Shadows & Sorcery #8
Welcome to issue 8 of Shadows & Sorcery, and Happy Halloween and Dia de los Muertos! To celebrate, this issue is free from everyone to read, and there’s a 20% forever discount for new paid subscriptions until November 3rd. Below you’ll find dark dungeons, eldritch wilderness, and strange materials from the beyond…
Today’s stories are:
Throne Dungeon
Defiled Wilderness
Iron of the Heavens
Harvest Hill
Undead Catacombs
Throne Dungeons
In a darker time, the land was a patchwork of warring states, minor realms and petty kingdoms who kept an iron grip on the peoples that dwelt within them. The only thing worse than one's lord was the enemy lord. Towns lay in a perpetual state of half-ruin, and villages were as mere camps, ready to flee at a moment's notice. Mercenaries roamed without reproach as standing armies dwindled into scraps.
At long last, a force came that brought the fractured land under control. The firm and at times forceful hand of a knightly council wrested control and allegiance of one petty kingdom at a time, and it wasn't long before the rest crumbled under infighting at the sight of a grand and unified empire on the rise.
When the last of the tyrants had been deposed, the new ruling council took them and their thrones and cast them into every dungeon and cavern beneath every benighted fortress and keep. They were sealed away with their foulest minions and left to rot, a forgotten relic of a dark and terrible past.
But they did not die. In the dark and the damp, the remnants of the old tyranny began to dig, breaking through dungeon walls and expanding caverns, until the whole crust of the land was honeycombed with lightless passages through which malevolent forces gathered. In the depths they established their own domains, and took to the practice of abhorrent sorceries to survive. And through all this, they took their thrones, their symbols of might, and were carried upon litters by slaves through the cold murk. The throne became as an idol to the wretched minions of the old tyranny and icons of them appear in every crevice and crack in the under-realm.
Defiled Wilderness
There are few alive now who remember what it was like before. They are furtive and avoid the subject, more it seems out of sorrow than any fear to speak of the thing. There are only a few accounts of it, so remote was the location, but the city has expanded far and the people have settled great swathes of the countryside. Though they encroach but little upon it right now, more and more people have come to learn of the defiled wilderness.
The exact dimensions of it are unknown, save that it spreads too far for most people's comfort. The vegetation, they say, isn't right. Where once it was a golden, bucolic and autumnal realm, it now resembles a welt upon the earth. Grey, dark, and sodden, perpetually heavy with dripping moisture and cloying air. The trees swell and twist in their growth, the brush snakes and tangles, and vines are knotted like muscle and hair. Outside the glades there are entire spans of rugged heath covered in loam-like mould or moss, great mats of soggy vegetation that sinks upon itself, collapsing the various mounds and small rises inwards. Virulent is the word often used to describe the wilds, there is something sickly about it, feverish and shivering. There are people who swear a pulse passes through it.
All that has ever been gleaned is that something passed over this place. A cloud of odd hue on a dark morning descended and seemed only to pull away when a retinue of royal hunters turned in its direction. It was described as a defilement, and it stuck. No one can really disagree. There is nothing in that span of woods and heather that doesn't seem to have about it an unhealthy distention, and the forms of what the trees and brush ought to resemble are just clear enough under the mutation to repulse the onlooker.
It is no doubt sorcerers of dark repute gather there, hoping to find what, no one knows. Perhaps it is a suitable setting for vile spellwork, perhaps things congregate there they wish to commune with, or perhaps a veil was left pulled aside. Regardless, on the clearest summer nights, the minute twinkle of fire and other lights can be seen on sunken hillsides from the outskirts of the city, and the people wonder whether at all their land should expand in the path of that place.
Iron of the Heavens
There is only one specimen of the strange metal left in the world, or so it is hoped. It sits in the throne room of a prince, veiled with a cloth embroidered and painted with holy symbols, a constant and frightening reminder of what happened those many centuries ago, and the great efforts taken to heal the damage done by the so-called iron of the heavens.
During the Month of Raining Stars, still remembered in the minds of those who live along the beautiful azure Yehodothos Coast, a number of high ranking soldiers and philosophers from three different city-states congregated in the ripe emerald fields of the north to examine the visitors from the heavens. Great lumps of darkish stone, badly sundered, their cores visible in the deep craters they left. Once brought to the surface, those there were speechless before the prismatic array of the comet interiors, a subtle and shifting blend of colours, not quite crystalline, not quite the sheen of polished metal either.
After some minor conflicts in their distribution, the philosophers set to work experimenting, testing, using their highest quality iron and bronze to chip away minor samples. The material, when struck, made a curious ringing, not wholly unpleasant, but, those who heard it thought, persistent. It was eventually deduced to be a type of metal, or metallic substance, as it could be melted down and cast. The first thing it was used to make was a broad-bladed sword for a general, and the first thing it was used for was battle.
The conflict was short, violent, and devastating. The 'heavenly blade' was of a keenness and strength as yet unseen. It shorn through the chain, linen and even breastplates of its victims, leaving vile gashes in its wake, tinged with unhealthy colours. Soldiers struck by the blade did not survive. In fact, there's no end to the horror stories that spawned from that initial conflict. Regardless, all remaining stores of the heavenly iron were used to produce weapons and armour of incalculable destruction.
It didn't last long.
Warriors in prismatic plate with shimmering blades and spears, chariots adorned with long cruel spikes that sung as they were driven, arrows tipped with iridescent metal that flew clean through enemy soldiers. The aftermath of battles were perhaps more violent than the battles themselves as soldiers sought to strip the dead of their prismatic gear in blood-red frenzy.
It was during such battles that the effects of prolonged exposure started to make themselves known. Despite the masses of coin and patriotic fervour in the face of potential ascendancy of one's land to regional domination, soldiers began to complain of their prismatically armed comrades, many of whom were rarely seen without their armour.
The shuddering violence of a death by prismatic weapon began to wear on the minds of some, and the actions of those that dealt such final strikes were becoming more erratic. It was when an enemy soldier was being stripped of a breastplate of heavenly iron, did they begin to see just what it was they were using. Flesh, warped, fused, and changed. Not mutated, so much as, philosophers who studied these bodies thought, adapted. Princes were made to see the reality of the situation, but it took the sacking of a city-state that left half-bereft of life to get the powers that be to cease the usage of the strange and malevolent material.
It took much blood, but prismatic soldiers were neutralized, and their armour cast into furnaces, melted, mixed with slag, and dumped. All but one, a shortsword that sits ringing under a cloth adorned with holy symbols in a palace throne room.
Harvest Hill
The eastern regions are famously vast expanses of steppe with rises so gradual as to be almost unnoticeable. But the city of Minosmir commands the east's highest peaks, a short range of scrunched up hills that command a view of the plains for leagues around. They're also home to a great number of strange tombs that the people of Minosmir have come to venerate as ancient Heroes, and there isn't a single tomb that doesn't have an attendant cult.
Beyond the limits of the city and the hills themselves, there lies a number of smaller mounds and minor rises as the land begins to flatten out. Most of them are home to fortresses and wealthy villas, but there's one slightly further east of special note. It's one of the region's agricultural and religious centers, a singular mound known locally as the Harvest Hill.
A number of homes ring the base of the hill, as no dwellings are permitted upon it. The wide, verdant slopes are covered in shaded groves, rich soil, and long, lush grasses. Farmers work the fields upon the gentle rise producing year-round abundant stores of crops, and animals set to pasture on it are healthy and fat. It's considered an honour to dwell near the hill and work upon it, and ownership of homes there has been passed down from generation to generation, slowly but surely building over the centuries a highly secretive and select agrarian cult known only to the hill-dwellers and the Prince of Minosmir himself.
Hidden amongst the groves and grasses are the hints of old weathered stone. Mud and moss half-shrouds them for most of the year, save for certain days when figures gather at midday and midnight to uncover them and descend into the hidden tombs. The rites are passed down from parent to child, or in those chosen to take a dwelling in utmost faith. Offerings of the finest meat and grain are burnt on stone plate before the sarcophagus of a hero, the smoke being allowed to fill the tomb. Over time the smoke creates a fine coating which is then studiously removed and collected, and mixed into the tilled soils of the fields. These heroes and their cult are the true source of the Harvest Hill's bounties, and Princes past have taken great pains to protect the hill during more warring times.
Undead Catacombs
The Year of the Bale Moon, as it is called in the annals, is an event well remembered now in the legends of the people, when a strange moon wandered into the sky and the graveyards become restless with wandering dead. Though a specially appointed Grand Theurge successfully banished it from the heavens, the land was still left with the problem of a looming undead threat. And so, a number of extensive and long unused catacombs were opened up and the undead corralled within, and sealed away.
The Temple Complex took great pains to keep these catacombs barred shut, and the mounting need for resources started to become a problem. Troubled talk dominated council meetings until a deacon proposed a bold idea that spread like wildfire through the Complex.
The first group of clerics to step foot in the catacombs barely made it out alive. It became startlingly clear that the Order of Judges had become complacent and, they feared, weak. New recruits and aged veterans alike descended into the dusty depths to do battle and hone their skills and devotion, as well as beat back the horde of ravening corpse walkers, to keep them in a near-constant state of stillness.
The Temple Complex began to see an influx of relics from across the land that needed to be tested. The monks and venerates hadn't been this busy in quite possibly centuries. Battle-hardened clerics returned from the depths to scour the land of evils, the Order of Judges ascending to near mythic status in this time.
But what the people didn't know, and could never know, was that for every mighty divine warrior cleaving demons in twain, there lay a score of shambling corpses in rent cleric's mail in the catacombs, in a perpetual agony their kindred could never undo. The Judges may have battled for the side of good overtly, but in their hearts they carried chasing memories of panic, guilt, and limitless gratitude for the fate they escaped, that they were not being added to the ever growing number they knew in their hearts would one day overcome them.