Wait WAIT is that the ninety-ninth edition of Shadows & Sorcery? Yes!
I always feel bad for the 99th edition of anything, because it lives in the shadow of its successor. Always second fiddle, you know?
Or it's the last good one before everything goes belly up!
But you shouldn't pity poor #99 here, because this one is pretty good, if I do say so myself (and I do say so).
Three tales of the chunkiest, darkest, weirdest fantasy you have ever seen! Most likely! Swords, sorcery, demons, darkness. You know it, you love it, dig in.
But I do have one thing to say before I let you get on with the good stuff—I’m going to be that guy and tell you that next week, expect not Shadows & Sorcery, but instead the next instalment of The Path of Poison! Follow the gang on the road with their grim warrior allies as they make for the port city of Farhaven…
And of course, if you enjoyed what you read here, let the stories know you liked them by hitting that heart icon! Hell, tell me if you liked ‘em and leave a comment!
This week, we battle with a trio of sword sorcerers through the Demon Outskirts, we delve into the dark mystery of the Sigil of the Deep, and we uncover the secrets of the Cursed Catacomb…
Demon Outskirts
It started innocently enough. A small movement sprung up in the hinterlands that challenged the austere and stoic old faiths of the land, faiths of distant resurrection, cold enlightenment, and calm detachment, faiths in something greater, higher, spiritual, ascetic. In place of them, there came the hotness of blood, primordial slime and mud, the rush of slick flesh, the thundering drum and leaping flame, the emerald glow of the glade, and the ecstasy of ritual madness. A faith for the living, for the now, for the world, for the people.
It spread across the countrysides, setting the hills and vales aflame with dance, lust, song, and life. It came to the cities as carnivals and festivals, surprisingly opposed little by the old faiths, who regarded them as little more than transient, trivial fixations.
That was, of course, until it was too late, and the land learned that their new cult of life was a primeval cult of diablerie that ancient mankind had fled in horror for the cold gods of other worlds.
The spires and minarets of the venerable city of Ka'Rak seemed to waver in the air ever so slightly, not as if through a heat haze, but rather as if to some unheard rhythm. Deep within them, orgiastic rites and black feastings, as the elder gods of mankind took what had been denied them these ten thousand years. Before this, there was the maze of the old city with its crooked streets and tottering old houses and keeps, all of it red with gore, pillars of oily smoke rising from sacrificial pyres, and creeping upon the wind, the cries of madmen, the crackle of spellfire, and the howls of demons as the cacophony of bitter war.
"Carve a path through the outskirts," said the warcaster captain as he gazed upon the scene. His armour was grey, made of broad, overlapping plates all over. "Lost they may be, but the city can still be won." He turned then to the trio behind him. "Signal us at the gates, so that our thief may secret Her Holiness into the capital. We'll take it from there." He looked at last to the Shrine Maiden, a young woman whose brows spoke of the immense burden placed upon her. At her side, sheathed, a divine sword. "All our hopes are with her."
Before them lay the smoking remains of the city outskirts, a jumbled sprawl of squat buildings outside the capital walls. The poverty-stricken dwellings had been hit hardest by the return of the elder gods, for they had accepted them quicker than anyone else to relieve them of the hardships wrought by a stagnating governance. Thuróz, the sword saint, shifted the great trick wooden sheathe upon his back, ready at any second to release the great flat tipped blade within. Oroz gazed on the outskirts and prayed, hand firmly on the hilt of a thin longsword. Behind them, Ahled said her goodbyes to the Shrine Maiden--the two had become close during the journey--and bid the warcaster captain good luck. She shifted the twin scimitars at her waist, and walked away.
They stalked through the muddy, sodden backstreets of the outskirts, avoiding the open for now. No sense bringing everything down on their heads at once. Every so often they came across the corpse of a cult reveller, left to rot when no longer useful. The look on the face of each corpse held a faint impression of a grin, or perhaps a grimace. It was hard to tell. Ahled stopped for a second when they found one, and the other gave her the moment she needed. She was an ex-cult renegade from the far north. She must have known too many people who had ended up like that, Oroz had mused some days ago after she snapped at him for a callous remark.
The outskirts were far from quiet, despite their ruination. Fevered laughter, gasping breath, and wordless songs snaked through the air. Crunching, drumming, snorting, and inhuman gurgling were mixed in with them. Tendrils of smoke converged in the sky in a great bloated form, giving the sunlight a sickly hue. There was an ashy greyness to everything, unhealthy, weary. There were dead trees everywhere, leafless boughs clawing silently, spread like hands grasping in agony. Things were nailed to them they tore down and stamped into the dirt, and spoke no more of.
Into the main street did they enter now, devoid of most cultists who had most likely taken to their homes and cellars to worship without interference. Oroz had given them up as lost and broken, but the kindly sword saint and renegade thought otherwise, that the elevating law of the heavens could see even the most destitute to purity. Indeed, but only if they take the step themselves and unshackle their souls from debasement and blasphemy. Oroz was not austere in his zeal. For a sword sorcerer like him, he had an uncommon fire to his voice.
It was he who had taken the lead, but suddenly stopped and fell into a low, defensive stance, unsheathing his long, thin blade. Ahead of them, seven demons appeared on the rooftops. Each one was a nightmare unto itself, some were wiry, ape-like forms with heads that were naught but massive, eyeless, slavering jaws, some were skittering stomachs on legs with fanged, obscene orifices, and others looked like worms with thin-lipped human mouths, and their long, emaciated arms ending in splayed, nimble fingers. They tumbled and fell and poured from the rooftops, eager to rush the trio, but Oroz but was quicker.
Taking his blade aloft, made held his free hand in a peculiar configuration, and made a wide circle in the air above him from which a radiance descended. Surrounded by a golden aura, he held his sword out and released a flurry of short, lighting fast swipes in the air before him, holding then his free hand in a different configuration. The strikes made trails in the air which joined, and a mere second later, there flew forth seven searing cerulean bolts that drove through each demon, setting them ablaze in azure fire. Only when their indescribable howls had died off did he thrust his sword upwards, and the circle above faded. A Tahn Radiant Sword technique, nothing less to be expected. Thuróz patted him on the shoulder, congratulating him on his form.
These were the techniques of masters, born of a transcendental philosophy whose rigorous martial and spiritual self-cultivation of the immanent and ever-present odic force was crafted with the deepest wisdoms of the old faiths. They were techniques to reveal and experience the ultimate truths by momentarily severing the veil of ignorance that lay over the eyes. They also came in handy for slaying demons.
They could see the gates in the near distance. Through a wide court strewn with corpses and pyres must they pass, where a demon stalked, pawing at the bodies for signs of life to yet enjoy. Thuróz was dispatching it with waves of irresistible undoing by striking the flat of his sword with a small, sphere-headed hammer, when something else swooped down on lightless wings. It spent no time in rearing up with an unsettling tittering and letting loose from its entire form a torrent of grey-flecked dark smoke. Thuróz fell to one knee and held his flat-tipped blade straight up in front of him and his comrades. He ran his hand swiftly down the face of the sword, invoking each syllable of the nine-fold chant forged upon it. The demonsmoke seemed then to be absorbed into the space before them, vanishing into an unseen void. The Setto Ah Sentinel Technique of the mountain-dwelling sword saint negated the dark power utterly, and the demon cowered low.
Upon its indiscernible form, a mess of whitish eyes blinked, and one by one they faded, as the demon melted into the murk of the air. It's not getting away, Ahled thought out loud. The renegade held then her broad-bladed, crescent scimitars in reverse grips together so they formed an oval like an eye, and intoned with a much-practiced perfection an auspicious celestial canticle of the Sho Kan lineage, opening the veil and revealing the demon. In the midst of vast mass of fluttering wings and fins was a skeletal body with a head bearing a small fanged maw and large staring eyes.
With a spinning dance and flurry of her twinned blades, she stopped and held for a mere second a burning radiance upon the edge of the swords, and then completed the motion by swinging her swords in a wide, singing arc, staring with grim intent directly into the demon's eyes as it was cut to pieces by a torrent of aureate waves.
Before the gates, a dozen dead demons lay smouldering with holy spellfire. Thuróz sat before the city entrance and removed the small, sphere-headed hammer from his robes and struck a particular note that travelled down the path they had carved. The demons would not approach their own dead. Soon, the thief would see the Shrine Maiden within the capital, and the tide might just turn. The trio looked to each other silently agreed with confident smiles that they were just getting started.
Sigil of the Depths
It's common knowledge that less than half of the entrances to the depths across the world have been sealed. High church officials find new ones all the time, too. Well, new to them. But to everyone else they're something that's long been better left out of sight, out of mind.
Until, of course, someone decides to draw something out of the depths.
Leagues upon leagues of dank, sunken stone, perpetually damp, whole sections underwater, many half-flooded, some just covered with thin, still, noisome pools. The virulent, subterranean greenery is ripe, overfed, bloated, and treacherous. There are whole spans of the depths you wouldn't even know were of worked stone so encrusted with lichen and smothered in moss and vines are they, their floors blankets of dark loam and slime. Other places are infested entirely with fungal growths, and the very air is pestilent. The rest is collapsed stone, darkish rivulets, and the ruins of the old world spanning all the earth itself, the old world that learned it lay too close to what dwelt below.
Beneath our feet, the depths of lightless cities and shadowed streets, open plains of darkness and forests of murk.
Beneath that, the cold, lightless, abyssal vastness of a hollow earth of serpentine caves, yawning gulfs, and towering caverns.
And beneath all that...a core of absolute, ineffible, limitless void.
That final, nethermost point of infinity wherefrom the world emerged, or perhaps where to it is slowly sinking in spite of how high mankind tries to climb. But that void is, at least not yet, empty.
The sky-worshipping tower-churches and mountain shrines say It is the enemy, that It drags down and saps away, that It must be fled from and denied with light and life. But most people believed amongst themselves that It, whatever It was, dwelt below as the true power of the world, the great devourer, which held all things in its jaws, and that It was many. Old, secret wisdom passed down and spread across the rising world, a wisdom taken, it was said, from the old world below.
The sorcery infesting the world came from below. It could be drawn up with sigil and sacrifice. Its applications were blunt, and its motives uncomplicated. What was called up wanted life, and came quite readily when called. Shadows, thin things hiding in corners, formless shapes in the sky. Conjured and given a taste of life, for a bargain. Guard, listen, watch, take, kill, and then do as you please until dragged down once more. Were they things that had never lived? Or had they lived, and envied the heat of life above all? Perhaps that depended upon what one believed.
These bargains, it must be noted, are small in scale. As such, rituals are performed in excess, and black markets thrive, providing everything from sigil scrolls to blood for offerings, and if one dug far enough, human beings for sacrifice. There was no particular symbolic or magical meaning--more flesh bought more favour, and a willingness to not betray the summoner.
Sigils are like the holy mandalas of the tower-churches and mountain shrines--that is, they are focus points. But not for the sorcerer. For what they conjure, to cling to and form themselves through. They are composed of squares and "gates", as the parlance goes. In the center, the point, then two gates around it, upon another outer later four gates, and upon a final outside layer, six gates. Offerings of flesh are set upon these gates so the thing may form itself. Things come out of them, rather than the faithful mentally entering them. That curious reversal has long been noted with a wry smile.
The peculiarities were as such: stone can draw but little, but bare earth works better, especially mud, or sand. No matter the medium, though, it must be upon the ground, or touch the ground directly. As such, no walls, no ceiling, no upper floors. In other words, it must touch the ground that touches the depths.
And it worked best, beyond compare, when one conjures in the depths itself. Every quarter in every city has a cellar with a hidden latch, a sewer grate that isn't a sewer grate, a thin old lane with steps leading into a pool of shadow, and outside the cities, abandoned villages with wells sunk too deep, ancient manors with portals under false family tombs, and gaping chasms in the open earth wherefrom black figures emerge with things in tow.
Sigils don't dig too deep. Or rather, most sigils don't. This is by design, and by agreement between practitioners. Sorcerers may traffick in abominations, but they aren't complete fools. The knowledge of the sigils came too with unspeakable, dire warning.
Cursed Catacomb
Look upon the city of Yllaisse, and know it is a shard of celestial paradise come to grace the earth. Behold its wide, crystal river, unsullied by pollution, the sun basking it in radiance and turning its mirror surface into a shimmering treasure hoard as it sets and rises. Look then at night and see the ten hundred thousand stars reflected in perfection upon its tranquil surface. See the numberless temples to small gods which crowd about its cool, pure waters on both banks, coming right up to the water itself. That pristine mirror is broken only by the gentle rowing of long, low boats which ferry the faithful and up and down at all hours of the day.
Look upon the city of Yllaisse, and see the mothers and the fathers with their children on the doorsteps, chatting and playing in the afternoon shade, see the poets wandering in a heady meditation around the ancient courts and old lanes, stopping suddenly to scrawl down their inspired verse, see the musicians taking residence in quiet corners to fill them with their harmonies, see the painters and illustrators taking up favourable perches to transcribe their visions of the city onto pad and canvas. See the merchants ply their wares and the wares of their clients, the laughter and shouting of the haggle and bargain, the clink of cups over a deal.
Look upon the city of Yllaisse and see its gilded palaces, its mighty pillared temples, its rows of pure white townhouses and villas, see upon all things the arch, the tower, the dome. See the painted walls with intricate murals of mythical scenes in colours of unparalled vibrancy, see the rich veined marble, the ivory portals inlaid with gold, the vast jewels cut to form the rims of entire structures, the silver fountains which sing and shimmer, and look upon all this and see that it has suffered neither weather nor wear, its riches have gone untouched, and its people gaze with naught but reverence as they stride through the storied streets and courts and emerald gardens.
Look up the city of Yllaisse and wonder why it is you see not guard, nor sentinel, nor watchman. Yllaisse is a paragon of peace and prosperity, of liberty, of culture, of life. Even in the dead of night, even when the ten hundred thousand stars are hidden by veils of deep charcoal cloud, when no lantern or torch is lit upon the slumbering streets, even then do lone figures wander and gaze with awe upon the shades of serene sable that paint the city in lonesome hours. No thug or brigand haunts the silent alleys, no assassin lurks within the alcoves. No vagrant shelters from the storm here either, and beggars ceased to exist long ago.
Look, then, within the city of Yllaisse, in the far off quarters away from the grand monuments to old heroes and philosophers, from the bustling markets, and roaring theatres. Look into the windowless houses and upon their inhabitants, steeped in blankets of ritual incense as they inhale the burning fumes of black lotus flowers which dull senses to near-death, which they say allows the soul to wander in strange realms. Look upon those who imbibe the green ichor passed from hand to hand across the city to secret dens, where jaded celebrants might ignite once more their passions before descending back into tragic numbness.
Look within the boarded up townhouses of venerable age in which are sealed away countless nightmare productions on canvas, in stone and clay and marble, and on music sheet, horrors produced by artists who drove themselves to delirium so as to find and express deeper and darker muses. Look upon the underground ritual chambers where throngs of cultists have begun to adhere with ferocious zealotry to the bizarre dogmas once designed with an alien aesthetic expression in mind, where squealing sacks are bludgeoned into silence on black altars to the beat of massive drums in the lurid flames of deep bronze braziers, whose smoke curls, in the eyes of the crazed rite-keepers, in eldritch symbols seen only in dream.
Look within the shell of the city to its primordial interior, where crudely carved passages wind into twilight deeps, lit only by the meagre torches of those who dare tread those halls.
Look upon the rows and rows of deep-set tombs in which yellow, twisted bones repose, the stench of ancient death having never quite left.
Look upon the great oaken gateway held fast with heavy chains and iron buttresses, plastered with rotten talismans and hung with amulets.
Know that within dwells the source of Yllaisse's beauty, serenity, and prosperity.
Beyond the gateway lies a low chamber of piled up corpses whose corruption is unfathomable and unceasing. In an ancient age, after the hollow victory of a bitter war from which less than half the city emerged alive, every remaining inhabitant not maimed into uselessness or madness descended into their centuried catacombs to bury their dishonoured dead and make an ironclad pact that Yllaisse would never again see such terror. Upon twelve bodies did the people spit a curse, into which they poured every dreg of cruelty, malice, sorrow, despair, and hate. They sealed that tomb tight and spoke aloud that should war ever set foot upon the venerable streets again, that curse would flood the city and consume it and everything single thing within it. A seedbed of curses waiting to spill forth. If the people of Yllaisse couldn't have it, no one could.
Only once have hostile feet trod the stone of the city, when fifty years ago a sect of ritualists took up arms in holy civil war, and the curse subsumed their entire quarter. Though quelled within hours, that old quarter was chained and barred like the gateway below, and every visiting official, magistrate, noble, and scion was shown it so they would know, and that the world would know. It is only recently, too, that the sounds from within that jumble of streets has gone quiet.
Between the new cold gods
and the hot blooded old-ones
is a path that few dare to walk,
for in it, you could lose yourself to lust.
or to dust, if you enter the wrong catacomb
and wake the wrong fell power from under the ground.
The sigil you use, might be the last that draws you to the lost city
of Yllaisse.