Welcome to issue 9 of Shadows & Sorcery! This is a paid subscriber post. Below you’ll find tales of strange royals, frightful knowledge, and curious rites.
Today’s stories are:
Tower of the Nightmare
Undead Duke
Fires of Offering
Cathedral of the Sorcerers
Sinner’s Archives
Tower of the Nightmare
Dreams are not made in the mind, as once believed, they come to us from other places. Our souls are shared between us and another linked to us, in another place. When we dream, we glimpse that life, and it is translated to us in strange, erratic images. Some can take over that other life briefly, possess that other body, through meditation or through certain awareness-altering substances, and perform things there that cannot be done here...and bring it back with them. In times past they were the shamans of wild tribes, now they are dreamwalking high magicians and sorcerers.
The dreamwalkers speak of something else witnessed when they possessed their other bodies. The other world is strange, savage, wondrous, alien, but this vision is believed to be the source of nightmares. There is, they say, a tower at the center of an incalculably vast plain of scorched, parched, ashen grey, neither dust nor slate, or any particular substance. It kicks up clouds of itself, choking, blinding, the foot sinks into it slightly, there are regions of bizarre undulation, deep dips and steep rises that the viewer can't help but feel hide something.
And at the very center of it all, looming in the shadowy air, always far off but making itself known, is a single tower. Crooked, but, it is felt, not organic. Those who have gotten closest say it has the aspect of a built structure in the vague definitions they can but barely spy. And they say that the closer one gets, the more warped and unstable the landscape becomes. The nightmare is by its nature filled with dark shapes that flit and fly and give chase, but they grow in profusion around the tower. The landscape presents perilous hidden falls, depression, cracks, it shifts as if it were not solid. Everything about it is not merely predatory, but cruel.
In any case the general consensus among dreamwalkers is that the tower is emanating this nightmare. And what's worse is that lucidity in the other body is so shaky that one cannot spend much time in the nightmare regions lest their other body be left there to wander in helpless confusion. So it continues to exist, to be watched and studied, and feared.
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