Shadows & Sorcery #90
Who is responsible for the ninetieth edition of Shadows & Sorcery?
It’s me! But it’s not just me, it’s also you, my gorgeous readers, who’ve stuck around for ninety of these things, some of you from the dim mists of issue one, some of you from the bright and breezy lands of recent months. Seriously, thank you for coming back, week after week. I don’t plan on leaving any time soon, and I hope you don’t either. I still have a lot of nonsense to send your way.
So, what do we have for the ninetieth edition? Five tales of STUFF. Weird stuff! Let’s dig in.
And if you like what you find below, deep below, give that heart icon a little tap to tell the stories you enjoyed them!
This week, we plunge into the hypnotic depths of the Labyrinth of Dream, we delve even deeper into the fiery Forge Mountains, we learn of the strange history of the Armour of the Pilgrims, we glimpse the dark hints surrounding the Cursed Saint, and we learn of the power of the Enchanters of Stars…
Labyrinth of Dream
It had been nearly a decade since war erupted across the continent. Every nation and state were drawn slowly, by old alliance, treaty, treachery, conquest, or subjugation, into one of two sides that threatened absolute annihilation. Leagues of land decimated, rivers and lakes poisoned, generations massacred. The world was on the brink of collapse. And then, scouts searching for a new defensive position in the mountains found something.
It looked, at first, as if they had stumbled upon an old, forgotten fort, or worse, a secret enemy base. But even a cursory examination showed that it was unlike any man-made structure they had ever seen. Thin, winding hallways that went on and on, never branching, never ending, their twists and turns almost hypnotic in their rhythm. Those scouts decided against better judgement to venture within. And for a time, they vanished.
The world will speak in awe for centuries of what transpired in the wake of the discovery. A gap had been bridged within the labyrinth depths, and life had experienced a shift on par with divine intervention. For many, that's exactly what it was. Regardless, not a year had passed before the war was over, and the world was aflame with brilliant sorceries carried back into civilization by exultant believers.
But while the world filled in its cracks and sought to find balance with these strange wonders, the scholars of the continent converged upon the labyrinth. Access to its interior slowly became more and more prohibited as the scholarly settlements around the mountains learned of the nature of this thing which had seemed to reveal itself before the absolute worst of the war struck.
There was no meeting with gods inside that labyrinth, no visitations ancestors, or dwelling place of a saviour. The labyrinth was a ritual implement. Those hypnotic rhythms were designed by some master craftsman and magician to lull those within into a lucid slumber that allowed one to physically enter their own dreams, and return to the waking world with things from beyond the wall of sleep.
Only all too late did those scholars realize the staggering implications of what it meant to manifest and actualize the vagaries of dream in real, living space. Foremost among these dark revelations was that just as one may enter their dreams and leave with powers and objects beyond reason, one may just as easily enter their nightmares. There were many who did, and they never came back alone. Too many haunted faces wandered from the labyrinth and into the world with nary a word, and hidden places came to be populated with horrors. Wild and fantastic powers were drawn from ludic dreams, but so too were violent and terrible devices from the dreams of those who harboured deep grudges from the war. Fragments and ghosts of the dead were sought out by those who only had memories of them, and such folk who ventured inside to see their loved ones just one more time will never leave those halls.
Dream is an interior world. It is not a shared space, a realm into which we travel in sleep, but an inner space to confront ourselves as sign and symbol. It is a fathomless abyss wherein dwell all our hopes and desires, our fears and anxieties, the lives and worlds we imagine, the power we lust after. It all awaits inside, ready to take form, and be plucked from the labyrinth. And so, deep inside the sprawling streets of the fortified city that grew beneath the labyrinth, there were sects of scholars who dared to meet in secret, smoky back rooms and high cold towers to discuss the final and greatest power of the labyrinth. And in those places, they dreamed and set down their plans.
Forge Mountains
Nestled amidst the mountainous apex of the overworld whose highest peaks crackle with lightning, there dwell three low, rugged summits—the lowest of all the ranges there, in fact. Upon them stands proud the Temple of Steel, where the ancient greyfolk Aun first found the steel that gave the steelfolk their name, and where the greyfolk Arts are practiced and studied by sages of all kinds from across the overworld. But the temple is both shrine and gate, for beyond its foreboding arches lies the interior of this craggy land: the Forge Mountains.
They may not rise into the storm-shrouded heavens like their kindred, but their roots run deeper than any other, winding down for leagues lower than any peak rises above. The grand city of Aslea may be the center of steelfolk culture in the world, but the Forge Mountains are the heart of something far more personal.
In the uttermost depths where their snaking caverns converge, the tunnels touch upon the burning heart of the world. As rushing torrents of molten ore and searing lakes of flame does it rush into the caverns of the inner earth, drawn by the steelfolk into their vast and intricate kilns and crucibles as fuel and material. The silverfolk may produce no finer an instrument for healing and banishing, and the stonefolk may be able to pull fully formed weapons from the living rock itself, but they and mankind know that naught equals steel for slaying your enemies and defending your lands.
The depths of the Forge Mountains are alive with activity and never rest. Endless halls and chambers are there, tall, spacious, and lit with a blazing, warm radiance, cooled with gusts of cunningly funnelled mountain air from beyond. Every steelfolk within belongs to one tradition of artisans, large communities of like-minded smiths who practice and refine their Arts. A friendly, if sometimes heated, rivalry exists between some traditions and who guard their old masters' secrets with fierce jealousy, while others enjoy an open cooperation.
The mountains are as much a forge as much as they are a shrine. The temple above may be a place of deep historical import, but down here is where the Great Grey Ones drew their steel from the earth. The steelfolk remember this at every step, and the training of new smiths has them learn that, above all else, this Art is not one of domination, but of balance and understanding, of working with the earth, rather than against it. The rhythm of the miner's picks and the smith's hammers, they say, resound through the stone itself, all the way into Aslea, like a heartbeat that reminds them not only of their might, but also what they fight for.
Armour of the Pilgrims
Sure, the faith's still all over the land, but back then? We were lucky if all the faithful in a single village knew about each other. Had to be that way, though, didn't it? I don't think we ever got over it. It'll be generations until we start coming together everywhere like we do here, that's my belief. But sure, that's what kept the armour safe for so long.
See, we all consider ourselves pilgrims. Life's a path we walk, over and over, until we reach our destination. Always forward, through as many births as it takes. And that's where the problem arose.
Oh, you don't know...
Well, see, outside the faith, souls flit around from body to body, lost, passed from god to god like coin and goods. But when you take the twelve rites, it guarantees that the soul remains within the faith—outside of the grasp of gods—to be reborn concurrently, so that it may remain on the path until its own end, and not go astray.
Yeah, they believed we were stealing souls.
So, you're wondering where this armour comes in, aren't you? Well that's where it all turned for us. This was...goodness, two hundred years ago? All this history feels very recent to us, but there you go. Back when we were all coming together as a faith, and when the Monarchites were going about the "Conquest of Spirit". You must know about that, right? Yeah, well, it didn't unify anything. Imagine! Your creator of the universe or your divine ancestor, relegated to a duke or grand baron under this mad system. You have your liege-gods today, but back then—and we saw it happening, we have clear records—the tension throughout the land was...palpable.
Then they got to us. And we didn't have gods for them to take. Oh, but we had souls to take from their gods! Thus came the Last Stand. It wasn't the final stand, for our survival, but rather it was the last one because it's all we could afford and all we'll ever let happen. But that Last Stand...it shook them. I think it's still there today, that fear, that uncertainty.
It's complicated for us, because while for the Monarchites it was this rebellion, for us it was an affirmation of faith, a rallying point, and a time of sorrow. There came to those of us who resisted a leader. No name, no face, no record from the time—and we have many—speaks of anything but an armoured figure coordinating resistance efforts across two major cities. We know them as the Martyr. Died during the siege of a fortified township of faithful. But that Martyr, we're sure, was...well, they were near the end of their path. Steps away from the culmination of pilgrimage. We didn't have holy texts before the Martyr, but their message was disseminated amongst us, far and wide. The biggest shift in focus our faith ever had, from individual effort to the formation of a real community.
So, the armour. We don't worship it or anything, no! But it's important to us. It's like a symbol of everything we stand for now. See, after the Last Stand, the Martyr's body was taken by the Monarchites, but the armour, we took that. Though they didn't really beat us, the aftermath was a disaster, and the faithful went into hiding across the land if they weren't killed first, and enclaves of us kept pieces of the armour to remember. They found their way to all sorts of places, many out in the countryside in lonely little cellar chambers, but some stayed in the cities, as a kind of defiance.
Yeah, there were fakes across the many decades, but they were rooted out. Apart from the make and dating of the armour itself, you can just...tell it's right. Maybe that's all down to faith, or rites, or something. It's also about knowing that this armour was worn by someone near the end of the path. Being close to that, well, gives you chills! Almost like maybe you can feel the end of the path yourself.
We have almost the whole thing back together. Only a few pieces to locate, but that'll take time. Years, decades. When it's all together, though, that'll be a moment to remember. By then I hope that, like the armour, the faith is back together. We can rally around it. Maybe someone new will don it for a better purpose.
Cursed Saint
The sprawling townships and scattered settlements sent more and more tendrils out as trade routes became extensions of their own homes, and the lines between each blurred. In no time at all, the first governing council took shape, and suddenly the lonely skyline of the grand span of the valley became populated with the works of man.
Since time immemorial, holy folk dwelt among the wandering peoples as oracle and shaman. They who seemed to dwell half in this life and half in another, who saw something most didn't, transmitting through deep trances a secret knowledge in whispers and signs from which a divine tongue was drawn and the miracles of medicine, metal, and masonry emerged. No caste or class of priest or sorcerer emerged in early cultures save these fearsome and mystical outsiders bathed in ash and paint, bearing staff and skull. They were a common fixture first in the middle of villages, which had sprouted up around them in their deep, ageless slumbers long ago, and then as familiar landmarks along roadsides and in the back streets of the city they found themselves in.
And with the coming of the city, there came the temples, heaved from the soil and stone around the entranced oracles. Built purely of human reverence, for the oracles withstood the bite of frost and sun, a new breed of monkish attendant observed and chronicled the various changes in hand seal, posture, and position of these newly appointed saints of the city. The temples were low and wide, composed of thick squarish pillars, twelve in number after the repeated utterances of several saints, and walls perforated with tall thin slits to admit people, and without roofs. Painted in greens and golds, the temples were vibrant additions to the naturally sandy and pallid stone around them.
Two things happened in the early ages of the city. The first was a marked decline in the emergence of new saints. No more were holy folk seen about the streets in their old niches and odd spots, but only in temples, and no more did new people take to wandering and trance. From this came the second phenomenon: that these venerable but fringe folk of the villages and towns, who merely lived alongside their more mundane kin, became the points around which a cult birthed itself.
The city inhabitants took to the pale emulation of the saint's trance states with drugs and meditation, sitting in assumed postures and holding their hands in half-seen seals to try and draw for themselves some of the holiness that came through their saints.
Yet, in the midst of this growing religious fervour, there was one anomaly. Some city spaces were less well tended than others, not forgotten, but looked over. But their inhabitants had not so quickly forgotten their rural past that they could not maintain their own lands. This makes the abandoned temple upon the far northern slope such a mystery.
That it is a temple is clear, though the paint is faded and flaking, the stone is smoothed in places and chipped in others, and every entrance has been entirely sealed. Desolation and decrepitude hang about it like a pall. It even lies a good walk away from the last inhabited houses in the rundown outskirts. Simply put, nobody wants to live near it. Not with the stories attached to it.
A murdered saint. Bloody rites from madmen claiming divinity. Violent hauntings. There's no end to the tales spun about it, and little of the truth has survived. That it was sealed some decades ago, just outside of living memory, is true. By the time an authority found it initially, it had already been quietly abandoned for a few years, and that authority dared not try and look inside. Temples were never constructed with roofs, and so all that remains of that first excursion to it are reports of sounds from within no one dared to set down in stone, clay or parchment.
The truth of it lies beyond common knowledge, and only a few whispers were ever let out among those who fled the outskirts for more lively regions. All they said was this, and no more: faithful who had once attended the temple gatherings every day witnessed a change in their saint. Subtle shifts in form and posture their monks recorded and imitated at first. But they didn't cease. Saints already had a somewhat otherworldly aspect to them, caked in ash and paint and matted hair, but what was happening to this saint now was undeniably something beyond ignorant perception.
It can be surmised that the saint began to take on less than human proportions. There came a point when the temple was fled and sealed, and their saint was deemed cursed.
Why this was, no one may ever know. The city never will. Though it may be forced to at least confront it at some stage, as the rest of their saints begin to exhibit similar conditions. In truth, the jump from nomad to village, and from village to city plunged nascent humanity through cycles of being that perhaps it was not ready for. Only natural that their spiritual focuses too follow that path—plunging into strange new worlds.
Enchanters of Stars
As Above, So Below.
As the Star, so the Soul.
What is known is this, and thus is it spoken: the thinking and reasoning faculty of mankind is the soul. The immaterial, ever-shifting, boundless spirit, in contrast to the immutable flesh and clay. And for every soul, a star. Imagine all life in the world below has an invisible thread connecting it to a star above, and as those threads reach the sky, they become entwined and impossible to divide from one another. Look to the sky and see at every second new stars flash into being, and others fade into darkness. The azure sky is not a collection of individual points, it is a tapestry, and every fibre is woven together. Man the micro scale, the individual, and the sky, the macro scale, the totality.
What is known is this, but it is not spoken: the totality of the sky is reactive—soul to star, thought and feeling resonates. Our stars flare and wane with the events of our lives, and those events are the results of other lives impinging upon us, as we impinge upon others. But this can be directed. The tapestry, and what it reads, can be rewritten. This must be done on the macro scale. Through deep trance, intense emotion, ecstatic experience, channel these into an image or thought, and thus does your star read as such above. To what extent this reaches is a matter of debate among the secret learned, but as has been proven time and again, the lives and destinies of individuals can be drastically transformed.
This knowledge is, at best, fringe, at worst, considered sorcery. There are those who harbour an intense abhorrence of what they would call meddling with life and fate, but those who have been put to death for it know more than half the world is happy to live in powerless ignorance, and chalk their fortunes up to an unknowable cosmos.
Of course, that has never stopped those with influence from having personal cults of thinkers controlling their stars. There is no king in the world now or in history that has not waged a secret war with their enchanters through the stars overhead. The interior of every grand manor hosts a cabal of fate-twisting magicians. But the secret is out. Look up, take back your agency, and carve through the blood your slice of the sky.