Looks like a whole lotta Shadows & Sorcery in here, ninety-seventh edition even!
What dwells below? Four tales, all with a theme! See if you can guess it, I’ve made it really hard.
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This week, we ponder upon the frightful Charnel Knight, we learn about the Pilgrims of the Dead, we delve into the Depths of the Catacombs, and we fight back the Frost of the Dead…
Charnel Knight
Lorgrad gazed at the great armoured figure ahead of her. Under the scuffs and scratches, the scattered dents and pits, the tattered rags and discolouration, there was, she believed, a hint of dignity. It was in the small, mostly faded details of finely worked pauldrons and vambraces, flaked gold leaf and dulled filigree across the whole of the arms, the chestplate, and greaves. But then she watched the thing closer for a moment, and those hints of grandeur seemed almost like a grim parody.
And it was a thing, no doubt about that. Not a person. At least not anymore. She'd been there when the vanguard captain called it up, how did he say, thought the soldier, "the old hero, risen once more to give service". A tomb knight, the captain had called it. A silent hulk, tireless, unwavering, unceasing. Why not fill a whole bloody army with them was what most militia said behind their superiors' backs. Truth was, the commanders and their own superiors probably didn't like them either. They knew what their soldiers said, and believed, and themselves said so, and believed.
They knew what folk had seen down the ages, and wouldn't let be forgotten.
But to be fair, they did the trick in a fight. The company had been marching through a great wide gorge in the Platzkord forest, a full league from the Skawric-Sovsia border, but with steep rises either side. Stupid move on the part the pasty, thin-limbed tri-elven captain. Fools like him made Lorgrad resent her fifth of elven blood. If it weren't for decent Livronnese elf-lords who actually ran their estates, unlike distant Sovsian dwarf primaries, she'd have jumped the border and been one of the dwarf-orc deserter bandits that ambushed them.
No, better stop that train of thought, she said to herself in a whisper.
The "tomb knight" had pretty much saved them when the enemy poured over the gorge walls, all one hundred and fifty of their company rendered useless in a choke point. It waded to the forefront alongside the captain and absolutely decimated the attacker's advance at the front. Screams of fright and fleeing must have reached the rear, the captain had mused aloud when the quick fight was over. More likely they heard the Sovsian shouts of "charnel warrior" and didn't want any part of it. Thank the trinities for dwarfen superstition, eh?
The march would soon end for the day. She'd never cared to keep an eye on it, but now she was curious. Does that thing rest? Or does it just stand there, all night, waiting? Or does it wander? She didn't like the idea of a pile of corpse parts watching the camp, let alone walking around it. And it always was there, ready, before any of the soldiers were.
She looked at the hulking figure in front of her and wondered who was in there. If they had descendants, and what they would think of it all. Maybe there were Ogre bits in it. That's why it didn't need to rest. And she almost shuddered because it was a possibility. That's something everyone would want their hands on, though not a soul would admit it. Centuries later and people could barely say the word "Ogre".
Though she supposed there was no mortal soul at all in that charnel knight. Some elemental, for nothing of gore and steel would any elven celestial spirits touch. No, some visceral thing called up from the Lower World, given form to whet its appetite if it fought for us. What was keeping it on our side, she thought. How much, or how little. When the battle was done, what then?
She supposed she'd find out soon enough.
Pilgrims of the Dead
On the second-score day of the Season of Thunder--that is, as the Apostolary of Seika reckons it--and some moments before the hightide chimes were sounded, a figure strode into the public Ritual Passage of the Halómys Basilika. Far above, heavy incense smoke fell like an ethereal waterfall from the unseen choir chambers, which masked the many faithful who went about the their mysteries alone. But not this figure.
A round but lean face of swarthy cast, and long, flat black hair which framed eyes of a dark red. His face was clean shaven, heavily lined, and bereft of ornamentation. His expression was distant, and grim. The Basilika remembers well those features, and the long, heavy black cloak which encapsulated his whole form--which marked him out as a devotee of Azrec, the austere mountain god, and enemy of the Seika faith.
The sacristans paused in their holy duties and muttered to each other as they watched him trod the dusky marble floor. By his somewhat hunched posture, he knew he was being watched. But for all that, he walked openly through the passage, checking the side altars as he went, and then finally amidst a bank of incense, he stopped.
A sacristan who had been showing the visiting Ecclesiasmus, one Mandus Etharke, stood ready with their hierarch for confrontation. It wouldn't be beyond the expectations of the mountain barbarians to brazenly defile an altar like this. The man knelt down, and to the shock of everyone around, removed his cloak. From his foot-length robe, also black, he removed something small no one could quite make out, and placed it on the altar. He then held his hands out to the side slightly, fingers held in an undeniably Seikan manner, and began a short solemn rite.
Moments later, he was done. He donned his cloak, stood up, looked down at the altar for a moment, and left without a word.
The Ecclesiasmus watched the mountain man leave, and then went to the altar. Upon it, a small oval object of bronze, flat, about the size of a palm. It bore both a holy Seikan name and a personal name on one side, as well as the mark of a Seikan deity. On the reverse was a small inscription stamped into the metal: "Heshim Gól does this in the name of Varouke, who died on the road at Kabash. His pilgrimage is now complete."
So, he had been a pilgrim of the dead.
The Ecclesiasmus stood with the pilgrim's medal in his hand, ignoring the sacristan who begged his pardon several times. Fulfilling the pilgrimages of dead faithful is a fairly common occupation and vocation. There are orders and firms dedicated to the task in a number of religions. It is almost always done anonymously, in the name of "a pilgrim forgotten". Indeed, the Basilika was filled to the brim with these offerings.
But this had a name, and a dedication. And Kabash, where had he heard that name before? Kabash, as in the old Austreal capital? That was half the world away. Had the Azrecite really come all the way from the south? Or had he been the last in a line of carriers? The Ecclesiasmus could only wonder at the story behind this tender, solemn act from an enemy faith for a Seikan pilgrim. He placed the medal back down gently, and returned to the patient sacristan. It was all the Basilika could talk about for a week after, and only after an appropriate time was the medal interred in a repository.
The Apostolary of Seika didn't think any different of the Azrecites after that, but did allow themselves affirm that there was some measure, however small, of righteousness in all souls.
Depths of Catacombs
Some time in its distant past, the city and its culture developed an intense distaste for death. Not unusual, but the degree to which the city collectively eschewed all thought and speech on it shocked even the most spiritually-inclined foreigners and dignitaries. To this end, the ancient inhabitants uprooted their graveyards and dug deep caverns in the earth where they interred unseen all things that reminded them of their mortality.
As the city waxed mighty and grew, so did the catacombs, but rather than outward, the people dug deeper and deeper. They had to branch out at certain times, of course, but at every possible juncture, illogical as it was, they sought to go downwards to further remove the dead from their presence. Many sections of the catacombs became little more than pits and oubliettes in which corpses were flung to rot and moulder in oppressive darkness.
Over the span of a full thousand years did the catacombs take the shape they wear in the present day. Sprawling for leagues beneath the city, almost equal in proportion as if it were the city's subterranean shadow, the catacombs ran and wound and slithered, sometimes creeping upwards only to plunge down again, and amongst this, there was no end to the secret passages and blocked off cellar entrances to the silent tunnels where thieves and smugglers practiced their professions. But the abhorrence of death had become a sacred precept in the high echelons of the city, and the echelons were loathe to spend much time in cleansing the resting places of their ancestors of this element, and left them untouched for long spans of time.
It was guardsmen, punished by their superiors with walking the beat near the catacombs entrance, or during the breaking up of dangerous smuggling activity, or workers trying to find niches in which to inter a new corpse in the miles of crypt passages, that began to filter reports to the rulership of the city. There were people living in the catacombs. And not only were there hundreds of them down there, they'd been there for years. The beggar, the criminal, the cripple, the madman, those dregs a society begins to form once it outgrows its ability to govern all its parts. These were the kind that had seeped into the untouchable space of the catacombs, and had found not just a place to call home alongside their fellow outcasts in the dead, but a place of power.
However, it was known by many but rarely spoken of that the catacombs were slowly becoming unmanageable, and there would come a time when its size would dwarf the living city. Apart from the subtle horror the high echelons felt at the idea of dwelling above a hollow world of corpses, the work it took to expand them was becoming costlier with every extension. But now the tombs had inhabitants who were themselves working to repair the tunnels for habitation.
Let them have it, was the unanimous decision.
A deal was thus then secretly struck among the echelons, and a new caste of citizen was born.
As their existence became known to the wider populace, a fear was born of the teeming hordes of subterranean tomb-folk and what dreadful things must be happening under the surface, a fear which grew into a violent prejudice. All for naught, as the tomb-folk knew their homes better than the city dwellers knew their own streets, and every mob of life-affirming zealots was left to wander in death-touched darkness before being spewed back out on the surface.
Calls were made by the people to flush the catacombs of their freakish dwellers, and while the ruling aristocracy spoke mighty words and made dire oaths, in secret they nodded to each other and let the matter pass. That apparent apathy took its time spreading to the population, but it did. Those who couldn't bear to live with the necropolis beneath fled, and those who remained by minor degrees developed a sort of begrudging respect for the tomb-folk as the fanatical loathing of death began to wane quietly, seeing them as an honourable but unclean people, living paradoxes.
Their story spread and countless folk tales and urban myths sprung up around them. They were survivors of a plague, or a war, or exiles from some far place. They were a secret cult, or the original inhabitants of the city driven underneath, for the city was older than the catacombs, and had a colourful history. But the truth was, spoken of by tomb-folk themselves, they were just the lost and the damned. The catacombs were something to do when there was naught else to turn to, and nowhere else to go. The poor made a life tending the dead, there was room for plenty, there was a community, rough as it was, and the echelons left them alone.
Of course, their core were thieves and smugglers, and many of the denizens of the tombs made a healthy living from burglary and murder which did little to endear them to the surface world. Life was precious in the catacombs, but only as a commodity, and more than one strapping young lad or lass went missing near homes known to have underground entrances.
To this day, the tomb-folk have wisely restricted their influence. They know their continued existence hinges upon their quietude, and so they kept it, dreaming into being a city greater and more terrible than the one that birthed them.
Frost of the Dead
A cold wind sweeps across the landscape. The green loses its lustre, and the sun grows dim in the ashen sky. In the northern countries, a plague ravages the cramped cities, small villages in the sparse countryside are abandoned, the nights draw in, and with every final sigh, the frost creeps further across the land.
To stem the tide, the magistrates and burgomasters and governors build great bonfires where plague dead are thrown, and their ashes are scattered over many days to the winds, and they see with weary but glad eyes, a small slowing to the spread of the frost. They ration out food generously, and feasts are held in all the halls and courts to feed the flame of life in every person.
Further south, figures trudge through ice fields in search of unmarked burials from long ago, forgotten graveyards, and ancient tombs that are as blocks of ice. Often they are parties of zealous freemen or low clerics of no renown or experience whose disappearances only add to the creeping cold. In the cities, sanctioned orders comb through steep, narrow, crooked old streets and winding hidden passages of the maze-like old capitals and fortress-towns, where antiquity hovers on grey wings, seeking out and destroying the frigid corpses of man and beast alike.
In the towering forests and lush grasslands, amid the foetid jungles and wind-swept highlands, there do hunters perform intricate rites for every kill, slaughtering by degrees so that life may pass easily. Countless communities have gone hungry in the wake of a traumatic death's burst of frost.
From the dead does the ice emanate, because life is warmth and wet and flowing, and death is cold, terribly cold and heavy and it is not still. In elder times of war and famine and sickness has such a cold emerged that winter had its grasp upon half the world. In the bitter season does life itself teeter on the brink of death, and all who succumb serve only to spread it.
There are more dead in the world than living, and this will always be so. Life endures, and births continue, but as of yet one has no outpaced the other. Even on the hottest days when life blooms across the earth, in dark places there is a chill. There have been those who have sought for answers through the centuries, and none who delve beneath do not emerge and ask, "What does it mean that the deep places of the world bear naught but ice?"
It's a grave wind that blows from the burial chambers and leads the pilgrims to the tomb of the Death knight.