Shadows & Sorcery #82
My goodness, it really is, in the flesh, the eighty-second edition of Shadows & Sorcery!
What’s going on here? Just five fresh tales for everyone to utterly consume as they see fit. Five glimpses of strange, dark worlds to get your brains itching. You know the drill!
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This week, we join two soldiers in a desperate battle against the war-god’s champion who bears the dreaded Armor of Sacrifices, we journey alongside strange priests into the Cavern of the Nightmare, we ponder upon the nature of Chaos Madness, we strike deep into the Depths of Storm, and lastly we witness the birth of the frightful Hunters of the Night…
Armor of Sacrifices
They had that particular bond soldiers can only forge over a long campaign, drafted from distant villages into a conflict they knew little about, marching side by side day in and day out, scraping through more close calls than they could remember, celebrating precious few victories, and huddling close as night and defeat crept in. It was a camaraderie that wasn't quite friendship or kinship, but something more animal. And what they saw now worldlessly spelled the potential end of it.
The great cuirass was emblazoned with the finely detailed visage of the one-eyed war-god, tusks and fangs and mane flaring in a silent, steel-wrought snarl. The armour's ceremonial decoration didn't hinder its brutal practicality--the whole thing was edges and spikes, plate meant not to absorb blows but to plow forward in the offense. Not that it wasn't chipped, dented, and terribly abused, every surface bore the brunt of the champion's lust for blood sacrifice, and there wasn't a speck of it that wasn't drenched in crimson, both fresh and rotten.
No less then fifty of their fellows had fallen to the war-god's chosen this day, and now it stared at the two of them from across the mud and filth of the blasted earth.
To be slain by the champion, to have one's blood spilled upon that fiend-wrought plate was doom. The might and terror of the war-god was such that should a person's blood fall upon its altar-armour, that person was symbolically taken prisoner and offered up. Prisoners of war are an immensely valuable resource, as leverage, sources of information, and slave labour. To cast them aside as blood offerings was a potent act. These champions were intended to circumvent the deaths of useful prisoners by slaying useless footsoldiers. Everyone in the various militias knew of these tireless berserkers, and there was no punishment their commanders or lords could dream up that matched the dread even the rumor of a champion could muster.
Great cleaving blade held out, the warrior roared as it threw itself forth at the two. One good blow from that thing would spell death, and the soul of the fallen would be shackled to the nightmare brass throne of the war-god for all time. Trying to parry it would be useless, no matter how good their shields were, and the battlefields of the past few months had offered up some rather good spoils. They might only be able to spare a single blow each, but they'd rather avoid such close calls.
The cleaver howled through the air, flinging congealed droplets in an arc as it barely missed the face of the soldier closest. He fell back, crouching low, whipping his head for only a second to his comrade. She returned his wild gaze and began circling the champion. Were there even eyes behind that grill? A human face? Or just gnashing teeth? There was no time to think--the champion came in again with an overhead swing, the soldier skidded through the mud avoiding it, but as he recovered, the champion was already rushing forward to strike him with its shoulder.
She dashed forward, raking her sword edge across the warrior's plate, grabbing its attention. It swung its free arm out, intending to knock her back, but she ducked under the arm, and sought to drive the tip of her blade through some exposed joint. What was exposed, though, was covered in chain and a layer of rotten blood, impossible to discern in the moment. She hesitated and found the pommel of the cleaver colliding with the side of her helmet. Her vision faltered and she was thrown aside.
The champion's mailled fist grabbed her by the neck and she strained the escape. But her fellow rushed in and landed his axe upon the crook of the champion's sword arm--it cried out as its arm drooped from the impact, throwing his comrade away. Oaths of black vengeance in the sacral tongue of war were spat and hissed and shrieked as the two soldiers circled the champion, keeping their eyes upon its cleaver. It was like an executioners sword, quite fitting, though the end of the thick blade ended flat, with two "hooks" on either side. He guessed that the backspike of his axe would have a better chance of piercing that plate than her sword point, but if some gap could be found, the sword would do the trick quicker.
But they had no time to plan as the war-god's chosen wheeled about, selecting a sacrifice. The stench of death which emanated from it overpowered that of the battlefield. Corpses in various stages of dismemberment were strewn about the courtyard they had found themselves boxed into. This thing had pushed them singlehandedly from the keep, which was burning down before them. The gate chains had been cut and they were sealed in. No one to even witness this last stand but the monstrous god which lusted in its fiery realm for their souls.
Dodging about this thing would only get them so far, and they knew so. Alas, it was only a matter of moments before the champion made a bestial lunge he couldn't get far enough away from. He heard her scream from beyond the champion. He felt one of those hooks rake across his stomach, tearing it open. Blood and more spilled forth, steaming, and the soldier fell.
No, she thought. No, not here, and not to this thing.
She had to be quick. He had minutes left, at best. One good spot was all she needed, one space through which to drive her blade to the hilt, to send this dread war-god chosen to its master's realm. The thing let out a gurgling bellow of triumph. She took the moment: barrelling forth, she leapt, rolled, and grabbed her comrade's axe. She spun it around so the backspike was held forward. Her sword might not work at first, but with a space made for it?
It snapped its eyes to her, and it seemed almost as if the eye of the war-god's visage turned to her as well. Such ornamented armour, she wondered. Sacrifices had to be made for it. She'd seen knights in ceremonial parade armour--the stuff was useless, as some of those knights had found out personally. Either too heavy to be used practically...or too thin. She banked on the latter. A monster this was, but even these berserkers must have their limits. No sense weighing them down.
She side-stepped a downward slash which cleft the ground, but in a second the blade was out and she didn't risk an attack then. It sent its fist out but in a flash she crossed her two weapons and rebounded the plated limb away. It whirled around in a great circular strike. This was it. This could clean remove her head, or leave the champion open to an attack. The slash clanged off the very tip of her helmet, sending a single hard shock through her head--but she was seeing red already, and with a single almighty thrust, she planted the axe's backspike into the eye of the war-god cuirass. It passed clean through like a spear through parchment. The champion staggered.
She slid her hand just under the axe-head and pulled the weapon out, and before the champion could grab her, she flung the axe down and prayed the tear in the plate was large enough. With two hands, her broadsword ran through through the champion's chest with a sickening sound. It blindly grasped at her as its cleaver dropped into the mud. She pushed the blade as far as it would go, before pushing the champion over, its frothing and hissing becoming more spasmodic as life left whatever face might lie behind that helmet. It was reaching from its cleaver--for the fresh blood on the end of it. She kicked it away.
She knelt by her fellow as he took his last breath. He wasn't going to leave this courtyard. But neither was he going to join the war-god's champion. Its hand was still up, curled like a dead spider, grasping at something in its final moments only it could see. She didn't bury her comrade, but she took the simple little charm that hung about his neck. It was the most a soldier could do, to carry their fellows on somehow, or deliver elsewhere than the hell of the battlefield.
Cavern of the Nightmare
Within the lower depths of the many-chambered skull of Great T'ela, there lies a secret. It is a dark secret, not an evil secret, but it is not good, and there is about it a peril. It is, of course, a powerful secret. Goodness may not always hold power, goodness often is small and tranquil, but evil and darkness do hold power, always. This is the way of the world. The line between darkness and evil is very fine, because darkness is strange, not evil, and it may be used for good sometimes. This is the hope of the somaphage priests who glimpse the nightmare deep wiithin T'ela.
It can only be reached by a great journey. Up from the valleys of the ribs, which cradle all the children of T'ela, past the many arms of T'ela which the somaphages must partake of, and then past the mountains which are the spine of T'ela, where they sup only from the old blood. This communion allows the priests to become a little like T'ela, and they need such strength to finally descend into the cavern-skull. It is a sacred space, beyond the heart, beyond the loins, and the divine anatomy whose secrets are known only to holy eaters.
Upon the cavern walls are all the hopes and ideas T'ela had for the world. They are thoughts and dreams so strong they left a mark upon the seat of the mind. And then T'ela became the world: dreams and thoughts into flesh and form. The priests who, back in the comfortable valleys, go into the warm dark of T'ela and there eat slivers of the heart, they say they feel the love T'ela had for the world. But there is a flutter in the heart that only those acquainted with communion arts can properly discern. Lesser priests believe it to be tenderness. Learned sages know it to be fear. Few know what it is.
Such were the thoughts of T'ela that there came flesh and form. T'ela made these thoughts after T'ela slept each night, and awoke from dreams to think upon them. So, from dream, there came thought, and from thought, hope. But the somaphages who make the quest across the mountains, who partake of communion at every step, when they go into the deepest parts of the many-chambered skull of Great T'ela, there is a little pool of total blackness. The somaphages imbibe it in small drops upon their tongues, which have the blood of T'ela still on them, and once in their bellies where the flesh of T'ela still is, the blackness mixes, and the somaphages can see what they have come to know as the Nightmare.
T'ela had hopes for the world, but T'ela also had fears. It is said T'ela once had a nightmare so dark and terrible that it seeped into all of the thoughts and hopes of T'ela as fragility, and so there is suffering and death in the world. But this was not a failing of T'ela, for the fears were born only from the love of T'ela. More importantly, and perhaps T'ela did not intend this and so it is a terribly sacred act, the existence of the nightmare and the black pool allows the somaphages to see things only T'ela knew about.
The Cavern of the Nightmare is consulted only in dire times, and the priests go there to imbibe the nightmare and inscribe all they see, which are all the possible dooms and terrors the world might experience. It is an oracle chamber of absolute last resort, and its prophecies are grim, but they are useful, for the fears were not hopeless, and had in them cures. It is curious that these answers lie about us all the time, but it takes disaster and fear to know them as answers. Perhaps T'ela intended this.
Nevertheless, somaphages who visit the Cavern of the Nightmare do not like it, and they come away with a disquiet which lasts them their whole lives. They see the weakness in the world, and leave life with the same trembling hope that it is believed T'ela felt as T'ela became the world.
Chaos Madness
You don't understand.
Really, what does the word describe? In truth, words cannot, for words are an order and system, and this thing is bereft of all reason and logic and sense. Chaos, and I mean real chaos, is unthinking, formless, aimless, seething, numb. But chaos is not nothing, it is not a void, it's not nothing, it is simply no one thing.
Words begin to fail at this point, and we haven't even really begun.
You still don't have a grasp of what chaos really is. You have to have it in your head--which of course denotes a boundary, a specific, and thus in some sense a kind of order or existence within a system, defeating the purpose! It has to be gained in some spontaneous way, you need to have the feel of it, to truly take a grasp at it. It's a sense more than a coherent thought or idea. Every description of mayhem and anarchy and disorder and pandemonium, they approach various flavours and extents of chaos, but never the absolute. And that's where everyone fails, if it is failure, and not the only possible outcome of the meeting between beings of laws and systems, that ARE laws and systems, and something wholly unmade and unmakeable.
I'm sure you can sense my words growing feverish, but really it crowds to the tip of the pen and threatens to consume the parchment. Scholars have sought chaos for centuries. Millennia. This shadow always passes across learned minds. And thus does madness begin to creep upon the soul, and not always does it come unbidden...
Madness is a break from reality. What is reality? A system. A set of laws, and ordering force or collection of coherent ideas. Madness is born from chaos, from true chaos. It removes the sufferer, if sufferer they indeed are, from the finer points of order. Only when one cannot grasp the laws of the universe can one grasp chaos. Perhaps it is for this reason the temples have banned so much of the old tracts and tomes written by those strange old pagan philosophers. Maybe they knew things certain people would kill to know now. I bet they saw things, too. Where all our old myths came from. Not that silencing all this has stopped madness from appearing in the world, in far and lonely places where there is no salve of reason physicians can apply to the warped mind.
Oh, if only you could see what years of madness does to a body. What it can become. Or unbecome. And the things you can do when you're mad. When you're free. Maybe you will see. After all, the wilds out east are getting more dangerous by the day. I think the reason is that, a while back, someone found something. But of course, reason wouldn't be the word for it, would it?
Depths of Storm
So long as Magister Ngarloth holds out, these enchantments may see us to the uttermost depths of Storm. They've kept us dry for three day's travel, and for that we're beyond glad--the rain hits like a wall sometimes, other times like a thousand daggers, but we suffer nothing more than some cold and sore skin. I wish I could say the same for the land we traverse, there are sections here I am sure were once grassland, maybe even forests, but if so, they haven't known green in aeons. We've passed through seas of mud here, many fathoms deep and ever shifting. That's the real peril of this land, aside from the bestial winds which sometimes threaten to lift us off our feet entirely, or bury us under some cascading wall of muck.
The rest is islands of rock--likely the foundations of hillocks, or the remains of mountains. I do not believe any peak exists here any longer, if they ever did. The stone is smooth, like polished glass, but misshapen and eternally slick with thin layers of water. Eroded into long, nearly flat surfaces, they're terribly eerie in the dismal grey light, though sometimes very stark when the light grows and Storm...well, it doesn't abate, but it shifts slightly, a welcome momentary reprieve. I believe this is a piece of Storm breaking off to relieve its burden over some far land. In those moments the light is brighter, and the landscape looks exhausted, rather than heaving with tempest.
Those small pieces of Storm dissipate, which makes us think there must be something--much like our enchantments--that perpetuates or otherwise sustains this One and Great Storm. This must be deliberate, be it by some primal spell of man or gods we've yet to find. I can barely sleep at night thinking of the potential which may dwell within this Storm Land. I dream of returning to the cities and holding high the source of Storm, an everlasting power source, or some wisdom with which to make our own.
And I fear of that power being used to stir up war again. Imagine a new Storm conjured over a capital, making it not merely unapproachable, but uninhabitable. I shudder to think of the evils. I fear returning with warnings and omens, too. That this quest is turning over a rock best left untouched. That Storm is not a fortress, but a prison. I'm sure the others have thought this in their private moments. But what are we to do? The world looks forward with a terribly fragile hope.
The lightning playing in the black clouds has a brutal beauty to it. Many times have we survived assaults from bolts cast down at us. I say that as if I know there is intelligence, but I don't, and I reserve that thought until signs of it appear. We have been unable to either call them down willingly nor belay their strikes. And yet, though we've born witness to pillars of thunder wider than palaces in the distance, and the dance of phalanxes of lightning all too close, never once have they hit us. They get close, enough to feel the ripple of raw energy on the skin, but never enough to more than give us a jump.
I have never known air to reach such speed as to feel solid. Earlier on today we were met with a rushing gale so fierce that we could not penetrate it. It knocked us back every time. We followed its direction until it diverged or dissipated, though it nearly cost us a life in a rushing rapids of mud. The fellow's environment suit was nearly rent from some twisting, it would have been the end right there I fear, but he was pulled onto a rock flat.
We were rebuffed on what I believe is the fifth day. Nearly a full week of travel into Storm. Time became difficult to manage in the curious half-light of sun and lightning through the vast murk above, so we measured our days by periods of sleep. We had managed to find purchase in the wall of air, and were met with the strangest sensation I have ever felt. It's hard to describe, but the air within that bulwark felt heavy. As if there was an actual, genuine weight upon us and around us. It was different to battling the winds. It was like moving through water. Hard to breathe, too. Cold and moist it was, with a curious scent to it I cannot place. It continued to rain slowly with large heavy drops.
There was the odd shift of that air every so often, which made us all look about. The roar of Storm wasn't far off, but it was dulled in the miasma. Suddenly, the land which had undulated began to rise steeply, and though smooth and wet, it was covered in scree and rubble. Fine, small grit, some of it almost like coarse sand. We hadn't seen anything like this before. I took samples, little of which survived.
In the haze of the thick air, near the summit of this great mound, we saw something. And it is this which makes me believe we were repulsed. That we were warned. Sudden blasts cut through the oppression, knocking several of our number to the ground, appearing from nowhere and dissipated just as fast. It was Yhan Kolek who saw it first and saw it best, calling out that there was something up there, and it was he who died for it, so let his name never be forgotten. Thrown down the mound by a gust like a charging beast, we found his body battered and broken.
I still think about what he said before he died, moments later. The tense stillness of that air began to erupt as he spoke, and I think some collective spirit of ours recognized the situation. The kind an animal knows when it is being threatened. We fled as the thunder boomed like hammer blows in our heads, and had to leave him behind. But those words stayed with me, with all of us, through the bulwark of wind, through the lakes of mud and drenched flats, and perhaps were more important to return home than his sundered flesh. Very simply, in the uttermost eye of that eternal tempest, he saw, unmistakable as aught else, silhouetted against the darksome sky and bleared sunlight, a tower. Ragged stone, smoothed and weather-beaten, but there it was, peering out amidst the storm-haze.
I saw but a flash of it, but the vision of it has haunted me every single moment since.
Hunters of the Night
We know that immersion in an element can make fundamental changes to the matter immersed. This goes for all kinds of elemental expressions, such as immersion in roaring flames or deep underwater, wood immersed in metal and vice versa, or something placed for a time amidst tempestuous winds, or in the earth. But above all else are those most primal elements of the world, the light and the dark.
The lore upon this subject alone, and not even how it pertains to other arts and trades, fills entire libraries from floor to ceiling across the realm. Most folk in the world make use of it in some way, passing down methods and potential applications through their oral traditions. Scholars scour the small villages and other settlements to record this ancestral wisdom for refinement.
Not that this natural wonder hasn't been abused in the past, but nothing has ever really happened to muddy the reputation of an entire element. That was, until the Hunters of the Night.
Warriors have been immersing their arms and armour in elements for centuries, and most popular among them is immersion in light. Light is weight. It is hardness and solidity, it defines the more of it there is and the stronger it is, and so there are suits of plate able to withstand blows from cannon fire nary a foot away. These are nigh-legendary, of course, since both the intensity of light and elemental exclusion--that is, creating an elementally pure environment--is a difficult process.
But then, someone (history does not remember their name, for better or worse) decided to try it the other way. Immerse armour and weapons within a pure darkness. Dark is softness, sightlessness, and silence, it does not define, but rather leaves certain things to the subjective imagination. This makes working with darkness tricky, and why it tended to be left to the side in most works.
The armour was removed from its crucible, and when donned by a fighter, the fellow seemed to not quite vanish, but become hazy. Something of his definition was lost, a bleariness, or softening of the outlines that only became more pronounced as he moved away. And what's more, he made almost no sound and could move with a surprising speed. The weapon was a spear, which became naught but a shaft of shadow and was all the deadlier for it. Thus was the secret out, and various lords paid handsomely for the process.
Then the first of the Hunters rode forth one night, veritably invisible in the murk of dusk, and laid terror upon their lord's enemies.
Shadows flitted out in the night from the keeps and manors of petty lords and would-be kings in a secret war whose bloody echoes rippled across the land as rumors of raised villages and burnt towers. And in the depths of ancestral mansions, stalking silently across the flagstone, black armoured hulks slipped into the bedchambers of enemy nobles and their kin, and slew them, looking like the spectres of death itself. Borders and estates shifted size and ownership each and every morning, until the land began to run out of lords to rule it, and all was under the sway of a band of frightful shades.
It wasn't long before outside powers noticed and intervened. Elite forces converged upon the land, and found the masses huddled in terror of the night, when their shutters were fastened tight and the whispering of shadowy steeds as fleet as a gale passed within a hair's breadth of their homes.
In an ironic twist, it was a light-immersed blade which brought the Hunter down, a fact which only fuelled the increasing dreadful reputation of dark works. It took the lives of over a dozen soldiers to subdue and slay it--it, for when the casque was removed, and the armour stripped away, what lay beneath it all no longer resembled a human being, and clearly hadn't for some time.
Immersion within an element can make fundamental changes to the matter immersed. That goes for flesh as much as anything else. And so the balance can be tipped in favour of something else, as had been happening with the Hunters of the Night. The armour was lighter than their own skin, while armour of light was only ever worn rarely. The others were never captured, but vigils remain to observe their appearances, and eventual dissolution. It is believed they can still be seen on some nights, in lonely places where villages used to dwell, or skulking the halls of old castles. They are but wraiths now, fully of dark, lightless, soundless, soon to be unseeable, and soon to be formless.
The world will be able to move on then. Or perhaps in such a state we really will have a reason to fear the dark. Time will tell.