Shadows & Sorcery #88
Pffft I dunno about you but it seems to me like it’s the eighty-eighth edition of Shadows & Sorcery!
I struggled to type eighty-eighth, just so you all know. Anyway, this week we are BACK with five tasty glimpses into strange, far off worlds. They lived in my head, and now they live in yours.
But before we get there, I want to brace you all for this: in the coming weeks, maybe month or so, I’ll very likely be making a pretty huge announcement regarding Shadows & Sorcery. It’s nothing bad! We aint going anywhere! But it will be very genuinely important. I know this all oooooh mysterious, but I don’t want to make premature announcements, and I don’t want it coming out of nowhere. I will be letting everyone know about this at the same time, so don’t worry about missing anything.
So with that done, there is ANOTHER interesting little project I may be a part of in the not too distant future, which I hope you folks get to read. More on that as it gestates.
No weird vibes here today folks, just weird stories, and if you enjoyed them, then give that heart icon a quick tap and let them know!
This week, we glimpse the dark hints of a dying world in Lake Graves, we learn about the grim vagaries of Winter’s Steel, we carry out a gruesome examination of Demon’s Armour, we come face to face with those who wield the Hammer of Madness, and we take a trip down into the valley wherein dwell the Flames of the Sanctuary…
Lake Graves
There was one incline that promised a relatively safe descent for the three who now took cautious, faltering steps upon the cracked earth. The hierarch had demanded a rough survey of the region which had revealed itself rather suddenly over the course of a few days. Her dominion encompassed a great span of rural communities, themselves unfit for individual magistrates. Action had to be swift out here, for word travelled slow, and things could linger. And so, here they were to scope it out.
Three respectable local figures from old families whose homes had, like many here, clung to the edge of the lake or the banks of the river which wound from a far off mountain. People with a connection to it. That river was dead, barely a trickle at its source, and the fisherfolk had reduced further and further their catches as the water got lower and lower, and eventually fled. Now people lived around the few deep wells that could be found, from places where the heat hadn't yet reached.
The lake had been feeding people for ages beyond count. Communities had sprung up around it, thrived, abated, shifted, and since the advent of man's coming here, small ships had passed over the waters in fishing and trade, a revered mutual source of life. The naturalists set the age of the lake to a time of cataclysms far before recorded history, a great split in the earth filled from deep water tables and from the water of the mountains, smoothed out over millennia.
Where once was a vast shining mirror set in a border of verdant green, there was now bare earth, dead grass, and precipitous slopes leading down into a shaded gulf of slime and mud, a skin of filthy, cloudy water from which there peeked scatterings of dark stone and mounds of rotting vegetation. Depths which it was quite possible had never seen the sun.
The air wasn't cold, but the arid winds and ravaging sun had been replaced with a cloying stillness that stunk to high heaven. They made it to the meagre water line, and observed for a moment. Should probably wade through a bit, check depths and such, was the decision. The lake had sunk terribly low, in most places it barely rose to the shins. In the weird twilight of the lake bed, around which there climbed beetling, uneven slopes, it was hard to see far. Heat haze obscured the vision for a ways in.
Things slithered in the murk just below their feet. Sometimes something brushed up against an ankle before rushing noiselessly away. Small black humps bubbled up from the water before retreating back. There were things down here that had dwelt in a cool darkness for thousands of years.
Finally the bed of the pit evened out as they reached what seemed to be the true bottom. The sky above was a vast yet distant blearing white eye gazing down with fire, but where they were was more than half-night. Regardless, soon there would be naught but dry, cracked desert where once grand depths dwelt. The haze wasn't so bad, but it mixed with shadow, making mounds of old rock and piles of weed leer from just out of sight in a particularly horrible way. Each of them was keenly aware in their own way that this was not a place ever meant to be tread by feet that had known only dry, lush land.
What was it that loomed from the darkness and the choking, noisome air of the lake bed that sent three well-reasoned human beings fleeing through the slime and mire, and taking the long way back to the hierarch's chambers, where they shame-facedly announced their discoveries with tremulous voices?
In the middle of the very epicenter of the lake bed, so it was said, did they find three graves. Long, raised slabs of dark, moist stone, peering from the murky water, bearing upon them faded carvings. And, so goes rumours of the account, half open.
The hierarch has sent more people to down into the lake bed, which has not fared well. It is strewn with the rotting corpses of things the lake people would rather have wished they didn't know existed. And the more people are sent down, the more graves there are. The lowest point of the lake bed if infested with them now. They appear, according to desperate locals who know no better, to be opening more and more by degrees. What's down there, they guess, can wait as long as it wants.
Winter's Steel
Iron purified and transformed rises from its brutish, earthen state and becomes steel--metal's most fearsome form. This is the belief of the world. For a thousand years since its initial spread from the deep deserts through waves of fierce invasions, those who have adopted steel have believed that it is flame alone that reforges iron into its highest mode, that fire burns away the impurities. This is the Age of the Sun, and so it would naturally be the sun's own flame that drives man onwards.
But far to the east, tucked away amidst the lowest chasms of beetling, jagged peaks where frost still clings to the shadows of the bare few places the sun cannot reach, from those frightful wilds there has come a new steel, and if it be not the herald of a new Age of Ice, then at least the dread reminder that winter can never die.
Flame can make a blade whose edge is so honed it can cut through solid rock. It can create surfaces hard enough to shrug off ballistae and cannonfire. But in the depths of the dark white chasms, ore was dredged from the earth by bloodless hands and instead of set to crackling heat, it was instead thrust into freezing fog wells, the raw material immersed into rushing torrents of half-frozen rivers, set into tunnels of blasting blizzard gales, shattered, warped, smoothed, and hammered in matrices of black ice.
The singe-like sting of steel's edge, pain like burning, these were forgotten when arms from the dark east were dragged across unfortunate flesh, and in their wake did they stick like cold metal does to skin, and black, rotten wounds of frigid gore were left when swords and axes bit down, rather than cut. The black flash and howl of winter steel cracked stone and its toughness shattered the heads of arrows and shots of cannons. These blades were of a rough and heatless surface, all of them in hue in like sombre ash and slate. They were heavy, monolithic, as cruel, brutal, and yet stoic as the ancestral memories of deep winter days when the sun is a pale white star.
It would seem that steel is not wrought equal, and that some form of it is birthed in purification. Or rather, goes the modern designation, transmogrification. When steel of sun and winter clash, neither survives. The ice blades temper those of flame, and flame dulls and degrades that of ice.
It must be so that this process repeats itself through the ages. For although no records survive of older times, there are artifacts in lost places, and memories in old minds and dreams. At the passing of every age is chaos, this is all that is known. Ancient sun swords sleep in the earth, returning perhaps to their iron state, to be repurposed by the powers of the dominant age. But always will there ice to temper fire, and fire to hold back the ice.
Scholars have dreamt of other ages in the high sun, and the steel of other times. Perhaps in an Age of the Deep Sea, it will be secret currents and crushing weight that breaks steel free from its crude iron form. Perhaps in the coming Age of Desert it will be the sandstorms and cold of night that raises iron to strange new forms. And perhaps, some dare to whisper in secret, such things are waiting to be found, just under our feet.
Demon's Armour
The blood had to be human. We tried it with beast blood, we tried mixing our own small samples into alchemical mixtures, but no, it had to be human blood and naught else. This will have to be investigated, but the sacrifices incurred so far have been unthinkable. I dread to think of what may become necessary.
What rose from that pool was, I suppose, both what we were and were not expecting. Imagine an engraving from the middle layers of the Venishad Texts, especially those sections compiled somewhere around the Latter Dynasty Period some two thousand years ago. The Adversary Narrative with the demon knights in their plate of leering faces, twisting crests, jutting spines, cruel ridges, and the warped, almost flesh-like countenance of it all. Images that have haunted the world for time out of mind.
Well, what rose from that pool was exactly that.
It is terrifying to have one's faith--one's pallid, perfunctory faith--so violently affirmed. To have one's comfortably bland worldview shattered in seconds, to feel that flood of overwhelming confusion as the mind balks at the implications. Before us there rose from a pool of human blood a demon, dripping with gore, and speaking a tongue whose words grated upon the ears, just like the old texts say.
And then moments later, as we fell back in shock, all was cast even further into doubt when one of our lads fired a mounted bolt into its face out of fear, and the thing keeled over completely and hopelessly dead, black matter spilling obscenely from its head.
The face plate was entirely ruined. Part of me was glad it was, because I didn't like what had survived. We hauled the body atop a slab and washed most of the blood away. The chamber floor was a disgusting mess afterwards. Beneath the gore was metal. Perhaps not iron or steel as we know it, but an otherworldly alloy. The experts among us confirmed that every sabaton, greave, brace, and segment matched perfectly the developments of several centuries of armour manufacture.
But that's where the similarities ended.
There was no mail under the armour, no reinforced coat or padding. There was, when we prised the plate away, flesh, tearing it from its connective tissues. Tough, almost pebbly skin, sinew, and very odd bones. In truth, the armour was more like chitin than a suit of plate. Like this thing had grown to mimic us. Or mock us.
We gazed at this thing on our dissection slab. This was a demon. A denizen, as written in our holiest texts, of an unsavoury netherworld where all the dark of the world sinks and settles. It was conjured by grotesque rites under a full moon with sacrifice. And yet, it was flesh, it had a reasonable anatomy, and it did not melt back into the shadow realm or roar as it was banished from its material form. It just died.
That the underworld was so physical, and so close to us, that it was a reality, that everything written was a reality, the constant sense of it has ruined my ability to ever sleep soundly again. But this is what the old duke wanted, and what we took payment for. So a fortnight from now he'll march out proudly in his demon's armour.
Hammer of Madness
It was known to the cultists as The Liberator. A tool, they said, to free you, to release you. The hammer didn't sunder flesh or skull, for the price of a moment of pain it broke the shackles on the mind, and let you see, let you hear...let you feel what was really there. But that didn't matter. He'd seen enough ruined people screaming until they coughed up blood in madhouses, some desperate enough to take their own lives to escape what they saw. Or thought they saw.
And now he was looking right at it, ready to fall upon him, and awaken him to the truth.
The cultist's movements looked like a puppet's. Those eyes were somewhere else. Kastaine got a good look at that hammer. Crude thing, made of a kind of tawny stone, rough, chipped--it had seen much use, he was aware. Small dark stains spoke to the "moment of pain". But it looked like it'd break easily. The cultists around him sounded like they were under some exertion or intense anticipation, strained, sharp breaths came irregularly from all sides. If he tried this at the wrong moment they might all bound forward and tear him to shreds.
This squalid little hollow was hidden in the rockface behind an equally loathsome tenement, one of the pits where the governors dump their undesirables under the name of charity. This place was lit by foul smelling candles emitting a lurid illumination, and the ceiling was black with smoke. Heavens, thought Kastaine, how long had they been using this place? The cultist above him looked, he swore, like he was waiting for the signal to strike. But there was no one else in this place than him, the hammer wielder, and maybe five others.
The loose, toothy grin of a madman suddenly spread across the leering face whose eyes bulged as clarity flooded them and they looked upon him. A face right out of the worst nightmare anyone's ever had.
The hammer came down.
And Kastaine's head spun aside as the dull crack sounded sickeningly in his ears, as if his mind had expected something else, and he threw an elbow into the cultist's ribs. The poor wretch was little more than bone as it was, but all the same, he held onto that hammer tightly. The others had jumped up, a kind of animal look in their eyes, slack jaws, and their hunched posture. They were not, however, looking at him. Kastaine barely deflected the sinewy arm of the cultist again and again, striking as if his salvation depended upon it. And then, Kastaine swung his fist up to meet the jaw of his assailant. But his hand never made contact. It was as if it had simply slid past it.
The flash of confusion was enough for the cultist to swing the hammer into Kastaine's brow.
His brain resounded from the impact, and from more than the impact. He banged his fists against his temples and gasped as he fell back. A thousand and one thoughts poured through his mind, formless, with no place to escape. Without thinking, he bounded past the cultists, shoving them side, and crashed through the tenement doorway and into the dark, half-flooded alleyway beyond, and only when he crashed into some discarded object in the thin little street, did he realize he had not been pursued.
But there was something in the doorway.
Amidst archives in the Hall of Sovereigns, a trail of blood, mere drops, but persistent, led into a lonely corner of tomes that had gone unread for decades. There was no one there when archivists went to investigate, but there was am empty chair, dragged from elsewhere, facing a blank wall.
That night a lone dark shape slid into the thin, worn door of the tenement, and was welcomed with open arms.
Flames of the Sanctuary
Can you imagine something dating back to the very beginning of the world? Not of civilization, not of humanity, but creation itself? Nothing around is really that old. The mountains were heaved up in times past, but they were not always so. The coasts and spans of ocean were not always so either. No, something from the beginning. Something never changed. Something that has survived epochs uncounted, survived disasters, dooms, and the dust of time. Something that not once did mankind let fall by the wayside, a symbol of constancy that no empire or myth has been able to even approach.
This is no mere idea, no abstract, for what has remained since the beginning itself is a physical thing that can be seen, be touched, be known.
Within a deep, mist-shrouded valley lies a long stretch of forest. Green, black, and silver predominate here. The deep richness of the leaves, the immensity and infinitude of the shadows down where sunlight barely creeps in, and the pale fog which leaves upon all things its argent sheen. The air is cool and damp, but not cloying--a breeze runs through these thick dark boughs down from the mountainsides in the sunrises and suntides, and so gives those woods a constant fresh moisture. Birds sing from just over the canopy, and woodland beasts call from unseen places as they rush and skitter about, curious of those who travel there.
In the midst of this vivacious forest, there suddenly peers from the primeval woods a great stone structure. There is about the breadth of its calm grey pillars, the hanging vines, the deep shades of the blooming flowers upon them, the sweep of its circular form, the painted half-dome, and floor of tended greenery, no aspect that may make it be called aught else but "temple". A small body of adherents dwell about it, themselves devotees humbled by the titanic legacy of what dwells within.
There are faiths of all kinds in this world. Gods to be worshipped, forces to be communed with, ancestors to call up, daemons to call down, transcendence, ascendance, unity, and nothingness--all of them humankind's fumbling approach to a truth it knows exists, but the notions of which are dim and remembered only in dreams. As such, temples, shrines, churches, places of spiritual import are spread far and wide in forms beyond number, low and high, grim and glorious, mouldering with age and still being reared.
And then there's the temple in the valley forest. Maybe it's something in the soul, but one foot over the threshold, and one feels as if suddenly standing atop a sky-scraping mountain summit. There is an immensity to that small, half-covered temple that spans not space, but time. The eye catches the source of it immediately. In the day, it shines in contrast to all else around it, but at night, it is like a star in the soft darkness.
Two short pillars of stone, not too thick, and reaching perhaps to just below the chest of a person. Rough, decidedly unshaped and natural, but set in the earth by design and not chance. The tip of each small monolith bears a healthy flame. These flames have burned since the beginning of time. They have stood as they are since their inception, their stone unburnt, unchanged. They are fed by no offering, sacrifice, or other fuel, and never have they faded or needed to be rekindled.
All the faith of the world is a blind grasping at divinity, but these have, undeniable to every soul that has seen them, the touch of another world. The great hearths of man's keeps, the roaring bonfires of folk rites, the lurid burning altars of cults, terrestrial fire somehow pales in comparison to what enthusiastically leaps and crackles there, fire of a richness, warmth, and vitality unknown to the rest of the world. Perhaps this is whence all fire came, or it will be the salvation of a faltering, shadow-laden world to come.