Shadows & Sorcery #96
Full steam head-first into the ninety-sixth edition of Shadows & Sorcery!
I lay this before you: five glimpses into realms of dark fantasy. You know the kind, perhaps. Strange forces, dark locales, grim cults, cosmic powers. They all await below…
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This week, we take a walk into the Forest of the Undead, we wander through the eerie Graveyard City, we uncover the truth about the Hunter’s Mountain, the discover a frightful Temple of the Pit, and lastly we learn of the strange powers of Ice of the Moon…
Forest of the Undead
It had been the newly coronated Queen Elyram's gift to the people. Elevated to the highest authority by almost unanimous public favour, she had wished to usher in an era of regrowth and new purpose after the disastrous reign of the very quickly and forcibly ousted Lord Hamholud. Her gift was a forest. It was meant to repopulate the now rather bare countryside to the south of the capital. In place of an empty landscape, stripped of its once famed verdant greenery and old forests, the new, sprawling woodland would come to symbolize and embody rebirth for ages to come.
She was terribly idealistic that way.
It wasn't until perhaps a year later did things begin to be seen. Only distant sightings at first, for the forest was intended more as something to be looked upon rather than interacted with, but these loose edicts were poorly enforced by the gentle Queen. And so, people went in to gaze and wonder at the tall, thick trunks of healthy bronze bark and the vigorous growth of greenery, all bolstered by that moist, rich earth, of a deep, almost black hue, fed by imported fertilizers given as gifts from a distant land to a nation back on its feet. The only one who didn't secretly scoff at the great chests of stinking soil was Queen Elyram.
These sightings continued for months, until a woodsman under royal orders made a report that finally reached the Queen. The earth in the forest was upturned in countless places, and the naked roots of the great trees were laid bare when they should be deep underground. It seemed that the soil had been raked apart and burst open. Upon hearing it, it seemed the Queen was quite upset, though she did her best to remain resolute. And so she set a special watch of veteran woodsmen to determine the problem.
The first report back was the talk of the court for months on end.
It turned out that when Queen Elyram planted those first trees, there'd been an old graveyard on the land, long forgotten. A garden of rebirth indeed. She couldn't have known, but it was the first misstep in a reign of missteps. Her woodsmen quickly found themselves reorganized into an order of "keepers of the earth", armed with axes and hammers, and told to do what was necessary.
They weren't seen again for three days. Not until a lone keeper wandered into the palace around midday, his garments redolent with filth and dried blood, requested in a calm tone for audience with the Queen at once, laid his chipped and stained axe down before her, and begged for the forest to be abandoned.
Alas, she fought for that forest, first with more keepers, and then with soldiers, and then finally with mercenaries, but nothing helped. Not even removing them from the forest perimeter and destroying them in the castle did anything. They always returned in the forest. To her credit, the Queen presided over every experiment her alchemists tried. And as mercenaries left in droves, word of it spread far and wide.
Queen Elyram's reign was marred, if by nothing else, by the bad repuation the nation got from that forest. Right on the capital's doorstep, a haunt for disreputable scholars to lurk in the night and gawk at unexplainable horrors, a bank of darkness in which children and travellers went missing, and a place which stood in blasphemy against every tenet of every righteous faith.
It is understood that the Queen desired, near the end of her sudden illness, to be buried in the forest. No one refused her final act of desperation, if it was such. The second she passed, the keepers disbanded and not a living soul set foot in the place after, at least not deliberately.
One can only guess what happened after that. The citizens of the capital do not know, for they are all dead.
Graveyard City
"Return only when you take something from the city," the guild master had said.
A breathless stillness pervaded the city. No wind stirred, no crumbling structure cracked, no rubble loosened. No bird perched and cawed, no scavenging beast skittered through the streets. No voices called, no feet clamoured, no crowds bustled, no weary labourers staggered home. Even the sky seemed to slow to an imperceptible crawl above it, and only by immeasurable degrees did the bleak daylight and deep night pass over it. The city would have appeared like a static image, frozen in time, were it not for a single black shape which slunk from corner to corner, throwing back a furtive glance every few steps.
Not a single building here was not boarded up. Every door, cellar, window, and garret shutter, every possible entry way right down to the sewer grates, were sealed with wood and wax. There were chains across a good many of them. Some of the small, narrow streets of high, tightly packed houses had been barricaded, even partially bricked up. But not everywhere had been shut so tight that a slender figure in black could not crack a door open and slip within.
None of these buildings had seen light in decades. A darkness filled them that held a quality difficult to pin down, but each shadow-laden hallway and room seemed as if filled with some animate particle perceivable in the lightlessness. Like moving through dark, murky water in which there swam rotting detritus.
The small lantern's radiance only reached a bare few feet around, so that the thief was forced to peer close at the interior of the house. The scent of the air was thick, cloying, old. There was a hint of foulness that scratched at the nostrils. This house had seemed promising, for it was well known that when it appeared, wherever it appeared, the sites of its manifestation were quickly shut up, and forgotten. But it was a large house. It could be anywhere.
Every house, every smithy and grocer, every official's chambers, every single sewer tunnel and old forgotten passage from the centuried history of the city, in all of them lay a core of putresence born of that devil's plague. An eternally mouldering rot, a shapeless pile still slick and sunken in to reveal the final remnants of what once showed that this was a human being. How it had spread, none could guess. But they knew whence it came, and the thief which had secreted it into the city had been burnt alive. Only after more than half the city had entombed itself did its leading magistrates realize there was no stopping it, and they confined themselves to their inner quarters, and left the people to their own devices.
Some of the oldest folks in neighbouring settlements remember the tales their elders spoke of when pressed to it, that for weeks on end, those who had reason to pass by the city could hear the screaming and roaring swell into a cacophony of mindless abandon, and then subside by degrees into a cowering lament, and finally into dreadful silence.
The thief remembered that when all of a sudden, there it was. Sloughing off an old, stained bed. Perhaps a person's final, violent upheaval, an attempt to escape. Or perhaps a person's failed attempt to reach a last place of comfort. The thief recoiled, and held back a retching as a swift exit was gained.
At some point, the sun had began to leave the sky, and the shadows had assumed a lengthiness. In the deeper ones, the thief pushed back the thought that the uneasy jittering of the darkness was outside, in the streets. Passing into a wider, more well-lit path, the thief did not seek to creep and hide anymore, but walked openly. On the left now, in a court to itself, a temple. Almost certainly that temple was one of the worst places in the city. All those people clamouring for succour, and sealed within. There wasn't a threat in all the universe that could convince anyone in their right mind to venture in there. The stench which leaked into the air from inside was deterrent enough.
"Return only when you take something from the city," the guild master had said. The thief had an idea now what that really meant.
Hunter's Mountain
To become a hunter is to become part of a grand tradition, to become part of the backbone of society...to become an outsider. One finds within that world kinship, wisdom, and a sealed fate.
The lands still depend upon hunters of every persuasion, to patrol the lonely roads, to keep the beasts in check, to secure stores of meat and wild vegetables, and even as auxiliary soldiers in war time. Their role is older than the cities they're often denied entry to, and they know the earth upon which all worked stone rests, and from where that stone was pulled. No other folk figures into more hearthside lore than the hunter.
It starts with decorum. It starts with ceremony. A strict code to which every hunter adheres. But that decorum decays into brutal display, and that ceremony devolves into strange ritual. Codes become obsessions. Only temporarily can it be offset with intricate rites and bonding in the venerable lodges scattered far from the towns and cities. There do veteran hunters gather to celebrate, feast, and recall the old tales, to center themselves for just a little while longer.
An old hunter is a sight to behold. You've seen hunters fresh off their first few treks, still in their uniforms but with that depth to the eye. Fewer have glimpsed a seasoned hunter, who answers to higher authorities directly, bedecked in talismans of worked stone, in ragged cloak and brimmed cap, with a stalking stride even within city walls. None save those in tavern tales have set eyes upon old hunters out in the wilds, moving like soundless shadows amidst the elder woods, with eyes that flash in the torchlight like a beast's. Never far behind those are legends of the Hunter's Mountain.
The life of a hunter is one bound by fate. Why it is so has been mused over by great thinkers for many ages. Some say hunters are cursed by old forgotten gods of mankind daring to trespass in a domain they abandoned when they reared the first cities. Some say they are in fact being welcomed back by those powers, in their own way. Others still wonder whether or not the hunters uncovered gods never known to the rest of humanity, out in the wilds. Regardless, the fate of every hunter is sealed in their initiation, and come to look forward to the day when they are taken to the slopes of a lone mountain and cast into its labyrinthine passes for one last hunt.
Most legends speak of that bleak romanticism. But not at all.
Beyond a league of unbroken deepest forest, the kind of which only the feet of hunters have touched, a scattering of small villages squat in the shadow of the mountain, home to a people who have kept close check on the mountainsides. Beyond them and their meagre roads, more dark forest ranges up the mountainsides, parted only by cliffs, crags, and barren stretches of loose rock. Its absolute apex, barely visible even on the best days and at a reasonable distance, is capped by an unceasing bitter ice-wind.
Sometimes those people leave their homes, and come to dwell in more wholesome places. The mountain, they say, after much drink and interrogation, to the bemusement and unease of those listening, is no primal vista, or unspoilt virgin land, no, it is a charnel wasteland. Strewn with corpses of fresh wet death, old dry demise, and whole spans bleached bones. The tree trunks are stained perpetually with blood and ichor. The sounds that bleed down from the higher reaches are not the sounds of beasts, but neither are they sounds of human beings. Sometimes old hunters wander down from the mountain, and must be dealt with. A graceless, miserable death, will those from the villagers mutter, and then speak no more.
Temple of the Pit
"Most Esteemed Hierarch," the Answerer sighed as he carefully traced the greeting.
"I am writing to you on the day after the return of the young Answerer Tomasz, in the evenfall. It is with a dreadful regret that I must report that the boy was not ready, and I fear we may have lost an able instrument in our battle against the Pit. He returned to us here, in the Wickburn archive-chapel, half-dead. I remember the sight of him falling from his horse and crawling to the doorstep, gasping. The physician we had on hand saw to him, but could find nothing physically wrong other than that he was filthy, exhausted, and terrified. And yet, it was doubtful if he'd make a recovery. It was plain, the physician said, that he was suffering an illusion."
"I've no doubt the Pansophical College will reckon what has happened as one of the greatest disasters in the history of Brackenmere County," the Answerer scratched down upon the parchment with a flutter of anger in his stomach. As he went to dip his quill into the ink, he stopped, the nib thickly dripping fresh ink back into the well as another agonized yell leaked through the thick wooden door from outside. The Answerer shut his eyes until it subsided into a whimper.
The Answerer sighed and looked up from the page, and out into the evening gloam beyond his arched window. The sun was setting an angry red over the undulant expanse of Brackenmere County, one the last battlegrounds between the Great Truth, and the superstitions and falsehoods of the Pit. A wilderness soaked in heathenry, where human beings cowered before the appalling phantasms of illusion and deception, where the earth and the green grew in twisted fashion, nature itself deceived. Out there, amidst the nameless hamlets, isolated villages, and singular settlements which huddled against the old hills and haunted woods, unspeakable rites were handed down from ancient generations were conducted, and lives given over to darkness.
With a shaky exhalation, the Answerer returned to his writing.
"However, the boy's predicament is not the disaster of which I speak."
"As you know, the Cathedral ruins dwell a day's ride from Wickburn. Tomasz had ridden out there in great haste and zeal after his young fervour had impressed us. Ambition of such kind is regarded well by the Hierophant high council, after all. To put it plainly, we had no idea how bad it had gotten in the northern regions. The Cathedral has ever been a beacon for heathenry, but to the extent we found it after the boy's return has been unthinkable for decades. I dare say even now, after all is done, they have been amassing there for months, if not longer, right under our noses."
"A veritable temple dedicated wholly to the Pit."
The Answerer ceased for a second, an anger rising within him once more. A sob came from the other room, almost as if in response.
"Most Esteemed Hierophant I beg of you to level these ruins once and for all. To seed the earth with quicksilver. There is naught to be gained in Truth from letting it stand, seeped in superstition. The Wickburn elders will bend to reason if they are not secret devilists themselves."
"I beg of you," he scrawled once more, the quill digging into the parchment, "for the sake of the town, for the region, for the boy, for the Truth."
"Your Obedient Servant, Answerer-"
The cry from outside the door had ceased. In its place, a laugh.
Ice of the Moon
A new lunar waste is a fascinating opportunity to study not just celestial phenomena, but also to glimpse a higher reality.
Know then that ice, and as such, water, as a substance and element, emanates from the moon. That body appears to us as a great pale, cloudy orb, perfectly smooth, and with a gentle, dim radiance of lightest blue. This moon is a kind of core, or source, or spring, but of course, such terms and concepts are mere shadows of the true existence.
Lunar ice is not like ice which forms natively upon the world. Worldly ice is a pale reflection. Lunar ice is akin, in certain ways, to stone, but this is an approximation. Ice from on high is hard to chip, and melts at extremely high temperatures only attainable from other elemental sources.
Curiously, fallen moon ice is brilliantly clear with a wavering interior, and carries not the clouded appearance of its parent body.
The most sought after aspect of lunar ice is its inherent ability to spread cold around itself. We know now that heat and cold exist on a kind of scale, with a featureless lack of any temperature being the norm for this world. It is surmised that coldness itself is lunar in nature, if not in general something celestial. Lunar ice, even in its smallest fragments, chills all air and material around it, be it even in minor degrees and in only a short radius.
It is thus believed that the ice wastes which dot this world, coexistent with mankind since time immemorial, and of course sometimes added to, are the result of ancient lunar icefalls, which to this day give the world small glimpses of the realms which dwell above. The ice wastes are pristine pale silvery expanses, twinkling in distant sunlight, and are each of them a mountainous vastness which it is believed continues to grow and grow. Within the deepest snows there must slumber cores of primeval ice, the flesh of the moon itself, continuing to establish dominion over this world of shadows.
In those wastes does the world indeed change and begin take on a true and full form, that, they say, is of the moon itself. Few have ventured into them far enough, but those that have say the sky takes on an otherworldly aspect, that a deep and perpetual night falls, that above becomes fill with unseen constellations and unseen worlds of serene sable, revealed on this threshold of the moon.
Nothing walks there, save the rare feet of scholars and pilgrims. At least, nothing we shadows of the higher worlds can see, not yet. Maybe one day, when we have cast off our dim forms to walk in cold light.