Shadows & Sorcery #98
Hold on a second, is that-? Yep, it’s the ninety-eighth edition of Shadows & Sorcery, thank heavens!
And this week? Five whole tales of dark eldritch fantasy, horror, and mystery. Sink your mandibles into THAT.
Quick reminder to the new folks that it’s never been easier than right this very second to get into my fantasy adventure serial, The Path of Poison, with his handy chapter index!
I shan’t keep you any longer, but I will say that if you enjoyed what you read here, let the stories know you liked them by hitting that heart icon!
This week, we venture into the wilds to seek the Church of the Knoll, we get a taste of the dark history of the Tomb of Communion, we learn how to make an Offering of Death, we seek out the secrets of the Mountains of Ash, and we gain a dread glimpse of the Serpents of the Moon…
Church of the Knoll
Past the stained walls and old houses of Wickburn which sag over rough, snaking cobbled streets, over the ancient lichen-encrusted bridge of cracked stone that spans the black waters of the treacherous Darkrun River, past the small farms which squat in the virulent greenery of the twisting trees and grasses, and along an old path bordered by low, uneven walls behind which anything might slink behind unseen for many miles, beyond all of this shall a wanderer be led to a high rise in the undulant land.
It is known to the people of Wickburn only as the Knoll, and its reputation is among the worst in a county filled to the brim with horrors.
That summit is surrounded by stories. Furtive figures in black hoods seen skulking across benighted country roads on starless eves, strange lights flickering atop the Knoll on certain nights of the year, eerie cries heard by passers-by at lonely hours, dark shapes in the treeline beckoning with hypnotic drums. Missing children. Madness-wracked travellers. Witchcraft.
Its rises are steep and rugged, strewn with outcroppings of rock, impassable thickets, and low trees with hanging, grasping branches. A cold wind blows there always, and even in the doldrums of summer its bite is frigid and unwelcome. It is a place of pure and absolute wilderness--almost.
Upon its relatively level crown there sits a foreboding, bloated growth of tightly packed black trees with little space for ingress, though it does exist. Within this small but dense woodland, there dwells a copse, much of its overhead light blocked out by the clawing boughs overhead. But what can be seen and mistaken for nothing else are the irregular remains of the foundations of some building, smothered in thick, dark moss.
The small body of Agents of the Truth which dwell in Wickburn have mostly forgotten its existence, as their forebears were loathe to speak of it, and what its failure implied. But every so often a lowly Seeker, in perusal of the chapter's meagre archives, will uncover some mention of the Church the Agents tried to build atop the Knoll.
It was decades before the Truth decided to assault that stronghold of heathenry. Assurances of metaphysical protection and the presence of stout, armed Answerers weren't enough to quell the fears of the locals employed in this righteous work, but bribes of drink and coin were. So saws and axes felled the black, swollen trunks of the Knoll's fearsome trees under the blazing midday sun, and wagons of stone and mortar were wheeled along the precipitous hillside.
So go the accounts, that at every stage were they met with disaster and mishap, sickness, and bad dreams. Many of the labourers fled to safety as it got worse, nursing their wounds in the ale houses. But not everyone left. What was said by those eventually returned, changed, is still repeated by Wickburn folk today, and they remember what the Truth deigns not to.
No, they say, the air aint right up there. The land and the wind, it's all wrong, they'll mutter this before shaking their heads and refusing to say aught else.
Indeed, the prospective church never was inhabited, never was the Truth was spoken there, never was the world set to rights upon that superstition-soaked summit, and the Truth left it a secret, shameful defeat.
Seekers who press folk for this understand, and wonder, and fear that a space might have held so many illusions that its very nature might...but Seekers who make it this far stop their thoughts here.
Tomb of Communion
I don't think this world was meant to exist. I think it was a mistake. I think we were mistakes. Or we're a dark little corner the gods found one day. They won't let the world persist, but they pity us. Just as we sometimes overlook the spread of filth because we know we too are of it. Even a nest of vermin are just living things, trying to survive, right?
In a world so replete with decay, with rot, with impurity, where nothing remains and all marches forward into formless, unceasing corruption, that tomb is one of the few things that keeps us going.
Growth isn't really growth, it's the bloating, ripening, and decay of hot meat and organs pulsing in the dark of the body, held upright with slick, yellow bones. Then you die and all melts into putrescence. That's existence. But the tomb...I think we must be doing something right, or maybe, just maybe, the gods have found a way to save us, and that tomb is the first one.
Mankind can lay claim to one city, the first city, a dank sprawl whose lowest quarters are half-flooded, a breeding pit for vermin and sickness. But we built it to try and scramble up from the dirt, to become something in spite of ourselves and our world. I think the city, and everything about it, and in it, got their attention.
In that city, years ago, a horde of dwellers in the undermire crawled into the sun-bleached streets, wracked with a violent illness, seeking aid or quick deaths. Fearful of the pain, people corralled and sealed the stricken in old buildings, where their wailing and exudations could be contained, and unseen.
Once, during a dreadful famine, the starved peasantry of several leagues all around stormed the city, only to learn the city had itself resorted to vile measures in the face of the famine.
But both times, there was a miracle. We didn't even have a word for it when it happened. But we do now, and we speak it as a chant and a prayer: regeneration. Sickness undone, flesh restored, fields and rivers overflowing with ripe growth. The old crumbling building in which the diseased dwellers had been sealed became the first temple. So utterly alien were these miracles to our experience that we knew they were divine, or whatever concept we had back then of it. The temples grew in number, and in each we cried for regeneration, led by a holy people infused with zeal, who had been present at a miracle--or as it came to be, their descendents.
And there was one leader, a young woman in the full bloom of life, who one night passed quietly in her sleep. Beloved by her people, there was a full day of sorrow and mourning as she was taken and lain in her earthen tomb, crowds passing in and out of the cramped cellar for days on end to pay respects.
That was when we began to notice she was not rotting. She looked as if merely in gentle slumber, and yet, as the physicians examined her, she took no breath, and her heart was still. And then she was cut to see if her blood would flow...and the wound simply closed itself, not with ugly scarring, but as if there had been no wound there at all. That she was dead there was no doubt. No salts nor sounds nor motions could rouse her. It was a miracle. It was regeneration, and it persisted unlike before.
After that, crowds flocked to the tomb day and night, and the streets were never quiet with the rush of feet from afar on pilgrimage. A great cathedral, the seat of a nascent faith, was constructed around her, the tomb now a shrine, a holy of holies to be gazed upon with devotion, touched with awe, and devoured with love.
No more pleas of visitation from beyond, but cut from a limb and see how it is restored before your eyes. We take it into ourselves so we can be of it, and hold it within us. We pray for a day when the flesh of all the city, and then all the world has been replaced by regeneration from communion.
Offering of Death
I have come to believe that death is not native to this world. No process so utterly familiar and mundane, no matter how ancient it is, should be viewed with the sheer horror that death is viewed. No mortal soul does not in some fashion balk at death, at the cessation of consciousness, or an eternity of sightless cold, that there is an end, a hard end, an unwilling commitment that cannot be turned back from or undone. No cleric, or shaman, or mage in mountain tower does not, deep under their faith, cower in their darkest dreams before death, not because of some fear of the unknown, but because they know it is wrong.
This is why the arts of vampirism are so precious. Why they must be protected. I think they than elevate us back beyond death.
Wherefrom death came and how it settled upon the earth, I cannot say. It is not my concern. But it rid half the world of its vibrant, vivacious peoples when the mountains were thrown up from the hoary deeps, and had been culling humankind since long before then. But when the peaks came, so did the arts I have dedicated two hundred full years to.
Two hundred years. The average human can expect perhaps, at best, seventy in this day and age. Most often it is sadly much shorter. But those who embrace real power have tasted ancient life! Vampirism is the power of domination, and power over those things lethal to life: the malaise, the vermin, the beast, the storm. I believe vampiric arts are an expression of humankind's most primal wisdom.
Why then is it so feared? Hated? Sought out and burnt wherever it is found? It may be that the world doesn't know how to live without death, paradoxical as it may sound. What would they all do with themselves centuries from now? I see in my dreams sometimes a far off age of flame and ecstasy, where life pours free in a mad torrent, and wonder if such boundless decadence is right. But I suppose I am still a being of death, and its shackles are upon my mind.
I set this down, reader, so the faithful, the reasoned, may find it and join me in life as-it-was and in life as-shall-be, in the sweetness of true deathlessness. My work is as yet a pale mimicry of what we humans had before death came, but it is the first step. It has been paid in much blood, and likely even more coin. It was worth all that and more.
Know this: the heart is the center of all life, and blood comes from the heart, it is the expression of life. The heart expends blood upon life, but feed it more blood...and that heart continues to go on. One of the fundamental rules of the arts of vampirism. But here is the trick, so to speak: the heart need not be in a body to survive. The heart is not supported by the body, but rather the body is kept in motion purely by the heart. If the right measures are taken and it is fed, the life of the heart can be preserved indefinitely, and into news bodies.
But death must take. This thing which has fastened itself upon the lives of mankind has an insatiable hunger, and assails those who slip outside its grasp. Lives must end for yours to continue. The removal and indeed transplant of a heart is a sensitive and dangerous matter. You will need strength to do it, and to maintain it. As one versed in vampirism you know this is true for all matters of the art, but here it is paramount. I have had this procedure performed no less than five times with the aid of my loyal servants, whose lives I carry along with me, as they were my offerings. I have escaped the doom of my body and shall continue to do so.
Life is precious, and those of a vampiric temperament know this better than anyone else.
Mountains of Ash
"I couldn't tell you what caused it," said the guide, "but then again, I suppose no one can. At least not yet, eh?" The scholar who followed him grunted in assent. They traversed, inch by inch, the loose, treacherous terrain between a natural cleft in the landscape of the ash mountain. It afforded some protection from the whipping gales which sent clouds of pale, choking dust across the vast slopes, but atop the gorge, small rivers of ash continuously fell, threatening to pour forth in a torrent at any second.
"You lot must have an idea, right?" the guide said as he peered about a turn in the deepening gorge.
"Well," the scholar gasped between words through a thick kerchief around the mouth--a necessity on these bitter peaks, "the prevailing theory is corroborated by old prophecy plates, that...ah, excuse me," she stopped and leaned against the wall of compressed ash, "that some vast firestorm of astral origin did this, some star passed down and burnt these mountains of a terrible life. Why, though, none can say. Not yet. Maybe today that changes."
"Aye, maybe."
Their path now took them across a wide span of sloping mountainside. The wind twisted about their feet, sending a blanket of ash down past them to billow up against various jutting mounds, the waves of a dead ocean. Could desolation be summed up in a physical place, it was these mountains.
The ash was hard underfoot, not quite like stone, for in some places it had just a little bit of give. It was like days old snow, but a filthy greyish beige, it was not coarse, it was like velvet, and it smeared at one's touch. It could be gouged out in crumbling lumps, as had to be done for both guide and scholar to access the slender fissure which they had gained at last.
The light leaked from outside fairly far into the fissure, and the air had the same tepid quality as the rest of the mountain. But deeper in, the guide produced a lantern that bled pale orange light across the featureless surface.
"Can't say for certain what led me here, this high up, this deep in...guide's intuition, I suppose. Or a nose for trouble."
"What's in here, anyway? You convinced a full council to send me out this far, but I've only been taking their word for it ever since," she said as she slowed down, her tone somewhat guarded.
"I don't know," he said plainly as he looked back. "I just...I thought someone with authority should see this. I mean, how long have these mountains been a blight on us below, eh?"
"Longer than we can remember," she said darkly.
The fissure suddenly widened and opened into a large cavern, if the feeble illumination was indicative of the reality of the place. Climbing walls of striated ash, wavering and loose, but more than anything, she now noticed, there was a different sense to the air. It was thicker. And it had a smell, a sickly odour that, the further in they went, came to be profoundly unpleasant despite its lack of strength or pervasiveness.
The guide had become hunched, and kept a slow place. He almost seemed, the scholar thought to herself, scared. The lantern did not go very far. Everything about them was an absolute and still darkness with only the soft pad of footsteps on ash to break the murk.
And then it suddenly slid into view.
She stifled a gasp with her hand and stumbled. The guide looked back slowly, his eyes filled with worry and a tinge of fear, framed in the pallid light.
It was a colossal spinal cord. It could be mistaken as nothing else than that. Thicker than some the greatest trees of lush eastern lands. Each vertebra was distinct despite its titanic radius, and what's more, the whole thing was black, and slick. It rose from the earth, steaming with heat, exuding that sickly stench, and rising into the dark above where it vanished back into the ash.
"Some vast firestorm of astral origin...some star passed down and burnt these mountains of a terrible life."
That was what she had said. What she had believed.
"This isn't the only one," came the trembling voice of the guide, who by the second became more and more uneasy. "They didn't kill them. The stars. Only burned them. But look. They're growing back." And sure enough, as he held the lantern just a little closer, she saw then the vertebrae covered in countless strands of a connective tissue that squirmed and slithered down the bones like black worms.
That night, at the base of the ash mountain, she prayed to the heavens to sear the world clean and her with it if necessary.
Serpents of the Moon
A Voerlund tomb would work best, the wizard had reckoned. They built theirs immediately underground, open and airy, space to move in and be unseen. Silverden graveyards were on the surface. Baletor was an idea, but too likely to find someone else in there with you, up to no good. Mul Manatar cremated their dead. Minosmir was too far away, and their graves weren't really graves anyway. Dunmarrow, absolutely not, and the symbolism wouldn't be right. Macha? Absurd. No, Voerlund was the best bet for attempting astral travel.
The local landwight earth spirit had been appropriately propitiated before anything, assured that nothing like necromancy was afoot, and a small prayer to the World Serpent had been surreptitiously burnt in the nearby temple.
The wizard had taken great pains to consider the various symbols that would go into this endeavour. The tomb was perfect, the place of death, where the soul leaves the body. Burials were done in the day, but he had opted for night, due to the liminal state of darkness. He would sit within a square--a circle was traditionally a boundary, and in many old systems equilateral triangles a focusing tool, and a rectangle he felt was too much like a casket. But the square worked as a marking of space, a foundation upon which to build.
Upon each side of the large square in which wizard had lain down, on bare earth, were long, flat stones. These, he had on good authority, were doorsteps. Stones from thresholds, through which people have passed. Perfect. He was bounded on no side, all was opened to him. Upon the corners were tall, thin candles to "light the way" and serve as beacons for his soul's return. Besides, he had that natural distrust of darkness most people have, and especially that most wizards have.
As for grounding himself, he had planned early to devise a method of making sure he did not actually die, as was a risk where astral travel was concerned. A tonic of vitalizing mandrake root was concocted and drank about an hour before the ritual was set to begin. With it coursing through him, his body would be vivified. But all the same, it had to be just enough so as to note dilute the symbols of death and travel in which he must immerse himself.
He had been able to secret in these things and nothing more, and so had banked upon himself being potent enough to feel and act his way through this. As he say down, the stone ceiling overhead mostly dark and damp, his candles lighting the small droplets like stars, he placed on his lips a mild sedative, something to induce a restful state. Sleep was, after all, a little taste of death.
He closed his eyes, and began to silently mouth chants to the gods. He would soon walk amongst the stars, and speak to the celestial elemental forms that dwelt there.
There was a tugging at his body, like being pulled upwards, but he was still. Absolutely still. Something else was being subtly plucked at, and then suddenly, he was moving. A wild, upward surge through twilit air and light-studded cloud--he could feel his heart racing but it was so distant. He tried to control his movement but there was an irresistible upward current that carried him aloft.
And then, in the midst of the cascade, there suddenly came, all in a flash, a horrendous sensation of being utterly overcome--subsumed, by a darkness of absolute tangibility, and hurtling through a sightless space. The shock nearly severed his concentration, but he redoubled his chants, and gave awareness to the space he was in, both his flesh, and his spirit. But where was he?
The shape of the cavern or vast, rough chamber was both in shadow and stood out somehow against the dark itself. He was upon the floor, he assumed. The whole space pressed in upon him, a weight upon his spirit, and he bade himself with mental fortitude to see.
He did not think it was right that he saw, as it were, but he did perceive. And as he did, a thousand things that were not the still outline of the space crowded about him. He felt them more than he saw, or heard, or otherwise sensed them in his bodiless state. Gods above, their faces, he thought, they looked like people. Drawn and gaunt, with drooping, sorrowful mouth and hollow eyes, these heads surmounting thin, bent, limbless bodies that coiled like serpents. And about them, vast and sinuous and melting through the murk itself, greater slithering forms with eyes that shone darker than aught else, pits of an infinite depth. The entire cavern was utterly verminous with them, and their maws gaped open, filled with crooked fangs.
The lesser forms cowered under them, and the wizard swore from far off he could hear a wordless cacophony of desperation. Mockeries of the great god of Voerlund and Silverden! The dark things which wound between the stars, obfuscating their guidance! Crawlers in the filth and darkness of impure earth!
All of this happened within mere moments stretched into an eon of horror.
The weight that had grown about the spirit of the wizard was replaced then with a fierce and perilous plummeting and the sudden shock of gasping breath into the lungs of the wizard, as he scrabbled to his feet. He grasped at the earth around him, at the sheet-wound bodies in their deep recesses, and stumbled headlong out of the Voerlund tomb. The night was cold and young and the wizard stopped only when under the fullness of the calm, lightly clouded night sky. His heart began to steady as he looked at the ten thousand and more lights of the celestial realm, but balked as his gaze shifted to a rugged, uneven moon that leered down upon from far above.