of the Echoes of Winter, we meet a Celestial King musing upon a very peculiar problem, we witness the uncovering of a Forbidden Saint, and we walk the path of the Shrine of Stars…
Throne of the Night
Out of all the Powers in the world, from the somber and stately rites of the Magicians and the crimson theurgy of the Clerics, to the visceral sorceries of Shamans, there is no Power more reviled than the arts by which one may draw life from the unwary. The arts by which one may call the storm, spread the sickness, beguile the mind, compel the beast, and drive forth the vermin. The arts practiced by those who creep through night's murk in search of the blackest secrets of creation. The arts of dominance and disaster—the arts of vampirism.
Tomes of old tomb-lore are traded in surreptitious gatherings on forest roads, or at crossroads by the light of sickle moons. In the towering shadows of mouldering castle walls do furtive figures steal into forgotten passages to deliver bound parcels to veiled lords. In secret chambers are grimoires unclasped and their yellowed parchment carefully turned so that followers of the hidden arts of darkness may yearn for the image scrawled upon the innermost pages of their priceless volumes: the Throne of the Night.
It is said to dwell within the uttermost depths of the highest peak in one of the bitterly cold mountain ranges which ring and cut the world. It is these mountains which, in their uprising, divided the world of old, and left small enclaves to stew within their shadows. Out of those sky-rending heights were dragged from the deep, slumbering earth things from incalculably primal epochs. And one of them was that which grants its name to those arts of the latter day darkness.
Only the faintest image of it has come down through the mists of time: a seat of stone in the midst of a lightless chasm, a chasm peopled by the skeletons of structures so ancient that the truth of their antiquity would shatter the sanity of any who learned it. Upon the throne lies a corpse, withered, shrivelled, and some say, inhuman in proportion. It is the seat from which this antediluvian lord ruled an empire of shadows from the center of all darkness.
Those whose might is firm spend their lives in search of the ageless remains of their secret emperor, so that they may finally, in accordance with the philosophy of their vampirism, go to it, and take from within its frame one of the last dregs of its infinite power. It is believed and whispered of with feverish zeal that to sup upon it brings about a dread transmogrification in those who attain it, whereby one takes not life but power, and does not compel but commands. Such is the dream of lords who have escaped the cold claws of death in their ancestral keeps, presiding over the squalid generations they and their kin are liege to.
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