Oh hello, I didn’t see you there! Please, come in, come in, have a seat. What’s going on? Oh nothing…besides the seventy-third edition of Shadows & Sorcery!
Got a fun one this week (because none of the others have been fun, except issue 43): five glimpses into one world and the strange war it waged against a frightful enemy. Sometimes these themes or connections present themselves as I generate titles, and I let them form to see what happens. So we’re only getting a little experimental this week, just a little, as a treat.
Remember, readers new and old, throughout February I’m giving all new subs month-long trials of Season 1 (issues 1-70) and that includes YOU. If you’ve ever been curious about what lurks in them there archives, unsub and resub, I’ll see it and you’ll get bumped up. It’s only fair since there’s currently literally no other way for people to legitimately access it at the moment!
And 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 walk through the bleak vista of a Consumed Settlement, we learn about the dark fate of the City of Offering, we learn about those who wield a Blighted Blade, we gaze upon the alien dread of the Chasm Spires, and we learn of the desperate invocation of the Winds of the North…
Consumed Settlement
This little village doesn't have walls. Not even a proper boundary. They dwelt naked, in the open earth, trusting to the Winds as righteous believers, their main streets were even aligned, as best they could manage, to the cardinal directions, and their homes built in the wedges between. But walls wouldn't have saved them. The Winds didn't either.
In the village's communal center, where beasts were grazed and goods were traded, where proclamations were made and rites were enacted, the golden altar which received the Winds lies half-submerged in a pool of thick black sludge. The earth around it, and around the entirety of the village, is black and soft. Dissolving. Decomposing.
The small homes, the short towers for watchers and grain and other goods, all seem to slant in the wretched earth, and upon their sides there grows great plates of gnarled, pitted bone, a shroud seeking to slowly envelope these meagre structures. Worst of all, the archive at the eastern extremity of the village, the small, likely long outdated but still holy repository of knowledge, has been cast down, its walls crushed, and its contents stamped into the black mire, all of it covered in what looks like long, skeletal growths that remind those who seem them of fingers. A greenish vapor slithers lazily close to the ground. If one looks long enough, things might be seen to move under portions of the rotten loam.
This village, along with many others like it, mark the furthest that the murk has ever spread, and its absolute, most necessary limit.
City of Offering
Fascination is often coupled with disgust, and no matter how deep the former feeling may be buried, it is always in danger of emergence. That's how the murk got into the city.
The seven capitals are the first places where the old lore was uncovered. Scrolls, tablets, carvings, leaves of brittle parchment, countless vast troves of primal wisdom and faith from ages before the scattered peoples converged upon this land. The icons of old were cast aside at first, but eventually found their place under the almighty Four Winds as emissaries and whispers of the divine Eastern Wind, and the images of the old gods now have shrines within the Temples of the Air. Members of the great archives in the capitals hunt for hidden lore buried across the lands to transcribe and study, and to disseminate to the rest of the kingdoms. The cities are ruled by their librarians, despotic circles of scholar-lords whose councils are the deep wells of ancient knowledge they alone hold ultimate access to.
As the body of religious texts grew to considerable size, the harder it became to regulate them and make sure everyone was on the same page, literally and metaphorically. The seven capitals fought for the sole right to excavate, and began to hoard their lore. But smaller towns and villages were left decades behind in learning as a result. The inter-capital religious body which oversaw expeditions determined, by a meritocratic system, who was fit to handle such artifacts. But of course, if only the larger settlements were granted regular access, then it is only they who will find something. The smaller cities who lived in the shadows of their greater kin had to fight tooth and nail for relevance.
And then the spires arrived.
In those early days, everything was up in the air. No one knew what the spires were, though they'd learn soon enough. But while sages sent scouts out into the wilds, the spires in turn sent things into the cities. Specifically, into the smaller cities which crowded about the great capitals. In the night, shrouded forms strode dark country roads, crossed centuries-old mighty walls, and slipped through shuttered windows, and they spoke to the faltering philosopher kings within.
"The knowledge of a thousand generations, lost to time...but not to us. All we ask for is what would become ours anyway."
All that is known is that the city's end did not come as a slow, creeping doom. It can only be imagined, in the grip of the most potent toxins and drugs, what the scholar-lords saw and heard as they crouched over scraps of lore dredged up from lightless gulfs below, safe in the confines of their archive. The earth caving in, the cacophony of towers and domes and whole rows of houses collapsing together, the screams of a vast multitude of unknowing humans being torn asunder by waves of fetor with talons, the hammering of panicked fists on the brazen archive gates that were even then being smeared with murk. It is almost certain the scholars went mad before they died.
That city no longer has a name. It is no longer on any map. No record of it exists in available annals or chronicles. But everyone remembers it, though there may come a merciful time when no new generation can recall it. In those early days, fascination was not buried so deep, and even if it was, such had the desperation of the minor cities grown that they weren't beyond thievery, sabotage, or even murder. Or secretly giving over the lives of their faithful to the Worm.
Blighted Blade
Violation, desecration, rot, death, decay, these were not words that described the what dwelt below. There's was not a vision of a graveyard world, but of seething life. Yet they also knew that filth and disease were a means and precursor towards virulence and vigor, for life fought to survive against even the most extreme circumstances. And that made for the finest soil.
To this end, the worm-sorcerers of the charnel deep searched within their fathomless wells of alien knowledge, and brought forth miasmatic powers which ran in black channels in the lowest layers of their lightless mire realms. In flesh nests were weapons grown in mockery of those above, which secreted every unspeakable toxin the world thought it had forgotten, nurtured and shaped to hasten the putrefaction, dissolution, and integration of the matter they so craved.
As resistance to the Worm increased, armies were called up from the great oceans of flesh, repurposed and commanded by worm-sorcerers which dwelt in their hollow forms. Shanks and spears of moulded bone and netherstone found their ways into the grip of murkmen, and every horde was led by great brutes in ridged chitin plates that thundered across the stark sands of the badlands with their Blighted Blades. Like great long teeth emerging from a bony maw, fitted and moulded into the very hands of their wielders. The soldiers who saw them soon came to recognize them as symbols of absolute terror. To even be in the presence of such things was a death sentence, and on those battlefields, not a scrap of skin was left behind.
In the years that followed the invasion, shards of splintered Blighted Blades, once crushed on golden altars under the auspices of the Holy Winds, became commodities in secret black markets. Assassins and the worm cults they usually worked for, unknowingly or not, sought them as potent relics and tools. Villages would vanish overnight if it meant laying their hands on even a scrap of bone, such was the power they contained to kill and spread illness--all for the creation of new life below, of course.
Chasm Spires
One day, without warning, in the lonely places beyond the outskirts of the furthest village settlements, several great spans of earth suddenly collapsed in on themselves, as if voids below had swallowed them whole. In their place, yawning gulfs of dark. But these chasms weren't empty for long, for out of each one there rose a vast, terrible spire, ridged and twisted and dull red like flesh, tapering to wicked points. And with their coming did the earth all around them slowly turn black, soft, and brittle, and from the chasm maws a greenish miasma seeped and poured over the land.
The kingdoms were slow to react. It was only during an expedition into the wilderness for ancient religious texts did scholars spy these new additions to the world, and very quickly did their curiosity become horror as they saw what the spires were doing, and what issued from the lip of the chasms they jutted from.
It was an invasion, that much was clear. The vanguard of an illimitable force that sages trembled in fear of the potential truth of. What came from the dark below was the dead of a thousand generations, of a thousand thousand generations even, not risen, not returned, but repurposed. The crude matter of ancient humanity taken and changed in the charnel gulfs which dwelt in the uttermost depths of the world, where it is secretly believed that all things ultimately descend to, and fester.
They came first as emissaries and messengers, then spies, then assassins, then armies. Old flesh and bone reformed by the worm-sorcerers which dwelt in the fathomless murk of the inner world, amidst a rich and fertile soil of the dead of millennia, and all the things they brought with them to their graves. What they spoke to the first humans they met was this: life is not cultivated in the garden, or in the tilled field, it is made in the pit. They were of slime and filth which begets a seedbed of boundless life, every lake bed and dank cave floor was their shadow.
The spires were their blooms, and one day, when the sun was blotted out with their clinging miasma, they would burst open and their dreaming kindred would swim and crawl through the mire of the earth forevermore. They have simply tired of waiting for the world to die for them.
Winds of the North
(Appended note for a foreign scholar: the following are, transcribed as promised, the prayers retrieved from a rather unorthodox manual of mantras, scrawled onto a bound collection of parchment scraps in our sacral tongue. Clearly the work of a priest in the latter days of the war. Of especial interest is the final prayer, which is believed to reference, if vaguely, the desperation of the people, for that Wind has traditionally held a grim repute. Also, for reference, understand there is a difference between the mundane phenomenon of the weather, which may blow from all directions at will, and the Winds as invoked in our faith. Though both are currents of air, the Cardinal Winds are of solemn import here, and considered, as you might say, vessels or channels for the divinity beyond, and have many associations beyond the ones stated here. But that is a conversation for another time.)
O Winds of the South, bring unto us the warmth of summer and the coolness of the evening breeze, revive and refresh our souls for the battle ahead. Grant life in equal measure and see our purpose done with your steady breath.
Let not your air be taken by the Worm.
O Winds of the West, heaven of souls, bring unto us your eternal autumn air and grant the rest it brings. Soothe us and calm our dreams. Take our souls upon your breath and into the everlasting life of soul's beyond.
Let not your breeze carry the Worm.
O Winds of the East, ancient and divine, forever eastwards comes the spring and source of all things, blow over us and let it be done. Renew all vigor and let loose from your realm a new age.
Let not your breath speak the name of the Worm.
O Winds of West, and of East, take the sun upon your pendulum and see it across its path by your grace and guidance.
Let not its light fall upon the Worm.
O Winds of the North, sigh of death, final air, winter's grasp, howling dark, come and meet our cries, flood this world and fill up the earth, go into the deep places and sear them with desert's heat and freeze them with the bitter cold of icefall, blast them with storm and gale, and leave ruin in your wake.
Let naught feel your touch but the Worm.
These are so good. I love how they each weave an element of the world together and how with each one I feel more enlightened to the overall setting. Great work!