Shadows & Sorcery #80
Hey hey hey hey what’s up hey hey it’s the eightieth edition of Shadows & Sorcery!
How did I ever get away with making eighty of these? Couldn’t tell you to be honest. But here it is anyway! Thank you to all the OGs who’ve opened this thing every week, and to all the cool new fresh people who’ve come in to gawk at whatever all this is!
Now, my friends, I have four pieces of news/information/wonderful facts for you:
Normally issue 80 would contain the 400th tale, but back in issue 60 I began experimenting with story length and content to spice things up a bit, so story 400 will actually come out in a couple weeks instead, likely in some odd numbered issue. Pure chaos here!
Importantly, I’m going to begin instituting a small break for myself every 20 or so issues. That means next week, no new Shadows & Sorcery. I’m very very keenly aware and afraid of burnout, and to be fair I do put this thing out weekly. As I’ve said before, I don’t ever want to get to the point where I look at something and go “yeah that’ll do”, because that means this has become a chore and not something I actually enjoy. Could I move the weekly deadline? Sure, but deadlines are handy sometimes, much like budgetary limitations in filmmaking, it forces you to work creatively around problem, to think more actively about how to pull something off. So instead, I’ll take a little refresher every so often.
BUT that doesn’t mean you won’t get something new next week, because that’s when the 10th chapter of The Path of Poison is coming out! Viner’s Night approaches, and something sorcerous is in store for Sepp…
But now onto this week’s stories, and hey, if you enjoyed what you read here, give that little heart icon a quick tap and tell the stories you liked them! You can even tell me if you liked them with a little comment! Or, of course, if you absolutely reviled them!
This week, we gaze fearfully upon the lurking darkness of the Hill of the Witches, we join a sorcerer’s quest for the Astral Shadow, we hear the strange words of the Prophets of Silence, we explore the Tomb of the Stars, and lastly we take a trip to see the Plateau Spires…
Hill of the Witches
His hand shook as he laid pen to parchment, hesitation gripping the limb so that he might not permit this uncovered darkness to leave his mind, where it might mercifully fade away. No one else had to know, no one else had to be drawn into it. A warning might serve just as well as a signpost to the wrong people. But could he truly let it alone? The old scholar looked around himself again. A candelabra threw half its lurid glow upon the study, and left the rest in hazy shadow.
Arrayed about the scholar were several curious items. Nearest to him was a bundle of ragged, yellow parchment. The pages were scrawled with faded black lettering of a highly decorative kind. The individual glyphs or symbols were almost impossible to discern so complex and compacted were they. They were broken up into sections, between which were highly stylized humanoid figures. The leaves had a certain rigidity to them, and did not feel brittle. There were several round, flat, rough stones of dark green hue, one side of each housed a deeply but crudely carved image--they were idols, and they had been left face down. Next to these, two small axes with long but thin bell-shaped blades. They were thoroughly stained dark. Furthest from the scholar was a mask with a simple strap to hold around the back of the head. It was made from the face of a human skull.
The old scholar looked out his eastern window into the night. A little under a mile from the manor, just over the gently rising land, the tall, dark mound seemed to make its presence known. He gave a shaky sigh, and began to drag his pen across the journal.
"I have long held suspicions about the Croach Knoll, and late last night they were, to my horror, proven true. The first seed of its reputation was sown by the local folk upon my arrival and initial inquiries into the surrounding land, as I am wont to do in my profession. Once they learned I was take up residence in the late, or so it had been deemed, Lord Berech Soor's manor--I say manor, but it's hardly kin to the sprawling manses of the heartland--they grew sullen, and one hard-faced fellow told me to take care in the old house. Even now I can't tell if it was a warning, or a threat."
"About a week after this, I took a visit to the knoll, eyed by every single farmer, labourer, and wanderer on my way there. It lay in a bleak, windswept stretch of open country, the kind of place that makes one feel as if they were caught in the open. I thought it a lonely place, distant from civilization, from humanity, and then as I ascended, distant from any and all benevolent divinity. All I can say is that there is an...atmosphere to that place. Old, older than the land around it, in a way I cannot adequately describe. Weary and crooked. Bestial. What I chiefly remember was my repulsion by the belt of dark, twisting trees and their feotid air which the nature there used to bar my progress at every turn. I caught but a single glimpse of what I now know to be several ragged stone monoliths, arrayed like a crown upon the summit."
"The final horror came later. I had been assigned by the Lord Provost to catalogue and sell a number of the house's possessions as I saw fit, so that the college could keep the manor under their rule. Lord Berech had been a college man himself, an anthropologist of high esteem, but in latter months became negligent of his duties and, apparently, a little too independent, or so some felt. He was an appointed Keeper, and the manor was a stronghold of fine relics. But I must cut a long story short: in taking stock of the fine but increasingly strange collection he had amassed, I knocked open, by mistake, a hollow panel in a corner of the library."
"I knew what they were, and I knew Lord Berech knew what they were. He had passed long out of theory, and into practice. I can only guess at what brought him to this decision. Indeed, we as a civilized people can only guess at why some others retreat back into this darkness. Perhaps they tire of distant gods and the promise of aid to come, and so seek closer, earthier gods they can feel...and see..."
"I am certain Lord Berech found the items I leave alongside this journal at Croach Knoll."
"There can be no doubt about it now--it is the seat of a survival of an ancient cult. There was a reason mankind fled the worship of the old gods. In a dark time before the rise of iron-fisted kings, before the colleges and Lord Provosts, wild bands of barbarians roamed the lands, clad in black beast skins and wielding wicked weapons of crudely wrought iron, forged in fires fuelled by the bones of their enemies and victims. Life was short and brutal, red from beginning to end. No death was natural, all was violence, and gazing down from their temples, cackling with demoniac glee, were the blood-totems and devil-icons of gods whose names have been struck from history, things to whom mankind brayed like animals for glory and power."
"No mild communal worship or feast days were given over to them, only ecstasy and orgy, vile rites performed not because the actions held any innate mysticism, but because the gods revelled in chaos and bloodshed. To kill and conquer drew favour from them, to spare none the strength of one's muscle and cunning filled them with black mirth. To those who performed darker and more obscene acts, the gods gave powers with which to further spread suffering. A witch's holocaust of unending war with no honour or humanity. Until the quivering masses of slaves finally fled in a mass exodus and left the warlords and sorcerers to tear each other to shreds, abandoning the gods for whom they were merely playthings and cattle."
"And that darksome knoll is a seat of this cult's survival. A place where, on sightless deep nights, sickly fires are lit and rituals of detestation are performed with the fervour of mad beasts. Other places such as this exist elsewhere, and have been destroyed. I can only pray that Lord Berech had no fellows in his unspeakable ceremonies, that he broke through alone that bleak veil on the hilltop and found waiting for him the objects of evil worship, granted with expectant eagerness by the slumbering horrors which thirst eternally for chaos, and not by the hands of secret faithful."
"I dare say I know the reason for the locals' change of attitude towards me. I suspect some of their number have...gone missing."
"I shall smash to bits each of these vile relics, then petition the college's authority to burn that dread thicket down and topple the monoliths which crown it. I have contemplated a return to the knoll to seek the remains of Lord Berech...but I fear for what I should find there."
Astral Shadow
"I have taken this task upon myself. Thus begins the account of my investigation."
"Never have I projected so far from my flesh, and I believe now I am open to higher sensations normally unseen to the regular astral wayfarer. And yet, my way here was lonely, for these planes are often populated with the shimmers of astral bodies of my fellow magicians, each on their own quest. Now, it is silent, so afeared are we all of what has been seen. Nevertheless, the thread which binds me to material existence is thin--I have seen it flicker. I am close to a state beyond. Any further and I shall take the great journey before I am ready."
"It is impossible to describe even the first three spheres with language designed for lips and teeth and tongues, and I am unable to truly choose the words my auto-nous shall use. But I shall attempt to give an impression of this empyrean majesty into which I have plunged after three full months of intense ascetic and mystical preparation. It is not the object of my quest, but I have never been one to pass up an opportunity, regardless of the results."
"You who reads this account can see my ritual chamber, where I myself have fashioned the right angles, the correct depth of the carven sigils on their specific surfaces, the purity of my golden talismans, and, dare I say, the artistry of my celestial dome. The cloud of Yagor petal-mist may even still hang about me, helping induce the trance so necessary to my work. My robes and cap show the heavens and what lies beyond, I am garbed in the universe itself."
"The higher spheres are beyond mortal words, yet here I see flashes of what filters down below. Know that here, colour and sound are as one, and I believe somewhere within it all is a heady fragrance I might dimly compare to a rich incense, it makes my head swim--or would, had I a head and not an astral ideal. I believe this is intentional. Also there is touch here, and I can feel the vibrational texture of colour-frequencies, as well the slickness of the incense. I see radiance-white-softness upon the pure-blue-hardness almost like crystal. I see vigor-crimson-wet flowing through it all. Force-purple-smooth, quite royal in its own way, exists as a base to all things--the cosmos is noble in intent. The hot-yellow-slick pulses in a way I do not like. But it is in answer to something between the frequencies. Something dark."
"I get the impression of a temple here. This sphere, the seventh, is a sacred space."
"If this indeed be the place wherefrom sanctity of all kinds impresses itself upon our reality, then no wonder the world is in such a state."
"There is something in this temple."
"Something dark."
"Perception is not inward, it is outward, my thoughts are shaping what I perceive--or rather, this sphere is perceiving my thoughts. It is also perceiving the thought-impacts of intense experiences from travellers before me. I think I am being warned. This is what was seen. The eighth sphere is godhood as we understand it below. But what I understand here is something else. I am thinking truth, cold, hard, absolute and immutable truth, and this sphere perceives it. About now my corporeal body ought to be slowly making the Signs of Mung and Kaphosh, which shall be held until I return."
"I procured these symbols-made-in-flesh at the expense of a human life. Please understand it was necessary."
"Truth is being revealed by my thoughts."
"I can see it"
"Gods and ancestors I can see it"
"I have seen the Archetypes which are threaded throughout the spheres. They are beyond the spheres, where I cannot go. I have seen the slices of the cosmos which lay in their various grasps, and I have wound through their fingers. Not even Myremno of Kalamme glimpsed this in her Visions of the Gulf. Woe be it that she couldn't. Yet they grasp all the universe with a frightful tenderness. They cower, as is it were, over what they are/make. I call to them in ten thousand words."
"Please do not take it"
"The shadow from beyond the spheres comes"
"DO NOT LET IT-"
At this point, the mechanical auto-nous which had been performing this lengthy automatic writing session seems to have suffered a catastrophic breakdown and was found scattered across the floor in pieces. The body of the magician, who had ritually undergone a severing of his name, was found by marauders in the old abandoned tower, seared black, hands still in the signs of Mung and Kaphosh.
Prophets of Silence
There is no quiet in this world. There is no stillness. No serenity, no peace. All is motion, and noise.
But this was not always so.
Once before, there was an illimitable tranquillity.
This world of cities and people and stars and far off spheres, of the fate they weave and the order they impose, of life and death, of the fleeting cycle of suffering and joy, all this was born of Sound, of the shrill vibration that disturbed the silent void. And thus did a cosmos spread and each vibration find frequency in life and its motions.
But now the sound is coming to a close, and the agitation of the primeval calm recedes. This will be a time of boundless sorrow and darkness, for as the sound begins to waver, as it has begun to do but faintly, it will become dissonant, disharmonic, and the sound--this experiential world and cosmos--will falter and wane and become a living hellish.
It is better now to silence it.
We prophets have heard the quiet between the dropping echoes, and have ourselves have gone quiet though we are things of sound. It is the way of things to be silent, and we have given space in ourselves for silence. Come to us and see us, and bear witness to miracles of silence, of the primeval and tranquil void, the quiet and the static which we let be upon your sickness and ills, your madness, your nightmares, your fears.
What is our lot in life but to be drowned out in the chaos of cosmic cacophany? Even in death we rot and there is noise, the worm and vermin feasting--there is no rest in the end, for even the mind echoes on as a disturbance. Chaos and oblivion, these are your choices. We beseech you now: choose oblivion, choose the tranquillity of not-being and take into your hands the reins of the fate of the universe. Let not yourself and your loved ones--those minor notes of joy in the noise--let them not suffer for generations as the Sound of All peters out to a helpless whimper. Say no, and speak not. Be silent.
Join us.
Tomb of the Stars
The burden beasts snorted impatiently in the rain. It was that odd kind of persistent, thick drizzle--not terribly heavy, but constant. Like a veil of water draped about everything around it. It was the kind of rain that came from a violent tearing of the upper air, which only every happened when a star fell.
Brother Aka jumped down from the driver's seat, black robe heavy with damp. Brother Loq had already dismounted the small covered wagon and was preparing the sodden gold shroud with which they would carry the star. In truth, Brother Aka savoured this weather. There was an air of occasion to it, a kind of soft atmospheric lament or dirge for the passing of a divine body, and its softness symbolized for him the gentle intimacy of the whole affair. Brother Loq liked the rain because it made it easier to fall asleep at night.
It wasn't an especially sizeable specimen of its kind, easily carried between the two, which they were thankful for. There had been starfalls in past ages that had required entire teams of labourers to move. Hence why tombs had transitioned from small, labyrinthine earthen passages into sprawling stone crypts. It had also cooled considerably since its fall a day before, which made carrying it far easier, but as relatively cool as they may become, they can never be handled bare. All the same, the warm through the gold shroud was quite pleasant in the cold weather. They both looked forward to a brief sojourn in the star tomb, which never really lost its warmth, before going back to the somewhat draughty monastery.
The star looked like a dark core, reflected and displaced through a thick veil of smooth, wavering, opaque glass. That core, it was believed, was a kind of fuel source, or lifespan, and the glassy exterior gave the light its shape, as it were. The way it shone far above. There'd be much consulting of the astrosophical charts over the next few days, perhaps weeks, to determine where this one fell from. Considering it was so small, long nights in the celesium looked to be on the way, gazing through layers and layers of lenses at patches of night sky, placing old films of dotted star charts over them to compare what was once there, and what no longer is there. Laborious work, but of great spiritual import.
Brother Aka undid the seven great clasps on the star tomb gate. Lamentable that such security was needed, but blasphemies from long ago had convinced certain enterprising and uncouth folk that stars could be made into weapons. And what terrible weapons they might be if the order hadn't entombed them centuries ago and led crusades to reclaim stolen stars. The corpse of a heavenly body was no weapon, it was a potent relic of the cosmos, which held even in its inert state some of that outer essence. The two monks were reminded of this as they picked up their charge and began to descend the wide, shallow steps past the inner section of the gate. No need to throw open the whole thing to the world, lest it catch a glimpse of what lay below.
All stars sat within their own niches in the walls. There were no empty lots here, awaiting occupants. Only one, which had been swiftly prepared the day before by well-paid masons. The fall had been fast, and the retrieval faster. Normally the monks would hack a place into the stone themselves, but time was of the essence here. They wouldn't leave it to linger anywhere unscrupulous hands might be laid upon it.
For all it was a tomb, the air shifted and was unquiet. There was something like a hushed movement, never near them, but just out of sight. It felt, to Brother Aka, like the interior of the monastery, as if reverent figures were coming and going in some important task. To Brother Loq there was an air of nervous anticipation to it, as if something kept making check on something else. They quietly discussed the stories of other, much older tombs, whose interred stars numbered in the hundreds. Brother Aka once spoke to an old abbot who had visited one of the continent's oldest tombs, and with a curious glint in his eye, the abbot had said that so full of stars was it, that it held the aspect of "a depth of outer space itself". Looking about the velvet darkness, they had an inkling of what he meant.
The niche for the new star wasn't too far in. The air was warm, and quite dry. The alcove was a little more crude than many of the others around it, but it would do. The workmen who had been paid to excavate it had been quite blessed, mused Brother Aka. Brother Loq didn't reveal what he'd heard in the dining hall, of workmen rushing away the second their payment was handed over, with cold, uneasy looks in their eyes.
The two monks paid their due respects to the stars below with a single prayer each, and left in silence. For some time after they had left, the air began to grow darker and darker, and in the pitch black of an unlit chamber of heavy shadows, there shimmered in the air a small streak of light, like the coloured nebulae of the far off cosmos.
Plateau Spires
Far out beyond the golden grass vastlands where low, wide trees shimmer with emerald leaves in midday suns, then deep within the red, dusty badlands where buttes and mesas of curious form rise like the trunks of twisted, petrified trees worn smooth by desert storms, there rises quite suddenly from the earth a vast tableland. The rock is sandy and coarse, and cloven with countless small, winding ingresses forming rising canyons between the towering plateau walls. Could it be seen as the bird sees it, this jutting land's edges would look rugose and withered, so numerous are the thin paths which lead to the otherwise immense and unbroken summit.
But so too would such a bird see that which gave rise to the hundreds of crevices worn down by the tools of the all too curious.
In centuries past, tribes clung to the plateau edges for shelter, and there received strange, dim dreams. Half-glimpsed imagery none could guess the nature of, yet it fascinated those ancient humans, and the plateau became of intense religious import. Although natural entry points existed as gentler slopes and high alcoves, it was the pick and hammer of the old tribes that took what nature had started and finished it, so that they might stand atop this mount of heaven.
In the distance upon the summit does one spy them, sitting alone in the middle of the plateau. They rise like fine strands into the unclear badlands sky, disappearing perhaps into haze, cloud, or through some unseen veil. They taper ever so slightly, and there is both a stark black and silvery sheen to their form that becomes far more pronounced as one encroaches upon them. Whether they are stained black or worn chrome is hard to tell. Imagine a thinly spread forest of tall, leafless, branchless metal trunks, and amidst it, the crackle and buzz of unseen energy, a nervous tension waiting to snap and break forth.
No one knows what the spires are. But they send mankind dreams, or rather, they send visions. What is seen in sleep amidst the spires is unseen anywhere else in all the world, if the tales be true. Dreams come in many forms throughout the world, often reflections of the past, or sometimes the future, of secrets and hidden meaning. But the images which come to the minds of sleepers amidst the spires are undeniably of a single kind. They are not reflections of any time or place in this world, it is felt, being so utterly beyond the experience of common humanity. And so countless pilgrims, of a kind, come to this place to experience for themselves the visions of what must surely be a divine realm.
Not every one of the alcoves and canyons in the plateau slopes lead to the summit. A bare few, it is whispered amongst the caravans and camps which come and go through the sprawling town which hugs the wide tableland base, lead instead inside the plateau, into a hollow world of cold, labyrinthine passages, cut with a precision unmatched anywhere else. Great glass veils and screens hang and are fit into walls, lightless and as clean as a lake surface on a windless day. A thrumming echoes from a depth not thought even possible, for the bravest explorers of old plumbed the plateau's innards for days at a time and still couldn't find the source.
It is supposed by those who believe the stories to be a fortress of the gods from long ago, and the spires perhaps trails of hardened magma from when gods flew into the sky. What caused them to flee or retreat, if it was such, and people feel somehow it is, none can say. Such is the nature of the plateau and its spires.