Spewed forth from the depths of this brain and onto your eyes, it’s the ninety-fourth edition of what we here at Shadows & Sorcery like to call “Shadows & Sorcery”!
This week? Two chunky tales, and two shorter tales—the best of both worlds! We revisit two worlds, one familiar and one still fresh from last week, and then we visit two absolutely brand new worlds.
I should say, very quickly, that there’s still some rather large things happening behind the scenes. I said this a while back, and if anyone was wondering where it went (you should be wondering), well, it never left! Watch this space…
Onwards to this week’s adventures, but of course as ever, if you enjoyed what you read here, give that little heart icon a tap and tell the stories you liked them!
This week, we ascend into the hills to find the source of the Dragon’s Murk, we watch the tumultuous birth of the Sorcerer’s Spear, we follow a strange figure in a dark world in Lost Ash, and we learn just what dwelt within the Ruins Crypts…
Dragon's Murk
Two vast ridges rose into the sky, creating towering cliffs. At one end, a stretch of wild, wooded country and a narrow, rocky gorge. At the other, gradual rise of the land, studded and scattered with jutting slabs of grey stone. In the midst of this was the small walled village which held the pass. Odd place to settle, but they were free to do so. Though, Kastaine thought, perhaps not for much longer. From the moment the one-armed swordsman stepped into the dusky village, he thought he smelled something draconic. They had told him to leave, that there was an illness upon the town. He knew, he said, and had an idea from whence it came. He had made the weary innkeeper relent and grant him a room, for which he handsomely paid and asked not to be disturbed. He had work to do.
That night, Kastaine had stayed up to confirm his suspicions. Great silvery stars shone frosty light upon the landscape. The village had fallen back into a deep, much needed slumber. It seemed as serene a scene as he could imagine, until from the crags there began to creep slowly at first a thin, dark haze which, as it approached the village, then flooded down until it had blanketed the the entire ground, rising up in lapping waves and stealing through open windows, looking as if it threatened at any moment to engulf the village.
So then, it was a basilisk.
The morning did not come as Kastaine had expected. In fact, it seemed as if, even despite the village's shaded space between the stony ridges, the sun barely rose at all. He reached down to his side and shifted the sheathed sword at his belt, letting his hand rest lightly on it for a moment. A greyfolk masterwork, but you wouldn't know it from the bare, unadorned scabbard in which he kept it. A mild deception that made his work easier sometimes. He gazed out of his inn window upon the sickly, lethargic villagefolk, wheezing as they went about their honest toil, helping each other to doorsteps to rest after walking barely ten yards. Kastaine then strode from the inn and summoned his full arm of spectral king's armour as he walked through the poison-stained streets.
Let the people know an agent of Castlegrand walked with them, and that the steely mountains hadn't forgotten their own.
Of the two ridges, Kastaine had guessed the lower, thicker one might house his quarry, and it would seem he had guessed right. More places to hide. The stench of airborne toxin was thick in the barren, dusty uplands, though no miasma crept through the sighing air. Basilisks are the most insidious of the dragonspawn. They seclude themselves near small, lone settlements and gradually weaken them with potent exhalations sent on the winds before moving in and devouring their defenseless victims alive. They aren't well suited to fighting, but they were big. And cornered, they could spew a torrent of miasma that could rot flesh off bone.
The maw of the cavern seemed deformed in a way that made Kastaine profoundly uneasy. It had likely rotted the stone to make for itself a foreboding lair. Kastaine pulled out from a small pack a long length of silver fabric he tied around his mouth. It was stained with the purifying blood of the Great Grey Ones, ancestor-gods of the greyfolk, though this particular item was already well tarnished. It would have to do.
He expected to come upon the thing rather quickly. This was no natural cave, just a wound in the earth. Quick, dirty, righteous work was ahead. Kastaine unsheathed his sword. It tapered to a fine, diamond-shaped point, the blade itself was entirely of steel but of manageable weight, and the edges were silvered so that if plunged into something bubbling with toxins, such as a basilisk, the silver would combat its putrescent outburst. Such swords could even cut through clouds of the stuff.
There was a sound from within the melted cave. A wet crunching and snapping. Kastaine feared the worst, but what he found worse than that.
Rugged, stony hide, mottled black and slate. Short, flat, blunt snout, lipless and snarling, it wheezed a black vapor from between fangs like clasped fingers. Small red eyes that burned. Its front limbs were quite large, and ended not in paws but what looked like human hands. Its hind legs were shorter but thick, able to push the bulk of this thing along the earth. The basilisk stood on these, hunched over and devouring something Kastaine knew implicitly to be nothing less than the corpse of a dragon.
This was unheard of. And it had to be stopped immediately. This accounted for the strange darkness left in the wake of the basilisk's poison fog. True draconic powers gained from vile cannibalistic acts. The swordsman leapt forth, spectral arm held out to take whatever attack the basilisk might throw at him. Losing his arm had been the best thing to happen to his career. With no flesh under the nigh-indestructible king's armour, he could afford some mistakes. The basilisk lumbered towards him, maw dripping, and lunged with a great claw. Kastaine took it on his spectral arm and bent low, flinging himself at the lowered dragonspawn and thrusting the diamond-tip sword into its neck. The thing gurgled and foamed—and the blade was stuck, and his sword arm could not remove it. Kastaine barely jumped back from another swipe.
He ducked in, and with his spectral arm, pulled the sword free. He preferred using the king's armour as a shield, but with this curious, mutated skin, he needed the freedom it provided. He swung the sword out in a broad arc, moving it with frightful speed unbound by the constraints of flesh, and raked the silvered edge across the beast's left eye. A foul effluvial torrent poured forth. Nothing about these things was not slime, poison, or disease.
Suddenly, an acrid stench filled the air. The basilisk reared up again and and gave a throaty rumble—ancestor's blood, it was like a laugh, thought the one-armed swordsman—and blackness began to erupt from its maw. It wouldn't dare let the treasure of dragon flesh and dragon blood be taken from it, but Kastaine had other plans. He flipped his blade in his grip and leapt backwards, lending the weight of his body and the strength of his king's armour into a thrust and sent the sword hilt-deep into the basilisk's stomach. The poison it had conjured was stopped in its track though stinging tendrils of it rotted through Kastaine's clothing and onto his face. With both hands, he wrenched the sword upwards, tearing through the stony hide of the dragonspawn. He dashed back as foul insides spilled out.
The thing shrieked and went to fall upon him as it shuddered in agony, but he instead fell into a low stance, and blade held in a reverse grip, locked himself on the ground and let the dragonspawn head land upon the stained silver blade.
Below, the town had appeared to brighten up a little. The people were still weak, but something of the curious murk had lifted, and the sun shown down from on high with a pleasing warmth. The thing was dead, he told them, and could be left to rot. But he didn't suggest going up there any time soon. He didn't tell them about the dragon corpse, and wondered what to do about that. So much dragonblood for sorcerers to find...or something else. One thing at a time. He would send for physicians, and declined their offers of food and gifts. No, there was still work to be done.
Kastaine strode from the town's walls, head low in thought, but his heart filled with serene gladness, for now. His return to Castlegrand would come with strange tidings indeed.
Sorcerer's Spear
Once, the world lived in harmony. Loose bands of humans wandered an unbroken green vastness wherefrom cool dew and nectar was supped from low hanging leaves, perfumed fruits fell gently from branches which offered themselves, and great black-bark trees rose into the calm grey heavens to drink of their soft rains. In those days humans dwelt under the overhang of heavy green canopies, and in the broad arches of low boughs. They slept upon moss beds and ran for hours on springing grasses, they passed through corridors of tall fronds and worshipped the trees which were known to them, each and every one, as a world axis, upon which the cycle of natural order turns.
In those days, man's will was in accord with order, having been born of rich clay and vigorous roots, now eager to grow in different ways. Thought and world axis reacted to one another. Then came the first growth, and nascent mankind began to think beyond the turn of order. At first, the world was endowed with vivacity, the rains fell harder, the fruits dropped in profusion, and dew and nectar flowed freely. But man sought what was further beyond, and with the trees around which the world turned, they began to pull up from the deep earth the first stone, flung skyward, creating the first mountains—the first axis of human design.
The green crawled up the towering rock alongside the humans who dwelt there, but the mountains listened not to order, they were inert save for the thoughts that moved them. And among the human beings there rose those who thought very clearly, and they shaped the green upon their new domains to their will, and slowly humanity left the vast ancient sweeps below for the mountains, and each peak became a small world unto itself.
But the real power of all the world lay still in the great trees which rivalled the mountains in size, and the world-turners of the mountaintops gazed upon them with something like envy. The second growth came when the first human went down to the misty base of one of the axis-trees and hewed, with stone, from it a length of living wood, and carried back to the mountain the first staff, and the second axis of humankind's making.
Strange ages of stone passed then with the aid of tree-staves, and finally the world-turners of the mountains began to look to each other with the same envy that they once looked to the trees with.
The first weapon was the spear. Battle, in the beginning, was small, sudden, swift, and at first approached with a decorum that quickly dissipated as mankind learned just what powers it really commanded. The world-turners fought with their tree-staves, and attached to them heads that were shards of mountain stone, plunged into the soft flesh of their opponents, which became soon after their enemies. The axis mundi was in their hands, and so the world turned for them, and in the first few battles between the nascent lords of their sky-flung nations, the world turned in a way that could never be undone.
To feed the third growth, which threatened never to cease, never mature, never come to fruition, wood was hewn from world-trees across the newly established lands. Boughs were cut and bark torn from those axes through which natural order made its course. In the latter days of war, new world-orders were established and clashed against each other on crimson-speckled green vastlands. No more did world-turners walk the path between harmony and control, but now sorcerers strode with terrible confidence the path of domination. The world was twisted a thousand different ways by war magics. And in their hands, their spears which rent the veil of nature.
Mountains fell, and new peaks were thrown into the storm-laden heavens, their bellies full of fire.
A world-tree burned, and an inexorable, scorching doom was set into the natural order that man would re-discover over and over after each time it was avowed to never be used again.
All this, the root-reading scholars say, was the painful price of change and freedom, blood was the tax that must be paid for growth.
Lost Ash
It plunged its blade into the withered chest, and the puppets which had been an arm's reach away suddenly fell still, the gravewarden's intelligence no longer present to guide them. A silvery light crept from the chest of the warden, an old corpse half-built into a sarcophagus. The blade-bearing figure placed its hand over the dry wound on the warden and let the light seep into its own body. Still not enough to heal that ragged rent on its own back. Would have to wait, that light would be put to better use elsewhere it was sure.
There was something at the top of this tower, that's what the still-sane warden back the crypt had said. Why else place so many automatons and puppets here? That last slaying had been risky, the last warden it had bound itself to was now so far away, the chance of reanimation, should the figure be attacked, was slim. But neither could it have let the puppets follow them up here where more danger potentially lurked.
A rickety mechanism lurched to life as the figure leaked a little light into its workings, and the elevator shuddered as it lifted the figure into the heights of the tower. It crouched low, and held its blade at the ready. As the elevator ascended through dull, cracked stone, the ambient light died off, and it passed through a space of total darkness, before arriving in an uneasy twilight that showed naught but foggy corners and a great bronze door.
The figure, naught but rags across a lean, wiry frame, and stone head weathered and chipped by quest and combat, pushed the heavy portal open.
Inside was bright—too bright, but out of the strong, cold radiance there could be seen things like great telescopes, high-backed chairs, and chests filled to the brim with countless items. The floor was a pale stone, the walls some kind of rich wooden panelling.
"Look at you..." came a voice out of the blearing sunlight. "Goodness, you must be old...you must be ancient—to have flesh—to have a body!" The figure could barely see the tall shape approach, and readied itself for defense. "Rough condition to be sure," the great glass figure—for it was, as sight cleared, certainly made of glass—wheeled about the figure with immense enthusiasm, "but this is skin, muscle, tendon, you...my friend, you have no idea how long I've been waiting. How long we've all been waiting. I'm sure you can see it, but we're running on fumes here."
The tall shape was evidently composed entirely of glass, some strange, half-molten, malleable glass, in which odd gases played and delicate instruments wavered. It was clothed in great burgundy robes.
...
"Ahem, yes. I, my friend, I am a Glass Noble. I was built by our makers to lead in their stead, and rule if needs be." It spoke, but its mouth did not move. "Not that there's much to rule, and less to lead, but it wasn't in vain, was it? I mean, here you are."
...
"You...don't know? You really don't remember?" The Glass Noble seemed trouble, and thought for a moment, muttering to itself, "Perhaps you never knew...hmm. Ah, well, you are a stonehead. A kind of," it hesitated trying to find the right wording, "shall we say, automaton? But not quite like the others out there I'm sure you've seen. You're of a very early kind. Back when the war wasn't so desperate. Back when there was excess flesh to work with. They took you from a battlefield or hospice, sewed you up, and stuck a stone head on your neck stump, then sent you back out to fight."
...
"What, pray tell, is the last thing you remember? Or rather, the first thing, from when you woke up."
...
"A...no, it can't be...then that's it. They really are gone, aren't they?" The Noble went quiet again for a moment, and almost seemed to shake. "The others, you see, they aren't what they once were, and..."
...
"A warden told you that? I'd thought them all long gone by now, that's...wonderful news, my friend. It was right to send you to me." Its mood brightened. "As I said, there were once others—other makers, I mean—but alas they've long ceased to be of much use in fixing this dreadful problem we're all in. Well, I say they're useless, but..." the Noble's voice dipped, "you must know at least what's inside them isn't. They can be put to use. Did the warden say...?"
...
"That is good. You mustn't be afeared now, my friend, not at all. Some might even say it is your duty to do what must be done. Scrape together what's left, and just maybe...oh, new light, from a new soul, just think of that, eh?"
...
"I'm afraid there's not much I can do but point you in the right direction, my friend. Unless, hmm..." the Noble pottered about its chamber, and removed two things from a large chest. "Now! Never let it be said we Glass Nobles weren't generous... This, my friend, is a lens. If you think it wise, you may focus light within through it into various useful forms. Alas, this is not a complicated specimen but should you, ah, encounter any others like me—that is, other Glass Nobles—their glass may be of some use. Bring it to me, and we shall make use of it." The Noble stooped low for a moment, like it was afraid it might be heard. "We are terribly fragile things, you understand?"
It then held out the second thing.
"And this...well, I saw that rather nasty gash on your back and...well, if you fear using too much light to join it up, pack it with this lost ash instead. I can see your hesitation. Yes, I'm afraid this is what we've been reduced to."
...
"Yes, this used to be a person. A human being. With a soul." The ash was a dark grey, and looked to be rather coarse, thick, and crumbling. Perhaps not entirely, properly burnt. "But that was terribly long ago. They shan’t miss what they aren't alive to experience, hmm? If you're to house a new soul, then you'll need a body in good order, and this will help. I'm sure of it. In fact, using ash is a noble deed here. This is their legacy, is it not? Well, in any case, we all must get our hands dirty sometimes."
...
"Go beyond the enclave wall outside the city. There you will find a maker, or what is left of one. Rotten as it might be...you know what to do with it. We are all counting on you, my friend."
Ruins Crypts
It had been a practice, millennia ago, to inter the illustrious dead within crypts constructed from the dwimmerstone of fallen sky ruins. Once such sites had been scoured for any useful scraps of rune-laden stone or dust, labourers would drag the hefty remains of the ancients' heavenly dwellings and build deep tombs with them, and the bodies within would receive royal reception, placed into dwimmerstone sarcophagi and packed with dust. Most often these were powerful battlemages and sorcerer-kings, or zealous warpriests and ritemasters.
It was believed that either righteous fury, or their occult power in life, made the dead walk again. The crypts commonly became haunts of corpses wearing skins of stone, things considered by the primitives to be half-ascended demigods or masters, either to be propitiated or to have knowledge gleaned from. Minor sects to these dwimmerdead spread wherever the ruins crypts were built, and the race soon became not to harvest pure dwimmerstone from the sky, but to gain raw material with which to construct new crypts. In these ages, much rune-laden dwimmerstone was lost in the scrabble to fashion these temple-tombs, much to the dismay of wizard and priest alike.
The truth of the matter was neither master nor demigod dwelt in these graves, but something else, the likes of which has long been effaced from the world.
Sorcerers were great patrons of masons' guilds in the old days, and as the guilds consolidated, dwimmerstone sorcerers pooled resources to make, in secret, grandiose tombs that were in fact thrones beyond death, where into eternity, in their semi-divine states, the secrets of the ancients would be revealed to them. They planned for their deaths at the prime of their lives so that strong, ripe bodies could be preserved and enhanced. Those who knew the dwimmerfolk of the high heavens as gods and not as ancients, and who learned of these doings, saw much of this as trespass and blasphemy. The faithful were ever at odds with the movement of thaumaturgy, itself a minority yet with an immovable position in society, from wulven mountain keeps to human city streets and beyond into grimalkin jungle lairs.
As their number grew, the power of the liches began to wax mighty. Were they, then, not as gods themselves? Cults to them grew quickly, deeper in devotion than the old sects that came before, as these new liches had retained not just awareness but intelligence. They expressed powers beyond the priests, and had access to inhuman wisdom beyond even the wisest monarchs or chiefs or elders. Eventually the cults emerged from the tombs and word spread across civilized lands that new powers were on the rise—new powers of every race and type, that had transcended these limitations. Accept the rule of those beyond death and know a measure of eternal peace under their guidance.
The grimalkin accepted almost immediately, as did the battle-lusting wulven, for they were creatures with a nose for power and saw a new order in the corpses-lords. All breeds of apefolk, including the city-bound humans, fell into open warfare over it. Only the leonids looked upon this blasphemy and knew it deserved nothing more than to be ground under their heels.
If there was one thing that made the leonid people stand apart from the world, it was their ruthless crusades to destroy the abominations that had taken one step too far. With sword and stone they waged swift, violent war and trampled many under their feet. Every life spent was worth it to efface what they knew would become a terror worthy of divine retribution. Let the gods see their deeds alone.
When the leonid met them in battle, they knew what was lich and what was mere accursed undead. Mercifully, comparatively few of their true enemy existed, and they left not one stone unturned in their searches. The grimalkin eventually fell under their heel and the leonid cleaned the sweltering jungles of festering dwimmertombs. That bitterness reaches in the modern day. The wulven put up fierce resistance and were the last ones to be cleansed. The apefolk faithful, who knew the gods, banded together and helped purify their homelands of undead taint.
The liches themselves fell slowly, but surely. The leonid reached the height of dwimmerstone miracle-working during that age of war. But alas, much holy stone was lost in the effort, and even more was destroyed so as to not fall into the wrong hands. But there came a weary day when the last crusaders could hold their heads high. The old crypts were crushed, and sealed for the rest of time. Sorcerers complicit in the conspiracy were slain, their bodies made ash so they may not rise.
Only the leonid remember now, and they keep watch.
All hail Rex Leo, those who cleansed the world of the undead
All hail the knight with the magic arm.
Death to the basilisk, destroyer of life
Woe to man, who has forgotten that he's a stone head
sent back to battle, in need of ash
given life by the lens of the glassy one.