Shadows & Sorcery #77
Shadows & Sorcery #77
What’s up folks, it’s me, uh, the seventy-seventh edition of Shadows & Sorcery!
This week I tried out a slightly different format. I’ve found it good practice never to force an idea, because I don’t want to ever look at something and go “ah yeah that’ll do”. I want to write and send you things I think are actually worthy of reading. So, stories get the length they require, and in this case, this week we’ve got a half-and-half: two long tales, followed by two shorter ones. I’m trying to at least keep it even!
Now, free subscribers may have noticed they got another email—that’s a new Substack feature! They’re letting me send out messages to my freebies, beckoning them into this delicious gingerbread house with delectable special offers, so if you got that and are wondering what in the hell it is…you should take a look.
Don’t forget, the latest chapter of The Path of Poison came out last week, check it out HERE
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This week, we take a grand tour of imperial history and learn what dire events led to the creation of the Hammer of the Knights, we follow a pious vampire on his perilous journey to the Sepulchre of Shadows, we discover the history of the miraculous Spear Woods, and gaze grimly upon the foreboding Fortress of the Storm…
Hammer of the Knights
In the oldest days of antiquity, conflict simmered and erupted in continuous cycle amongst the constantly shifting borders of the three empires: Habraustche, Skawric-Sovsia, and Livronne, and it was in Livronne, grand and stately, with aspirations of nobility, did they find a need for a new breed of warrior. Thus were the knights born amongst the slender elven folk of that realm.
Back then, two prominent border provinces of Livronne--the Twin Enclaves as they were known--lived in a perpetual cold war with the bulwark kingdom of dwarven Melchisia. They sat at the forefront of contested lands, in which a mess of petty kingdoms eked out a survival on battlefield scavenging, providing camping ground and supplies to passing soldiers, as well as acting as fodder for battles. Having sat in a stalemate for some two decades, and not having made much progress in the centuries prior to that, the elves of the Twin Enclaves finally beseeched the Higher World, the cold stars and celestial spirits they worshipped as gods, and were granted a boon stranger than any could have imagined.
Elite warriors existed in Livronne society back then, each one the heir of an ancestral armour whose forging secrets had been lost to time, and were too precious, expensive, and useful to break apart and melt down for study. A properly outfitted warrior elite was a scourge of classical battlefields, untouchable by most weapons and requiring specialized squads to face head on. And then, by high ceremony and astral magics, was each and every knight of Livronne made to swear an unswerving oath of dedication to war.
Thus sworn into service, the knights were encased in their own armour, suffused with supernatural vigour, and their armour was inscribed with the names of celestial spirits who flocked around and about them in a raging, invisible maelstrom. And then, they went to war. There is no end to the stories spun about these chitinous hulks, leading charges and crushing the Melchisite forces with swift and bloody might, or holding the line in desperate and heroic last stands against dire odds and winning the day. They were figures larger than life brought to life, avatars of war and paragons of strength and combat.
Only in truth, they were little more than killing machines.
At first, the knights were driven, zealous fighters, and may have even embodied some of the legends that were spread about them. Doubtless they committed grand deeds for Livronne in the beginning--terrors for the peasants of the petty kingdoms and Melchisia--which sowed the seeds of their myth. But as Livronne continued to take land and expand its borders, the knights began to falter in their conduct. War has rules, and though fighting rarely has honour, the threat and stench of mortality usually keeps most warriors in check. Not so the knights.
They were nigh unassailable. They dove into their enemies like mad beasts, slashing and stabbing without a care for the nuances of combat. They shrugged off most blows and recovered quickly from the rest. They sometimes would forgo their weapons and pummel and rip apart helpless conscripts. Some elven lord captains let them loose on choice targets, but even those who commanded the highest respect had trouble reining in their knights. Suffice it to say, taking prisoners ceased to become a viable strategy, and instead the Twin Enclaves were reduced to using knights as a threat. A bare handful were downed with considerable efforts by Habraustchen mercenaries who carried the bodies away to their cold mountain realm, likely where the frightful knights of that country eventually came from.
But then, humans came from the east through the wilds of war-torn Skawric-Sovsia, and brought with them tales of a more dire threat. The knights found their greatest use, or what once might have been a noble calling, during the invasion of the ogres. That was a war from which the world never really recovered, and the faces of the three empires were irrevocably changed in its wake. The ogres were slain, every last one of them, at the expense of, it is believed, no less than a full third of the population of the three great realms. Villages, towns, even some cities were left desolate and never reclaimed, graveyards to a horror the world prayed to never see again.
In the aftermath of the coming of the ogres, Livronne, Skawric-Sovsia, and Habraustche retreated from their battlefields of old to lick their wounds and take stock of themselves as the dust and smoke slowly cleared. It was a fiery apocalypse from which a new world did not emerge, but from whose sodden ashes the old one crept. The mimic species Humanity had entrenched itself in the empires now, and new breeds of dwarfmen, half-elves, and man-orcs emerged, and on the fragile, mutable borders of the realms, these half peoples merged again and again into new strains and new forms, and a new culture began to grow.
In the midst of this period of adaptation, however, the enchanted knights of Livronne still walked, and still slew. They began to inspire fear more than any glimmer of hope when they appeared on the front lines of the Lord Livronne's forces to enforce peace in this trembling aftermath age.
It was becoming more and more apparent to the grim nobility of once stately Livronne that their knights were un-tameable blood-mad killers, no matter how hard they wanted to believe it was nothing more than tales of superstition and ignorance that reached their lofty towers. When a knight finally turned on the almost fully elven Countmarche Viselle and tore him limb from limb, the Lord Livronne herself stole away across the somber country of the empire and across the border into the foreboding mountains of Habraustche, and there bid the newly enthroned Khan to help put an end to the horror her ancestors had created.
The Khan was no stranger to the knights, for though his land had few of them, they'd done enough damage to be sealed away under his keep in treasure-filled crypts for eternity. The heirs of several clans had suffered for it, and he knew there was no way either the mightiest Habraustchen or Livronne warriors could round these things up and entomb them. So, instead, he offered a different, more radical solution.
The legend, spoken of by certain nobles, goes thus:
In the deep of the tallest peak of Habraustche, surrounded by glowing lava flows and the rumble of the earthen core, mountain shamans descended to the Lower World and brought back wisdom from the demons who were their oldest gods, and under the watchful gaze of the Lord Livronne and Khan of the Mountain, a hammer was forged in a single night to toll the armour of the knights like a dread bell with every strike, to drive away the celestial spirits who flock to it from the Higher World, and then to crack the plate open and slay what dwells inside.
The Hammer of the Knights would be held by a Habraustchen, but led by an elite cadre of Livronne scouts and soldiers, for Livronne does not worship the Lower World. And so it has been to this day, a secret war and hunt, as the hammer has been passed down and around the clans of the mountains, and a hidden order of ranger-monks lies in wait to call for aid when a knight has been spied wandering. It is believed most of them are dead, and the rest are run ragged with sheer age and pursuit. But lives are spent for each victory, and the wine raised in victory is done with bitter tribute.
Sepulchre of Shadows
A pious old vampire once told a story to a scholar. A wild and terrible figure that vampire was, but in the depths of his depravity, he suddenly came upon something wondrous: the shadow of the pilgrim. Thus was the world introduced to a minor cult of nomads who followed about a dark shape believed to be an ancient vampire on the cusp of true redemption from its cursed existence. And then, as the years went on and on, more shadows appeared, and the world began to understand that vampires simply fade into nothing should they reach a great age without succumbing any further to their vile inclinations. The shadows became symbols rather figures to be followed, things of temperance, dedication, and almighty willpower...
He could feel the weight upon his eyes, sagging his shoulders, slowly closing its fingers all about his body, locking every limb, dragging with every step. The call of somnolence was louder than it had been in the past several decades. Maybe longer. The silent crypts where those about to achieve holy dissolution could do so in reverent quiet, he ached for them. To finally fall into slumber even near them would be a blessing.
Perhaps it was centuries ago, he didn't know anymore, for time and memory become as fog as one drifts further and further past natural life, but back in some dim and dread past he had given in to the curse. Even now he remembers it was only supposed to be one drop. A taste. To prove himself, and his willpower, to the others. His life had been a blur since then, a smear of half-formed faces, garbled words, and distant shrieks, but he knows stark clear that one single drop had become a whole village. And the only righteous thing to be done with the years and vigour he had stolen was to drive himself towards those lands where the shadows gather in sepulchres that had been built for the wandering icons of the redemptorist faith. His faith...
He thought they were a safe haven. In the midst of a deep wood with towering black trees, clinging mist, and a biting chill that no cloak or naked flame could fend off, he'd come upon their number in a shaded ruin of old smooth stone with a skin of green moss upon every surface. They who dwelt there were vampires, he had believed them to be pilgrims or stoic redemptorists living an ascetic life. But upon inspection in the warm firelight, he saw that they were far worse off than he was, and knew that one only attained such an advanced state of curse through enthusiastically repeated acts vampirism. They had succumbed, and likely each of them had been willing.
Unfortunately, he had recognized them as a sect of vampiric supremacists all too late. Once he had revealed his desire to fade away amongst those of eternal slumber and the rigours of his long pilgrimage, they had turned on him, stating their belief that vampirism was a state of personal divinity unlocked by the departure of gods who had shackled mankind to a pathetic mortality. That he would cast away his gift--his choice--so easily was abhorrent and blasphemous to them in the extreme. And there was, of course, the danger that he would tell of their nest, and that they would be flushed out by wave upon wave of cowards and mortals.
How he had even managed to flee, he didn't know. So much of his early years began in wandering, seeking to partake in that ancient devotional struggle of following the pilgrim's shadow across the world, and he had spent much of the life he had taken in a search of empty leads and false promises. He had vowed, like so many vampires, to never take another. If he simply dropped into somnolence in the silence of a dark forest, would that be so bad? No, but he would rather not be torn to shreds for that to happen, and he would honour the lives he'd taken by immurement in a holy place, not a lightless wood.
He begged inwardly for the vigour within, what essence if any may remain of those souls he had stolen, to hold out in his flight from the creatures behind him which had far greater and more terrible stores to work with. Their leader, if it was such, barely resembled the human it had once been. The others were of a twisted but perhaps recognizably human countenance. Vampires learn to not judge by appearance alone, but in this case, he had to admit, it probably would have helped.
For vampires, the more one became a stain on the world, the more one receded deeper into the curse, then the worse the adverse effects became. The mere touch of water or sunlight dimmed by cloud became intolerable, even painful, and such vampires dwelt in dark, arid places. There are those who would see the world blotted in perpetual murk, its rivers choked, its seas buried. Perhaps it was the guiding grace of the lives within him, but he emerged from the towering forest into a torrential rainfall, while grim figures stalked the treeline...
It was his personal belief that closeness to the passing of ancient vampires might, in some way, take a little of him away, and hasten is own fading. He had spoken to many proper humans on his travels and had attempted to explain his position in a way that they, still blessed with true mortality, could understand. He did not believe in nothingness, but he did believe in a kind of calm numbness, and a freedom from the bounds of his curse. Vampires could not die, but they could be destroyed. Belief of all kinds in cursed land where feral vampires had been destroyed, something of their essence lingering, was rampant. But the true dissolution of a shadow was something else, something peaceful. He almost talked of it like a reward. In a way, some of the human folk he conversed with understood him, and thought upon their eventual fates of putrefaction and becoming dust, and wondered secretly to themselves if a century or two before a clean passing as a fading shadow was not a worthy end.
Such talk wouldn't work here, though. The town gates, the turrets on the walls, every street corner, open court, and square was festooned in icons of the old gods. Legacy cults weren't unusual, but they were often very personal affairs. The town was a desperate bastion of the old faith, a beacon to something that very likely would never return...unless, of course, they can hold out. In any case, this town wouldn't be any friendlier to him than the rest of the world.
He was not so far gone that he could not walk amongst the crowds, but anything beyond a quick glance would give him away. He looked at these people from under his pilgrim's hood, pulled closer over his face than he usually liked, and saw a curious expression of exhaustion normally unseen in human eyes. He wondered if it came from the theocratic town rulers, the daily toil of this isolated settlement, or the wait for the return of their gods. But they had real faith, or at least most did, for their eyes softened momentarily when they passed over one of the old, weathered icons that adorned so much of the town.
What kept him mostly to the sides and through the alleys were the red-robed, stern-faced fellows who marched through the middle of the streets. Two in each of these groups held great bells in their hands which they tolled at certain stations where icons sat alone, with wooden hoods above their image. The other two carried large, highly decorated metal stakes. He'd had an idea that this town wasn't just the seat of a legacy cult, and these vampire hunters confirmed it for him. From one extreme to the next had this journey taken him. Every view imaginable of the world the gods had left behind. Was it something worth preserving? He didn't know. He didn't have much of a choice, either...lest other lives would willingly give themselves up for his longevity. And such thoughts wouldn't be good to have in his head.
He heard voices calling out loudly from at the top of a gently rising main street, which he meekly approached. It was a preacher, reinforcing the message of the town elders. He stopped to listen for just a moment, head bowed in what he hoped looked like contemplation. There were shouts and roars from around him, answering the words of the preacher who spoke of this greatest trial of all, the curse on the soul and on the body, and of the great work which will pave the way for the return. When he heard a choked cry, his eyes shot up. Two figures in red were staking a vampire to the mound upon which the preacher spoke. There were several other staked figures, some still, some weakly twitching.
Members of the crowd pushed past him roughly now, and dragged him forward in their movement. He managed to slip away through the rushing masses of zealots who beat upon the impaled vampires. He spared only a second's pity and sorrow for them who would be denied redemption. In that moment he believed, even if they had been more cruel than the horrors that lurked in that forest, that they deserved redemption. Or at least a clean end...
What surprised him the most was learning that, as far as the world knew, no shadow had actually faded away yet. Maybe not even the first shadow, followed so long ago by that pious cult. But most were far on the path to it. Some shadows were mere shimmers now, minute smears of shade upon a stone slab. They were watched day and night to see if they remained, though they were never disturbed. He wandered this tomb land in reverent exhaustion. A weight had crept into his limbs some leagues back, and the going had been harder than anything before. This was it, he felt, and he was walking through the quiet fields of his greater kin. Rows upon rows, entire streets and tangles of mausoleums and free standing graveslabs, white marble, stately stone, pillars and obelisks rose and dominated the skyline. Amongst it all shuffled scores of vampires, a priestly lot tending to the holy sepulchres of those falling into somnolence.
He wasn't sure what to do now, so he found an open tomb, and sat in its entrance. Some elder vampires of great respect and status within redemptorist cults are buried in their deep slumbers alongside shadows. Many of them lay here, still and stiff in undeath. He was not one of them, he knew, but he had come leagues beyond number to be here, and hoped that his passion would grant him rest. The sun was beginning its descent now. Figures shambled from hidden spaces. The weight seemed to hang about him now, like a body on his back, pushing him down. He saw the dim shapes of vampires kneeling and bowing before certain graves. He did not personally understand such outward expressions of devotion to those who slept, but he appreciated it all the same.
He didn't know how long he sat there, but the light changed more and more until there was naught but a silvery sheen to the stone. He was surprised his eyes were still open. He went to look up, and found himself flooded with a curious sensation. Something like memory clung to this feeling, and he rose to try and recall it. Every movement he made was suffused with a kind of pleasing sopor, the sensation one gets when laying down to rest after an arduous task. He hadn't felt this in...it might have been centuries. He noticed only dimly the excited motions of several others a short ways from him. They were coming towards him, or perhaps towards something near him. It didn't matter right now, he'd find out soon enough. But then they crowded about him, blocking his passage. The silvery radiance upon everything was calming, however, and he begrudged them not as he passed through their number.
In this state, he almost felt able to walk quite well for a while, the going towards rest would be pleasant. He stopped for a moment and looked back, to see the sepulchres stretched out behind him. There was a great mass of vampires behind him, looking to each other, and back to him. He wondered if perhaps his foreign garb was strange to them, and looked down to see if aught he wore was shocking.
Where once there was a hand, where once there was his hand, there was now naught but a shadow.
Spear Woods
The spear is the most ancient weapon. The pointed end required the first considerations beyond the heft of a simple bludgeon. There's a difference between the rock swung in rage, and the spear which was studied and fashioned back in the dawn of time. Though the blade has changed shape and the shaft has changed length, it has remained, in all its incarnations, the dominant weapon and true tool of combat across the whole world.
What caused the division, none can remember. Likely none want to remember, either. Best to leave that which nearly cleaved the world in twain in the dead, empty skulls of those who harboured it. But signs of it can be seen in this age still, and there are those who take great pains to preserve them as an example of horror, while the world and the ancestors who instigated it would rather have it left to moulder and vanish with the ages.
Regardless, however, the end of it all has been remembered, as it should be, in grand reverent legend...
At the very apex of the battle, when blood flowed freely in torrents and the heat and madness of war roamed the blasted landscape, there came suddenly a wailing and casting down of bodies. Some unspeakable sorrow had seeped into the two armies who had suddenly become witness to the conflict in its absolute fullness--every wound, every death, every blasphemy and curse and uttered hatred, the clamour of shrieks and shouts and growls, the crash of steel upon steel, and boot crunching upon bare earth.
The two league-long forces mingled in fighting became one, and streaming with tears, each set the shaft of their spears into the earth, so that the killing point was raised to the sky. They then dispersed with unfathomable shame and tremulous hearts, shattering their swords and burying their hammers, leaving the bodies of their comrades to slumber. That long, dark plain lay silent for weeks on end, until a traveller, whose name is forgotten to history, reported something curious. While passing by necessity through that desolate region, they spied small green shoots sprouting from the split, weatherstained shafts of the spears.
From this place, a vast woodland grew, stretching its rich dark trunks into the heavens, verdant with moss and loose, hanging vines, alive with the chittering and cries of unseen beasts in its boughs. The trees stand tall and straight like the spears which bore them, and their leaves are of every shape and shade, and each and every one bears a silvery trim and a wicked edge. Men have come to harvest the Spear Woods time and time again, and each attempt is met with a rainfall of deadly leaves, watering the ground with blood as of old, but only ever in warning.
It is believed by most that some distant but concerned divinity performed some great intervention to stop in its tracks an atrocity the world ought never to see. None can look upon it and see otherwise, for what else could have taken the first weapon, the slayer of men, and transformed it thus into boundless life?
Fortress of the Storm
You can see it a mile off. A tall, rugged knoll, the base of which is a cold, fog-laden swamp, and the slopes of which are sodden with creeping tendrils of cloud which slither through lush with virulent bursts of deep green. Finally, its peak, hidden amidst a great dark mass of stormcloud which sits like a brooding black steel wall, which cracks and rumbles from within, throwing strange shadows in the cascading bolts of thunder.
It has raged for centuries on end, never waning, never calming, sending forth its fury at the landscape around it, which life has long abandoned. Nothing dwells in the unquiet grey plains around it, nothing swims in the charged waters which reflect in their curious ripples the dancing lightning, and nothing ranges upon the dense hillsides. And yet the place seems veritably alive with the energy of the great storm.
Merely approaching the knoll justifies the name of the place. The air seethes with unseen force, and it seems as if a million tiny barbs prick at the skin, covered as it might be with cloak and armour. So oppressive can this sensation be that most turn away, driven to madness by the sparks and jolts which burst over their bodies with increasing vigour.
That it is a fortress is known, for its name and meagre legend have come down almost unchanged through time, so striking was the initial idea of it to people even then, in that curious time of old when the world was more malleable than it is now. Who dwells within it, none know, for the story goes that its great gates, as it were, clanged shut one final time in the face of an encroaching horror forgotten to time.
Mighty warrior-monks, a sorcerer, an old king, and a god have all been suggested as inhabitants of the fortress. Though nothing lives there, things do move there, and not just in the whipping winds. Many have died in the approach, and bodies which made it to the hillside have been washed and blasted back, only to rise and wander, their eyes crackling with the nigh divine force of the storm. They do not speak, though, having become the new outer walls and army of the slowly encroaching fortress of the storm.