Shadows & Sorcery #83
Stop right there, it’s the eighty-third edition of Shadows & Sorcery!
So this week took on a theme all by mistake, which has happened before, so I let it form. Awaiting you all are five ghoulish tales of undead horror and strangeness, full of corpse walkers and liches and more!
Now, very quickly, as I said last week, S&S passed a modest subscriber milestone not too long ago and I’ve begun putting further plans together for new content jazz up this publication. What I want to ask you all is there anything you’d like to see? Behind the scenes info? Glances at WIPs? Reader submitted material? Or perhaps narrated episodes? Illustrated e-book collections of stories? Maybe even guest writers?
Please leave a comment, I won’t bite much!
Also, the next chapter of The Path of Poison is coming very soon, and things are gonna get weird.
Anyway, if you liked what you read here, give that little heart icon a tap, and tell the stories you like them!
This week, we witness the creation of the Palace of the Dead, we feel the bleak touch of the Winds of Defilement, we join a desperate quest for the Charnel Flame, we learn what lies at the center of the Defiled Labyrinth, and we do our best to avoid wandering into a War Wilderness…
Palace of the Dead
We will likely never know why, but that doesn't matter now. The recently dead began to rise. The charnel houses, the morgues, the wake chambers, all became unquiet, suddenly shuddering into animation. Panic ensued as silent, shambling forms deserted the towns and villages, vanishing into the wilderness.
Was it sorcery? The work of some nameless dark deity? The militant arms of the great cults banged mailled fists on council tables and proclaimed their time had come once more, and crusades would sweep the lands again, and darkness once more be repulsed from the earth.
The carnage began almost immediately. Orders of warrior priests and paladins rode out every dawn, bedecked in gold and red and purple and green and carrying great banners of the same, the colours of holiness, life, and the sovereign might of the gods. Warriors of a particularly zealous bent gathered and formed militias beholden to patron spirits, riding out with the hopes of holy ordination against this new threat. In the first battles, or rather assaults, it became abundantly clear that the dead were dead--they could not be slain, let alone harmed. Each one was a walking bulwark, and no matter the grisly damage dealt, they carried on, a ghastly tide of spilled blood and severed flesh.
And then, word from the far provinces, as the dead continued their silent march: no more was there a macabre carpet of the sundered dead. Yes the horde had grown considerably, but they were whole, all of them. Spies who trailed them, learning that they could get fairly close, watched them stumble, watched accidents befall them, beasts attack them, and every time, they would simply put themselves back together and smooth out the wounds. Like wiping away spilled water.
The dead continued to face assaults from the crusaders, but unlike before, they were now fighting back. A cognizance had come into them, and they now defended themselves. It was war, then. There were easily hundreds of them out there, in the east, and with every attack from the crusaders, that number rose. Neither steel nor flame destroyed them, though fire did the most damage. Blades anointed with holy oils were ignited and smote the undead in frightful blazing displays, but no matter the skill of the fighter, the charred flesh and severed limbs were replaced with little issue.
And then the undead began what the cults believed to be the counter-assault. In the unsullied and slumbering graveyards of the living world, dreadful shadows were seen to lurk, what mankind came to know as necromancers. These were sorcerers, the high priests knew, undead wizards dragging from the earth by evil will the peaceful dead, making mockeries of the shrines to the ancestors. This began the grim War of the Burial Grounds, and the crusaders were recalled to their homelands to battle with this new, insidious threat.
But while the crusaders were away, the undead set to work. They had only small contingents of ordained militias to contend with, and their zeal, and their training, had its limits. The undead were awakening, and their tireless limbs built, over the span of no more than a month, day and night unceasing, a palace. It was grand edifice in the uninhabited wilds of the east, a towering structure of basic but worked stone, fit with precision. When the crusaders began to return, barely scraping by at home and worried about the frontier, their fires were rekindled.
The palace looked upon the siege engines of the great invasion, but like the undead themselves, the palace was built to last, and so within its cool, quiet depths they refined their art, and emerged remade in their own images, preserved and treated but able to rebirth the clay of the body again and again, as they saw fit, fleshcrafting with no fear of pain or injury.
As the siege dragged on and on, the undead set out into the world, into far reaches gone untrodden by any feet in millennia. Half the world was a tomb, the result of cataclysmic holy war, and there had been times before where death was worshipped. They knew this, and knew it was time to awaken the oldest believers of all. The spiced corpses of arid wastes, the salt-packed dead of deep jungle lands, the frozen remains amidst the ancient ice. Undead expeditions rode out night after night and bid them rise with necromantic arts.
When the crusaders and their legions of zealots were met with faces of primal ages, from lands and cults believed crushed underfoot long ago, they despaired, and fell back as the army of undeath met them the wisdom of deep time.
The Palace of the Dead has grown and become greater than it ever was, a towering edifice of black stone and burnished gold, home the forgotten idols of long ago, their faithful walking the world once more in strange new forms crafted with undead powers. Perhaps they had been promised this in lost tongues and rites. Nonetheless, the Palace has risen to become a power of the modern, faltering world. Deathless, tireless, with millennia of minds at their disposal, it's only a matter of time until the living join their kin to explore eternity together.
Winds of Defilement
All too late did they realize the winds weren't what they believed them to be. All too late did they come to learn that the powers they wrought were of a dark nature, and that the winds which blew were not some divine breath or celestial aether, but nothing less than the miasma of defilement itself come down from the void.
It hit the small shrines first, and then the temples. Slowly it happened. Idols and icons began to warp. Something in their aspect became unwholesome. These were old shrine and old temples, so people knew. They could see it in these holy forms they had known their whole lives. At first they believed the gods and spirits were growing angry. It only made our use of the winds even worse, as we tried to engineer rites and offerings to appease our deities.
But we abandoned such practices, and fled from our temples, once the earth around them began to split open and our dead crawl out in a tide of rot, our burial urns crack and the ash reform into pathetic and detestable crawling humanoid figures.
At first, you see, the winds merely changed things, very innocently, in small ways. And it was so easy to gather and shape. A group of particular individuals, often it was scholars, naturalists, philosophers, artists--people of an unusual mental fortitude or aspect--who could come together and through sheer will enact changes to the land and to things around them. It was magic, the power of myth and legend come to life. How could we not use it?
Is this what awaited us, up there? Beyond? What was the heaven we had invoked, what were the gods we had communed with? Most people stopped believing there had been anything pretty quickly once the colossal death-chimeras crept and lurched through our towns, made of the bones and gore of their ancestors, speaking sacral tongues in mockery.
It was defilement. Inversion, corruption, desecration, with no rhyme or reason other than perversion. Like we were being thrown down and told our place, a grotesque and macabre universe asserting its ugly truth, deforming what we held sacred and pure, and then puppeteering the putrescence that had once been our loved ones in front of us, the violation of the sanctity and fastness of death thrown aside.
All too late did the promise of wanton power reveal itself as nothing less than manipulation. Easily was humanity's predilection and enthusiasm for learning and experimentation taken and channelled into dark paths, practically opening the floodgates of the invasion.
Charnel Flame
The crack could be heard from leagues away. A deep, tremulous rumble followed it, cascading through the earth on that bright morning. Then there followed reports of a darkness and lethal haze. More than half the region was stricken with panic as the day grew into darkness and the air became poison. Whole towns were evacuated, and keeps shut up with hundreds inside them. There came a tremors after that, causing mild but widespread damage, and a few deaths. But what is chiefly remembered is that for an entire mile, in a wide circle, the earth was entirely entombed in ash.
The mountain had, apparently, exploded.
A vast black pillar clawed at the heavens, spreading limbs of darkness across the sky, blotting out sun and stars alike. Ash fell like a choking snow. There was an oppressive heat about it all. Red cracks in what remained of the mountain glowed like misshapen eyes. A nightmare had been pulled from deep within a madman's head and smeared across the earth. There had been villages all along that mountainside, now they were gone. Just gone. Covered under who knows how many layers of ash. There were the ruins of some keeps and towers protruding from it all, but they were collapsed. Those who inspected the new wasteland wondered if beneath, far beneath, anyone was alive. If so, for how long?
In the end, shame and guilt overcame them, and they ventured in as far as they could, for as long as they could, and dug. They didn't know what to expect, but suspected death. All they could do was hope that it had been quick, if anything at all. But the terror they must have felt in those moments...
One thing the people noted as they pulled away blasted stone and caked-in ash was the curious restless vigor that seemed to drive them forward. For all their limbs cried out, exhaustion came upon them very slowly. Something about the place made them keep going for hours at a time, unable or perhaps unwilling to stop moving, though how just how long they spent there in those first days, they weren't sure. Day and night had little difference in the waste. They did retire eventually, succumbing to the dreary ashen winds. Their enervation was more of the mind than the body.
Just as they thought they were about to break through the shell of compressed ash and sunken stone, they were met with something coming from the other side. Staring out at them from the stifling darkness of a snaking tunnel were dead clouded eyes, filthy faces, and broken bodies, animate, and what's more, pieces of corpses melded together with ash.
The workers put up a good fight then, pushing the undead back into their ash-flooded ruins, but were hopelessly outmatched. The dead limbs were hardier than theirs, and painless, and when they returned home, beyond the volcano's influence, the people did not rise from their beds for a full week so wracked were their bodies.
Orders of warriors were formed from knights and sellswords to hold back the advancing tide of ash undead, which were still emerging from the buried remains of villages and keeps, opening up like sores in the ash. Apothecaries and physicians were kept on hand to soothe the bodies of warriors strained to breaking point. Meanwhile, leading sages were gathered on the borderland of the wastes. They held convocation, and determined that a desperate quest deep into the mountain was the only thing that might cease this horror.
A small band of warriors, with blades to cleave and hammers to crush, lightly armoured to avoid strain and heat, were sent with the blessings of heaven under the black skies of the volcano. The heat wavered in the air, like a slow heavy wind. Streams of molten rock and fire crept down the cracked slopes. They eluded most of the undead, but couldn't escape them all. Short work was made of the lone shamblers, though clouds of choking dust erupted with every strike of their weapons, and when a group of several undead were met head on, the air became an even darker haze.
The most curious aspect of these undead was their violent natures, they didn't seem to be hunting for some sort of nourishment, but rather for materials. Two of the band died in one ambush, and as the others fled, they saw the ashen corpse walkers stripping flesh and pulling limbs off their victims.
Eventually they made it inside the mountain, and were then tasked with navigating a maze of scorched and seared black stone, lit only by a grim red glow. They took frequent rests here, for they noted that the deeper into the collapsed corridors they went, the more restless their unnatural vigor became. Their stores of water were dangerously low, and they had a return trip.
After perhaps an hour of descent, they suddenly came upon it. Ruins. Worked stone. Ancient. The remains, they assumed, of some lost civilization, buried beneath the mountain through disaster, or perhaps having sprung up in some primal age when the world was different, now slumbering here. The architecture was warped, misshapen, blasted. The air was oppressive to an unspeakable degree, half from the crushing, smoldering heat, half from the inhuman strangeness of the ruins, and the increasingly ghastly aspect of what they found in them.
In the midst of a yawning gulf did it sit. Simply being in its presence made them feel like they would go mad from the hellish energy which swarmed through their bodies. But they composed themselves, and looked upon something they knew should not be. A great roaring flame, of a deep, unclean kind of orange or reddish brown, flecked with black. It sat in a small depression, surrounded on all sides for the span of the cavern with cracked and shattered and ashen bones, of all sizes, sorts and kinds, human, beast, and something that was neither. A charnel flame, radiating snakish limbs of dark vitality out into the world, having burst open from within this mountain which served either as its prison or its shrine.
The warriors looked to each other. What could they do, but try to smother it and drown it with what they had left? They knew it would kill them. They knew it might drive their corpses out into the wastes and to slay and defile. But they were dead even if they made out of this place, so beaten and drained was their flesh, that the moment they left the flame's influence...that was it.
The warriors were never seen again. Though it took weeks for the black smoke to dissipate, for the seemingly eternal night to lift, and for the heat to melt away, the undead dropped to the ruined earth, and never rose again.
Defiled Labyrinth
Labyrinths are perhaps the finest ritual creation in human history. They are a sorcerer's most powerful tools, helping to effortlessly create deep transcendental states conducive to spellcrafting in metaphysical realms, allowing the spirit to freely pass into a higher existence temporarily. The power of most labyrinths is mental--they exist so that the spellcaster momentarily pass beyond, in a broad sense they die and are reborn by going into the center of the labyrinth, and then emerge on the other side, remade, the spell cast, the will express, the self changed.
Some labyrinths go a step further, or rather they remove a step, and they work on a spiritual plane. These labyrinths exist half here, and half elsewhere. Their deepest points touch upon other realms. This is profound, because it means the caster can more consciously perform their magics by passing actively into a post-living state, expressing pure will instead of channelling it through symbols.
There is, however, one labyrinth of a different kind. It took over a century and the coffers of a kingdom to construct, but time is little matter to a sorcerer, especially when it resulted in a labyrinth of true rebirth. No more approaching death by degrees, this labyrinth allowed one to physically die and become reborn, accessing untold realms of power beyond this pale, experiential world. The ability to remake and redefine oneself totally. The ability to exert one's will in stark clarity.
Alas, upon its first use, the labyrinth was utterly defiled.
Inside that labyrinth, a threshold had been breached, one that for reasons beyond human understanding had been sealed away. Indeed it seems that the higher realms were little more than passive agents, not gods or spirits, but background mechanisms unable to take the strain of the sorcerers' continual motion and impression of will and power. And inside the labyrinth, the cosmos was sundered. It became a crucible of horrors, the womb of a thing that should not be, a form beyond life, beyond death, with a knowledge and perception no thing upon the earth should ever have.
That which emerged from the defiled labyrinth had not been reborn. In it, the state of death had remained world-bound, and animate. It was itself half here, and half there. A walking labyrinth, some might say. Others, a crack in the fabric of the universe. A spirit possessing its own body, and seeing the gears of the cosmos that move behind everything, and how they might be loosened, and reverse. The lich was nothing less than a god walking upon the earth, and had it not been for the maddening weight of a world of transcendent knowledge suddenly thrust upon it, likely it would have become as such for all time.
Instead, sages of a dark repute sought out this figure, which had vanished into the wilderness. The came away from these surreptitious councils with the secret of where the desert valley lay, and how to penetrate the bulwark which had been erected about the defiled labyrinth. Many of those sages did not return, and their bones are being slowly worn away by harsh sands, each one a landmark for those seeking a vile ascendancy, to be replaced over the long years by fresh seekers without the fortitude to make it. Other sages did not return because they were lost in the labyrinth, dead, and unmade.
Others have returned, and the world fears an age of the black sorcery which grows ever closer on the horizon, when the world will be shaped not by cosmic law, but the will of the inhuman, immortal undead.
War Wilderness
You can just tell when something bad has happened somewhere. Something about the place is off. It doesn't feel right, but more importantly, it doesn't look right. Most people aren't really aware of it, but bad events really do leave a mark on the land itself.
The severity of the event, and the size of it, affects how...strange the land becomes. Places where a murder happened? Maybe they vegetation is a little dark, or the stone always damp. Places of prolonged suffering are even worse. They result in what are known by most as "hauntings". Some are nothing more than the replaying of parts of an event, some are...well, more aware, as it were. But it's on the battlefields you can really see it. The sites of major conflicts, where soldiers died slowly, and kindred-in-arms held each other as final breaths were choked out. Those places go bad, and never grow back right at all.
There are stretches of wilderness out there that are beyond lush, beyond luxuriant. They're virulent. Chaotic and hostile. People call these places cursed, they're probably correct. The violence and spilled blood watered the earth and what grew from the blasted mud was a land to reflect what had passed over it.
Waist high grasses that tangle and grab, that just wrap around blades that attempt to cut them, tortured, twisting trees with low, grasping branches, thorned vines around everything, and a terrible darkness to the corrupt life there. The greens are deep, some almost black, bereft of vibrancy. Every shadow threatens to hold some lurking form.
Thing is, they usually are.
Oubliettes and forgotten dungeons, lonely forest paths, perilous mountain passes, the world is filled with hidden corpses. But there is no place more stuffed with the lost dead than a battlefield. Bodies left to be picked clean by beasts, sometimes while still dying. A morass of rotting flesh sinking into the black earth. Bones laying as a carpet just under the feet, weapons still clutched in their final swings, still plunged through skulls and ribs.
It is no surprise, then, that of all the most stained and marked places in the world, battlefields are by far and large the most violently haunted. The worst examples cannot even be entered. Those that have tried, or poor travellers lost in the night, have been rebuffed by shadows and hands at their backs, the dry clank of rusted metal, and rushing shapes in the grass. There's a wildness to them that, above everything else, makes those who see these dark echoes profoundly uncomfortable. It's like being toyed with. There's a cruelty to it that isn't quite human.
And so these war wildernesses are left well alone, and made sure to never grow beyond their bounds with fire and salt. The people pray for the succor of the souls, or whatever they are, inside. But to date, no war wilderness has ever grown quiet. You can still see, even in the oldest battlefields, half of myth, shadows rising from the vegetation, to peer out at you, before sinking back down.
More good stuff. I don't know how you're able to pump out this stuff every week. I'll be watching for the upcoming weirdness in The Path of Poison. Cheers.