Shadows & Sorcery #70
Take a seat, my friends, or if you’re already sitting, stay seated—whatever that seat may be—because we’re here for the seventieth edition of Shadows & Sorcery!
So, I have a pretty big announcement to make.
Shadows & Sorcery, from this edition onwards, is going to be free to read.
What does this mean for everyone? It’s not that massive for those already here. For free readers, well, you’re gonna be getting a lot more material every week. 3-5 tales for the rest of your lives, whether you like it or not. But, you might ask, why would I pay for this thing anymore? Because, from this moment onwards, this publication will be free, not the older editions. The fiction you’ve paid for until now is still yours by right, every paid edition from 1 to 69 will still be for paying customers (or those lucky sons of guns on comps). There’s also some pretty big things in the works for this publication, one of which is almost certainly going to be a premium feature.
But for me, it means being able to now sucker in interest way more people. I’ve always tried to be pretty generous with my writing here, I really do want to share this stuff, but the fact is when people see a number to be paid, no matter how small, it creates hesitation. I should know, it happens to me a lot! This way, more people win, and I can still create incentive for paid options.
Also we got a snazzy new but familiar logo, whaddaya think?
But onwards! This week I’ve got another three VERY hefty short stories for you all, including an interesting two-parter, also the next chapter of The Path of Poison is coming either in the middle of this week, or alongside next week’s edition, it’ll be a surprise! Especially to me!
Lastly, my friends, if you enjoyed what you read here, give that little heart icon a quick tap and tell the stories you liked them!
This week, we join the Red Wizard Carloman in the lake city of Mul Manatar as he battles a Shadow of the Deep, we join a group of soldiers in a war-torn town seeking a Crucible of Heaven, and we follow a lone survivor in the ruins of that very town whose salvation may lie in an Abandoned Blade…
Shadow of the Deep
Carloman had made something of a stir when he arrived in the Southshore, the bottom span of the metropolis of Mul Manatar, city on the lake. Wizards are an incongruous element in any setting, and Carloman made no attempts to mask himself. He enjoyed his forays into the city-states of the east; as much as he loved his native Voerlund, there was a vibrancy to the lands out here he found refreshing. He'd come at the right time--he suspected as such, and assumed that the gods, as they often seemed to do, had given him a little nudge in the right direction, for not an hour after he'd set feet upon the stone of the Southshore had someone approached him quite nervously as he rested on a bench.
"I beg your pardon, sir..."
"Oh, yes?" he had to squint as they stood in the sunlight.
"You are..." the words were hesitant, spoken in faltering Merchant's Tongue, "a wizard?"
"I am, yes." Sudden anxiety crept into his chest. "There isn't a problem, is there?"
"No, no--well yes, but not with you, sir, no." The figure, a woman with deeply nerve-wracked eyes, came close to him then, as if to not draw suspicion, and then spoke in a more measured, and rather rehearsed fashion. "My name is Quras, I am an official with the city palace. The Prince of Mul Manatar would like to avail of your services."
The audience was small, brief, and tense. The Prince, a lady named Yema, for it was a traditional title, who had golden Voerlunder eyes but the clay-red skin and hair of a steppes native, had said something was loose in the city. People in the Southshore outskirts were complaining of an illness which had swept in quite quickly, and was taking root in the more solitary districts, creeping further and further inwards by the day. Carloman asked, with respect, what they thought he might do that their doubtlessly able apothecaries could not. The Prince went still then, and looked to her aide, an older fellow who bit his lip and nodded in a silent, unspoken agreement.
"Something has been seen prowling the streets in the night. It is not human. And it is not anything like we've seen hereabouts, like wildmen or mandrakes. Tosa, what is it the Southshore governor said?" The aide cleared his throat and spoke up.
"The governor came to us, day before last, he who himself has two very sick children from it, he was sitting up with them in the night. It cries, he said. He listened to it as it moved around the Southshore, crying out like an animal. Hungry-like, and it made him feel terribly...alone, was what he said."
Carloman considered for a moment, letting it all sink in. None of that sounded good. Already ideas were welling up in his head.
"Of course I will help. But I would like to arrange for some lodgings close by, if that's not too much to ask?"
"They will be arranged," answered the prince, nodding to one of the officials in the audience chamber. "But tell me your thoughts on this."
"I must ask, my prince," Carloman regularly deferred to the authority of wherever he ended up for the sake of politeness, "have there been any...bad deaths in the city? Criminals, murders, that sort of thing?" He didn't want to reveal anything immediately, but vampires were the first thing on his mind, even if Mul Manatar did cremate their dead.
"Mul Manatar has been incredibly prosperous as of late, Carloman. We have been doing well for ourselves here. Certainly nothing out of the ordinary day to day problems have been reported to us here at the palace."
The wizard went quiet in thought for a moment, and replied, half to himself.
"Well, unless something has wandered out of the wilds, some foul elemental, or some old solitary grave has went bad...but this isn't really in the nature of such things-"
A guard captain piped up in that moment.
"Something in the wilds...There is an odd, I don't know what you would call it, that chasm that opened up a couple weeks back."
"A chasm," echoed the wizard, unsure.
"Aye, some portion of the earth collapsed, or split--by fire, I'd almost say it looked like it had burst open."
Carloman's amber eyes snapped to the man.
"Take me to this immediately."
The wizard crossed his arms as he gazed into the split in the earth. The day was dull and blustery--the wind whipped around and bit with an uncharacteristic cold. In the distance, the glimmer of Lake Manatar seemed somehow lessened, somehow sullen. The chasm which had suddenly opened not twenty minutes walk from the city walls was like a big black smear on the ground, and darkness pooled within it like deep water. It was about ten feet in length, and three or so feet in width. It lay on a slight incline, facing the city. Just enough to be noticed, he thought. As if it wanted to be seen.
The day would be long, he guessed. This may prove both advantageous, for the people of the Southshore at least, but ultimately he wished for nightfall so that he might truly set to work. It had the unquestionable aspect of the Outer Dark about it. Whatever had come from this would only emerge at night from wherever it was hiding in the city--and that it was hiding in the city he was sure. Carloman shivered. He couldn't stop thinking of this wound in the planet, of what crawled out from it, with the city in its sights. He couldn't stop the image from coming into his head of a thing in some a cellar, crouching in a corner, watching. And what it might do if someone came too near.
The wizard had asked for a torch to be brought along. It was lit, and one of the two guards who accompanied him handed it over, eyes never leaving the split. Carloman took some uneasy steps forward, bent down, and thrust the healthy flame into the dark--it was immediately extinguished, as if plunged into water. "Serpent's Breath!" he hissed. Some part of him had expected as such, but he'd been hoping against it.
"I want four great bonfires erected and lit around this thing by the end of the day--before nightfall. If Prince Yema has an issue with it, she can speak to me."
"We doubt there'll be a problem, sir," said one of the guards, still looking at the chasm.
"What are they for?" asked the other.
"To stop whatever is in your city from going back in...and stopping anything else from coming out," the wizard mumbled as he strode back in the direction of Mul Manatar.
Carloman paced the streets of the Southshore and a little beyond for few hours after that. He saw it in the people, how they rushed about the darker it got, how they gave him odd glances, some studying him with, Carloman wondered, looks of anxious hope. Within one of these houses, or at the back of one of these alleyways, or perhaps just under a particular overhang, something mocked the world with its own presence. He swore he could almost feel it. All things have a potency to them, it's what gives certain places their atmosphere, certain people their force of personality, as it were. This thing was potent in the extreme, and its effect hung like a pall across the streets, across the people. But Carloman too was potent, and he knew that it knew. His footsteps here were a challenge it must meet. The wizard sat on a bench and gazed into the distant sun, and asked it to set so that he and its kindred stars might do what was necessary.
Cities like Mul Manatar never really go quiet, not even at night. There's always some bustle somewhere, footsteps, voices, savoury or otherwise. But this place was absolutely dead. Maybe there were some lights in some windows here and there, but it was more silent than a grave here. Carloman looked up to the great sweep of stars far overhead, the ordinators of the universe, according to Manatarian belief. And because modern Manatarians are half-descended from Voerlunder exiles, they were also believed to be the World Serpent's scales, just as the sun was its eye, thunder its fangs, and fire its breath. So, that was one and a million mighty spirits on his side tonight. But the things on the side of what stalked these streets were themselves unfathomable in their might and malevolence, older than the world, and answered only to the limitless and tyrannical source of creation itself.
Carloman had found it difficult to persuade any guards to stand out with him that night, and he didn't blame them. They didn't know why they held such dread of this thing, but their souls knew. And Carloman knew. Better they be ignorant of the blackness which even now peers down upon them. Instead, many street lanterns had been lit and given healthy doses of fuel for the night. He'd been inspecting each one as he passed them, and as he turned a corner, he noticed one--which he knew had been lit not ten minutes before--sitting dark, just a short ways down the road from him. And across from it, an open window which too had been previously shut tight. Something poured from it into a shapeless pile on the stone ground, but rose suddenly into a form, and gave the harrowing cry that made one feel as if there wasn't another soul in the world for mirth or warmth. Just the Dark.
Two points, not shining, not burning, but darker than what surrounded them focused on the wizard.
"You know what I am," he said, "now, I wonder, what are you?" The wizard had battled with innumerable agents of the Outer Dark in the past. Living shadows, the corpses of killers and warlords made into vampires and dragons, and the gnostic madmen who aided them. What stood before him now then, and how best to blast it from existence? "Come on!" he shouted with a clack of his staff on the stone, producing a single flash of brilliance from the amber gem which sat on its top. In that flash, Carloman saw for the first time what manner of thing it was. A serpent, which heaved itself up on two sinuous arms, but its head was shaggy, like a beast's, with a short, wide snout. In the parlance of wizards who knew the secrets of the Dark, what reared up to Carloman now would be called a Demon.
The world was filled with natural hollows, which had existed simply as spaces for life to manifest itself. But in the distant past, a terrible thing had happened, and Dark was dreamt into the world, and those depths became flooded with lightlessness, and it was there that the outside could look and seep in. This thing had never been alive. It had never known the freedom and expression of material existence. The demon which lurched with something awfully like confidence towards the wizard had wormed its way in from beyond, and had burst from its dark womb into the lands of men, intent on carrying out the will of the cosmic deep of which it was a shadow.
He could see the snarl on its face in the faint lamplight. Illumination of any kind was anathema to forces of the Outer Dark, but a specimen such as this was beyond the touch of paltry torches and braziers. It wouldn't dare come out under the sun, so, Carloman thought as he rose to match its advance, he would bring the sun here. He felt with his free hand quickly around the twenty or so amulets he wore at all times, and ran his thumb over a decently size medallion that depicted, in reddish metal, the disc of sun, studded with the stars, grooved with lighting, and stamped with a tongue of flame.
"Gods of Mul Manatar, World Serpent's coils, COME NOW!" he bellowed as he beat the end of his staff into the pavement. The lamps all around them, including the one that had been put out, flared to life. The demon flinched. The touch of the Firstborn Flame was on it.
"What have you in this Land of the Sun?" He goaded the thing which flexed its long fingers in clear disgust and rage. It spoke a word in answer then. A single word. And for all the wizard had cast countless invaders from this world, never in his life had one them, in all the wretched sounds and black speech they uttered, spoke to him in the plain and simple language of humanity with its voice of ripping fabric the tyranny of its will:
“DARK”
Though the night was calm and the sky uncluttered, something seemed to pass over the city. The stars were dimmed, and the lamps all around them went low. The wizard felt a rush of unspeakable frigid cold bite at his flesh in a frightful instant, almost like a strike to the chest, and he staggered back.
"Gods of Mul Manatar, World Serpent's coils, come now, and be with us." The wizard intoned gravely and with a shaking voice, fighting not to falter. The night itself seemed to close around them, the city was obscured to Carloman, that was dangerous not just for him, but for the city itself. The demon knew he was a threat, and wasn't pulling its punches. Well then, neither would he.
Carloman crossed the fingers of his free hand and held them straight up. He met the points of deep dark in the demon's skull. It was rearing an arm back to strike at him, but the wizard was quicker. Lifting the end of his staff from the ground, he shouted, with the fullness of a long life of incalculable sorcerous potency behind him, "Brother Thunder! Fangs of the Serpent! Here in the your lands, over your people, by your names and signs, strike with the wrath of sunlight!" As Carloman brought down his staff, there was, in the blink of an eye, a brilliant golden streak in the murky sky, and just as his staff hit the pavement, a fork of aureate light crashed and blasted into the form of the rising demon, mere feet away from the wizard, the roar of thunder rolling through the very stone of Mul Manatar.
"I am glad the fire priests were willing to come out so early," said Carloman. He sat across from Prince Yema herself, along with the rest of the palace officials, at a late breakfast feast. She laughed. Gods above he was glad the woman was able to laugh. She'd never know what had nearly happened to her city. What had crawled through its streets.
"They had not much choice, I fear, wizard! But what of the sickness?"
"You'll see it dissipate very soon, I suspect. If at all possible, I would issue a declaration or some such, that sunlight will aid in their convalescence greatly."
"We shall see to that, sir," said one of the officials with a smile, and a glance to Yema.
"The people witnessed a miracle, my prince, it's not east to call the sun from its far places, but it came to the aid of Mul Manatar." She seemed pleased with that. "The Firstborn Flame has consumed the rest, let it be forgotten forever."
They were quiet for a moment as the other officials assented.
"You know, I could use someone with your expertise in my court, Carloman." The wizard smiled and looked down, and spoke with some tone of regret in his voice.
"As could many others, I fear. It was the Sun and Stars which shone the way here, my prince. Days from now it may be the winds of Gaoth in Macha, the mountain Baletor in the north, or the coils of my own World Serpent in the west which summons me. I must never forgo their call."
Crucible of Heaven
"Please, a stone, give me--" The dying man heaved as he tried to speak, the blood audibly collecting in his lungs. The shadow of a catapult's missile momentarily passed overhead and the four other soldiers in the crater ducked. Shouts and hollers of combat, orders, and deaths echoed all around. The sky was a curious pale orange in the long dusk, heavy clouds, and smoke. The others looked to each other then. He didn't have long left. Maybe minutes. Maybe seconds.
"A stone, please!" the dying man hissed through what collected in his throat. Tears were gathering in his eyes, but not out of pain. Each fellow in that crater knew exactly what relinquishing their stone put them in danger of--what this man right now was in danger of. One of them cursed and undid the strap about his own neck. Blood pooled in the dying man's mouth and he turned to spit it out weakly. His comrade leaned in and tied the small, round stone, no bigger than a thumbnail and cyan in colour, around the dying man's neck. Tears fell freely as the man looked to his comrade, gazing as if upon the very Saviour.
He lasted longer than the rest expected, and there was an uncomfortable atmosphere in the crater as the man wheezed his final breaths. One of them peeked, wincing, over the edge of the hole. The scene had been added to since they'd taken shelter. Great catapults towered on the horizon, flinging devastating debris all about, entirely indiscriminate. The walls of house and town were shattered and skeletal. Corpses lay like a pavement and in mounds, wet with blood and filth. Gore ran into the grooves of the exposed cobbling and bare dirt. Scenes like this were playing out across the realm right now, and likely beyond. Maybe the world really was corrupted, utterly corrupted to its absolute core, as the wise ones spoke of in their dirge sermons. If so, humanity had long since given up fighting it, and took to fighting each other instead, especially since salvation was guaranteed with a crucible.
In the moments before they knew he was dead, they discussed moving him, or ending him quickly and mercifully then and there. One of them had a long, thin dagger for such work. But when they went to check on him, his eyes passed through each of on theirs in that curious slack way only a corpse can. He who had given his stone waited a second, and gently removed it from the dead man's neck. He looked at it. They didn't even know the man's name, or why he had been alone, but they were alive only because he warned them of the ambushers. He'd taken a sword to the chest for it, the price for killing a foreign knight and retinue. And now all that he was, all that would survive of him, that most fragile and pure piece, lay in the hand of a man likely doomed to an eternal darkness because he had no soul stone of his own.
He looked at the other three. Their glances all shared the same sentiment. To the temple and its crucible they would go, battle lines be damned. They grabbed their gundangs and raced from the crater. The weapons were as crude as they were effective--wooden clubs with iron heads to crush and a single top spike to stab. The invading knight had met a sticky end at those iron bludgeons, and no amount of polished plate could have saved him. The temple, they knew, would be untouched. Everyone on the field had need of it, after all. They ducked from wall to wall, dodging groups of straggling fighters who were now prowling the city in a grim free-for-all. Arrows and bolts whistled past them, but they continued to run. They passed dozens of corpses with stones around their necks, but they owed these ones nothing.
The temple was just ahead, but the roads were blocked. Barriers of wood and iron spikes were hung with the bodies of those either trying to escape, or which had been flung there in battle. But the buildings adjacent had been blown open or had their doors battered in--dangerous, but would do. They entered through the smashed open windows of what was once a storefront. Their feet crunched on glass, and each sound seemed amplified in the cramped interior. The sounds outside were muffled as they moved slowly through the ill-lit hallways. Some of the walls had been taken down to facilitate the movements of soldiers who had fought through here. There were a couple bodies slumped on the wooden floors. But suddenly there was something else, something they'd thought was another muffled barrage of catapults from outside. They passed by a doorway, and looked in. Someone was kneeling on the floor of an empty room being used to store the dead. The colour on their shoulders--for they seemed almost completely wrapped in rags and thus impossible to identify--denoted them as soldiers from the comrades' own forces. Their broken, rasping voice was laughing, repeating over and over "Now I've got you! Now I've got you! Body and soul, body and soul!" and the butt of an axe was slammed into pile of soul stones on the ground.
Something flooded into their chests at that moment. There was nothing more abhorrent to anyone in this world--nothing at all whatsoever more abhorrent than the deliberate destruction of a soul stone, the vehicle of salvation. Such things are precious, and their destruction is a loathsome blasphemy rewarded with death at the stake or the noose in most places, or a short life in an oubliette in others. Purification is all the great mass of humanity has to soothe its terrors. There are only so many stones in the world, it is feared. As it is, they often have to be passed around in town and villages. And here was someone crushing them to bits by the dozens. The pale cyan dust was scattered across the floor. They locked eyes with the lunatic. The figure leapt up and screamed, "Now I've got you! Now I've got you!", axe held high to strike. But they were met with the iron spikes of the soldiers' gundangs. They noticed idly that the bodies in the room had been pretty badly hacked, and were clad in the colours of the opposing army. The soldiers had no love of the enemy, but something had to balance out the savagery of mankind.
The soldiers slunk warily through a back door and surveyed their surroundings. The temple sat in a great big open court. Smashed and cast down barricades littered the pavement about the low building. It wasn't especially handsome, but you couldn't mistake it for aught else. Their shape made for an effective fort. It was rectangular, and existed solely for the funerary rite of casting in soul stones for purification. Sometimes people sat in the temples in the hope that nearness to the holy flames would help them in some way. The soldiers looked to it and expected invaders to be within, seeing as the defense had clearly broken. After glancing about for potential crossbowmen, they ran one by one in a low jog to the temple gates, which were ajar. The court was silent, and the battle sounded further off than before. They expected to hear horns soon, either of retreat or regrouping. Maybe they'd actually taken this town.
The temple had bodies in it, laid out neatly, their faces covered, their arms folded upon the chest. At the very head of the temple, under a great golden Arch of Heaven, richly decorated and surprisingly still intact, was a low stepped dais. Upon it, a thick marble plinth surmounted by a small stone cube. A pallid whitish light issued from its top. The soldiers walked to it with an unconscious reverence. The world was corrupt--it was lost. Man was lost. But the soul wasn't. The corruption came from the outside and seeped inwards. The best we can do for our fellows, the wise ones said, was to burn away what was left of the world so the light of the soul, what is pure, might flee to better realms. This was the one succour of humanity, and the excuse for every act of violation and malevolence. No matter what happened in life, the soul was guaranteed a second chance somewhere else, if still in a soul stone. It was all they could do for this nameless soldier who had saved them. For what, or if the price was worth it, they didn't know, what mattered was that it happened.
The man who had given his stone to the dead soldier removed it from his belt and held it over the crucible. The heat from it was intense, even at arm's length. He dropped it into the low, flickering tongues. They stepped back. After a minute of silent watching, there was a single, solitary flash, and they knew it was done. And judging by the distant but far-reaching call of the victor's horn, so was the battle. The poor bastards had been routed. Rewards to whoever hunted down the last of the mercenaries were likely in order, as some were probably in hiding or attempting to escape. Back to it then, and may the next life be merciful, they each thought to themselves.
Abandoned Blade
She ran down the slight slope of the street, staying as close to one side as she could. She stopped and threw herself against the brick wall at a street corner. She gasped to catch her breath, and almost unconsciously placed a hand to her neck, to feel whether or not her soul stone was still there. She gave a ragged sigh of relief when her fingers brushed the smooth cyan pellet. Throwing an eye over her shoulder, she swore she could see something dart into an open doorway back up the street. She clenched her fists tightly and spun around the corner, expecting fully to walk into the waiting arms of--she didn't even want to think of what.
Where on earth were the others? It had been two days since she'd even heard the call of another survivor. The last attack had scattered them. She attempted now to make it to another safe house--the last safe house. If no one was there...she banished those thoughts, too. In the first days after the battle came to end, she had been part of a group who had remained in the city, dedicated, or perhaps just obstinate, to rebuilding. It was a common occurrence in war-torn areas when conflicts finally sputtered out. They had removed the bodies from the streets, of both city native and foreign mercenary, but the cobblestone and gutters still stank of rot.
This had been different, though, and in their hearts they knew it. War, massacre, bloodshed, the world was hardened by it. But what passed through here was inhuman. It hadn't taken long for the battles which raged throughout the night to descend into savagery. It was, in the beginning, a civil war between the guildsmen and the viscount, fuelled by an influx of allied nobles, then mercenaries, and then drafted locals, until all the city was a battleground, flooded from all angles. Amidst old rivalries between royals and high ranking mercenary captains, the grim determination of the native people, bitterness and cruelty became the norm and saw every kind of desecration perpetrated.
Including the mass destruction of soul stones.
It seemed that, within the miasma of utter corruption and blasphemy, the souls of those doomed by the crushing of their stones went bad quicker than usual. When the ghosts appeared, that was when people started fleeing. She remembered it well: midday, a monstrous crack resounded through the city, and suddenly there were clawing horrors slithering through the blood-slick streets, cascading through spectral winds, stalking through dark alleys. Rumor from several runners had it that the great burning mass grave that was the Great Guildhall had become...something else.
But what could they do? The life that awaited them outside the walls as a band of refugees was one of slow death to hunger, disease, bandits, or wandering into another battlefield and being drafted. May as well stay in what remained of home, despite what was now lurking in every empty house, behind every doorway. They weren't really meat and bone, but you could hack them apart pretty well, so much so that they had trouble reforming. Why did a soul, for all intents and purposes an incorporeal essence, gain a form? The wise ones said that the accretion of "worldliness" didn't stop at the flesh, it continued on into soul. Over time, even that small core of formless essence would grow encrusted with corruption. Hence the soul stones which might hold a spirit in its untouched, tender purity long enough to escape via a crucible.
She had never seen a ghost properly before. She'd been spared the full sight of one, or of a horde of them. Despite dwelling in a city of them, she'd really only seen flashes, glimpses, of long arms, longer talons, whipping tendrils, lumbering shadows more than half maw, crowns of horns, and the rushing of claws and beat of wings. Sometimes still animate, sometimes not. The potential for every kind of bestial hate and ugliness given form in excruciating detail. In her opinion, she'd seen enough, more than anyone ever ought to. But now she was alone, and had been alone, it was likely, for several days. And something had been watching her, and finally made its move when she dared step outside to find the last safe house.
It crawled like a bat does, on big arching limbs, dragging along a useless torso ending in trailing, stunted feelers. Its long neck ended in an eyeless, lipless face. But for all that, it moved with horrid rapidity and focus. There was a gash across the thin flesh of its head she'd made when it got close the first time--it had continued to ooze a kind of blackness that seemed to her more like a mockery of blood than any real vital fluid. She found it now gorging upon the carcass of something she hadn't seen here before, neck buried half-deep in a form like a colossal maggot but whose face, which was towards her, was a great mouth with lolling tongue, and either side had a short arm like an insect's mandibles, which she saw then were still faintly grasping. The fingers curled as the ghost she'd been trying to escape pulled itself from the gore and turned its unseeing head in her direction, the bared teeth making a disgusting red grin.
She had two avenues of escape and only a second to choose--the way she'd came, into a building through which it might have trouble moving due to the way it walked. But that was back into the maze of the city, into who knew what else might be lurking in those buildings. Or, the great main road of the city, and she was standing at its junction. Certainly not past it, but to the wide, litter strewn way beside it, keeping the corpse between her and it. That led out of the city. What of potential survivors? Was she going to abandon them? In all likelihood, they'd already abandoned her.
She took the main road that led to the city gates, and the ghost gave chase over the corpse in a grotesque gallop.
It made throaty rasps as it gave chase. She ducked around piles of debris from smashed barricades and leapt over piles of lost supplies. The thump and clack of its claws on the wide flagstones in the sullen silence of the city was irregular and, she thought, feverish. The thought crossed her mind for just a second, what--who, rather, had this thing once been? A royal? An invader? A guildsman, most likely. Maybe even someone she'd known. It was in there, somewhere, buried deep under layers of fathomless corruption. It didn't matter, but still. Apparently in far off lands, and in the distant past of this land, ghosts were worshipped as frightful idols, until some distant divinity have humans the power to cleanse themselves. That's something she'd thought about in dark moments, offering something to these things for her life. If they even understood her, or cared.
She was getting tired. Her breaths came wheezing now, and her legs ached. She had to stop, or she'd slow, and it would catch her, and she'd have no energy to grapple with it. She stopped, and spun around. In a flash she took it in: the ghost lurching towards her, mouth champing and dripping with the filth of its last meal, and the abandoned sword sitting on the stone just next to her. It wasn't a particularly beautiful specimen, bereft of much ornamentation, but well crafted, and well maintained. A soldier's weapon, to be sure. The blade was straight, double-edged, with a tapering, diamond shaped tip. It looked particularly thick and heft, too. A kind of irregular, faint blackish stain ran down the length of the blade. The cross-guard was blocky and clearly bore the city's crest. The pommel was likewise blocky, merely a small cube, but this was an intentional design made to evoke the imagery of a crucible of heaven.
She ran low, grabbed the blade and, entirely unthinking, ran headlong and under the lunging monster, grabbing the blade rather unwisely with her free, gloved hand, and shoved it upwards into the sagging chest of the ghost. In the span of a mere few seconds she took it and thrust up again and again, and skittered out under its arm, which she turned on her heels to and brought the heavy blade down upon. The ghost frothed and fell to the ground on its ruined limb. She ran without even looking. She gripped that sword in her hand so hard she thought she'd break it. She heard bleats and yelps behind her, but they didn't follow.