Shadows & Sorcery Special
Hello everyone! As a small gesture to celebrate the one-hundreth entry in this newsletter, I’ve put together a bumper post of my ten personal favourite entries. Wild how short these started out, eh? This one’s for all to read as a bit of fun, but also for you free readers who missed a bunch of them. If they intrigue you, access to all 100 is but a DM away, here on Substack or over on Twitter. Has to be done this way only because, right now, Substack requires me to manually input emails to give away freebies. I’ve still got some free lifetime paid subs to hand out, and I’ve love to have more of you onboard!
Have a read of my ten personal faves, tell me if you agree, tell me if you don’t! Which ones would you rather have seen?
The tales within are:
Kiln of Winter
Memories of Saints
Sacrificial Catacombs
Domain of the Dead
Undead Duke
Night’s Deep
Moonside Tower
Dragon Kings
Graveyard of the Sea
Demon Church
Kiln of Winter
From Issue 1
In the heart of the mountain, where the gods first struck hammer to anvil, where their lordship was set in the stone of destiny, there lays a kiln. A low, primitive cylinder where strength was extracted from the earth, and the first weapons were forged. Even now, a chalky blackness stains the interior where the ancient star-fires blazed and smouldered, lending their power and warmth to what once was a world of bare and formless murk. But as the gods shaped and claimed the land, their weapons were lost on the battlefields, and the upstart races sought the source of this power.
Warring with each other, the new peoples spread in violent dominion across the world, each led by a god who championed a weapon. The Swordbearers were numerous and swift, the Hammerfolk hardy and strong, and though the Axemen were the least in the number, they were the most cruel. Having hewn the heads of every spear and arrow in their infancy, the Axemen closed in one the divine Land of Shaping, the vast sky-scraping mountain whence the gods emerged with their mighty technology. Sword blade shattered and hammer head cracked under the vicious arcs of the Axemen's assaults. Yet not all the gods had left the mountain, a few had remained cloistered in that place to study the arts of creation.
The halls and caverns had become filled with experiments beyond the ken of wandering gods, but it did not matter to the wrath of the Axemen. As the horde closed in, one god who remained and had not been cowed fled to the kiln. Barbarian feet clattered and trampled on the mountain stone, and the lone god fended off the Axeman host. As their champion, with wicked crescent blade swung in a deadly arc set to slay the remaining god, a hand was suddenly cast into the kiln and the star-fire grasped, crushed, and in a heart's beat it was not dark that spread across creation but a pale, frigid veil. Skies grew steel in mien, and sheets of cold crystal blanketed the world for leagues from the point of the kiln. Winter settled, and lush green shirked at the claws of sharp winds. They say the Axemen were not defeated then, but merely halted, and should they stir, the god who remained sends fresh frozen fogs and blizzards out to stay their advance.
Memories of Saints
From Issue 2
The brain is a wondrous organ. Ridged and rumpled with a lifetime of unique experiences and memories. There are no two brains entirely alike. Indeed, every raised portion is a memory, an instinct, either a genetic inheritance from ages past, something learned in infancy, or a lesson seared in only moments ago. And these ridges are accompanied by valleys between them, each one's depth suggestive of clarity or time elapsed. Ridges may have ridges, with crags and depressions of interlinked experiences and associations. The brain is a physical manifestation of an entire lifetime. And just as those experiences all happened, so to do the memories themselves have a physical, measurable presence. This is the most wondrous thing about this most wondrous organ.
These memories, these ridges, can be replayed, not in the mind of the subject, but through mechanical physick can they be interpreted and projected back into physical reality. In the early days it was learned, a cost paid in lives, to differentiate true experience from mental disease. There are still shuttered clinics in the depths of the city where mechanisms project half-rotted hallucinations. But the true worth of this practice, which has validated all costs of research, is the study of the memories of saints.
The church is an old institution, venerable and tottering in equal measure, and might have begun to fade into obsolescence had not the bright mind of a young cleric thought to trespass upon sacred ground and apply a cerebral translator to the preserved brain of a long-dead saint. This saint, whose legend was a life of pious proselytizing after a divine vision, was removed from their tomb in the cold catacombs and experimented upon in candle-light, in the ancient passage far under the church. It took hours removing the organ, mapping and replaying various groups of ridges, moving into the deeper valleys, but when that initial memory was struck upon, the city was never the same again.
A wave of revitalization surged through the streets and the people, and the tombs of saints were thrown open and the cobwebs cast away as people flocked into the naves and before the altars to see the memories of those who had witnessed divinity played for them in profound clarity. Saints, as a people, are notoriously eccentric, and perhaps it was only natural for mania to set in. The memories did not exactly conform to the stolid and hoary dogma of the church. Revealed to the people were ecstasies and ritual madness from times long past, brief but blistering scenes of otherworldly visions, visitations from holy messengers, mystical unions, divine monsters, and theogonic implications that set the mouldering theology of a thousand years ablaze.
The church splintered, old guards confirmed in their faith, primitivists who went into the wilds to relive the primal days of the old cult, crusaders with light their eyes who brought bloody truth to old enemies, theurges who chanted names and scrawled holy signs. But around the hearths of old scholars, who could divine the deeper mysteries of the saintly memories, the one troubling question oft repeated was where had all the saints gone? Why had the world remained content to dwell upon a handful of old visions and never once had to add to the ranks? What did they do in ages past that no one did anymore? Only time could tell, they thought, and what brains from preserved saints they could dig into. And for each new saint sawed open, every new vision found and translated, every new chance risked, some hoped they would never find the answer.
Sacrificial Catacombs
From Issue 5
They stretch for leagues into the earth, worming their way through drowned caverns and lightless gulfs. The Sacrificial Catacombs. None more desperate a creation has their been in the history of the world. It did not begin as madness or tyranny. In the old days only the abbey carried out sacrifices of those specially prepared and willing. But over the many years it became apparent that a quiet, dignified sacrifice would not be enough to quell the stirring of that which laid below.
Each sacrifice goes through a month-long process of spiritual purification and preparation, full of prayer, meditation, and martial discipline. Then, they are given a poison tea to imbibe, then taken and laid to eternal rest and vigil in the catacombs under the abbey, sealed within a small chamber.
As the years passed, it got worse. The Council of Knights, formed in time immemorial and entrusted with the protection of the land and the people, met in secret with the abbey. Madness spread in the night, shadows held frightful shapes, and the people lived in a growing terror. When the sacrifices failed to even abate the stirrings, the Council stepped in and began to officiate the ceremonies.
The Council had taken drastic steps many times in the past, always for the good of the land no matter how brutal it was. But no amount of ritual excess gave a sacrifice potency, only more corpses would lend reprieve. The catacombs began to expand, deeper into the earth and beyond the city's bounds, cells growing more cramped, more stacked. Even those on the outside could see the Council was becoming desperate.
When blood first began to be spilt, most felt in their hearts it was a change that couldn't be reversed. But it worked. Struggle and violent death begat strong spirits, and the spreading ward was all the stronger for it. From this time onward, the culture of the city became increasingly obsessed with sacrifice. Each life given over to the catacombs weighed heavy on all hearts, and each name was a hero to be remembered in prayer.
Sacrifice became a way of life. Nothing was done without it at the forefront of the mind. Children were raised in cultish orders to know their destiny was to be part of that great ward. People fell prey to fits of zeal and offered themselves up to the catacombs for the sake of their family. Bloody combats with cruel weapons were staged in which the slain were honoured as sacrifices. There wasn't a house in the entire city that did not have access to the catacombs, should the need be great.
The half-empty city cowered upon the back of a leviathan necropolis. The catacomb tunnels were attended to, for a while, by orders of monks. Reverence was offered to the spirits within, and it was from these unfortunates that word eventually reached the surface of the unquiet dead. Far from a slumbering vigil, the tunnels echoed with the cries of anguished souls who had begun to feel the bleak touch of that which was awakening below. The monks eventually fled in the face of wrathful phantoms who reached from their sealed tombs, seeking a replacement for their torment.
The city did not survive. The Council of Knights were the final sacrifice and not even their deaths stopped the ground from splitting open and the abbey being consumed. The ward failed long ago, and insane ghosts roam the unreal ruins of the city. Whatever dwells below has awakened and moulders in its lightless depths. Rumors of treasures in the ruins and the passages sometimes are whispered, but the aged folk who fled that madness with the scars of bloodletting are quick to rebuke them.
Domain of the Dead
From Issue 7
They have some odd practices down south. You know how it is in Silverden, obsessed with the 'natural order' and all that. Well instead of having sensible reclamation crypts like we do up here, they have these massive burial grounds out in the wilds with attendants living in lonely huts nearby. What's the reason for it?
Part of that natural order, you see, is that the dead live in their own world. Not in the sky, or in the earth, or even around us like some ancestor cults, no, they live...well, just sort of out in the wilds somewhere, their own society and laws, hidden. Once something's dead - and that goes for both people and beasts - they belong to that other world. Cremation is strictly forbidden, as is sky burial. Hunters have to placate the beasts they hunt and consume, because they're eating something from the other world. Probably goes without saying that cannibalism is unspeakably evil to them, but then again it is to most of us.
And these massive graveyards of theirs are very old, and very special. Yes, I believe they were chosen for some specific reason either forgotten or just not talked about. The graveyards are probably the most important part of the whole thing because, you see, they are the borderland between our world and the dead world. Some of them are in woods, some of them by small lakes, some on hilltops. They have attendants living close by to tend to the perimeter and see that no one messes with the bodies.
You're wondering how these old burial grounds keep being reused. Well, there is an answer. There's always space, you see. Silverden beliefs might be bit a weird but they're grounded in fact. Those graves aren't full for long. Yes, I have seen it. I was part of an inquest into a murder years ago now. An old man was found throttled, turned out to be some gambling thing, temple guards sorted that out. But I was obliged to see the body to the graveyard with a handful of others.
Apparently, we were in a bit of a hurry, it was late and there was something about the moons I don't quite remember. We carried the simple coffin up a hill in the twilight to the edge of a small forest. Silverden's beautiful in the golden light, those wide pastoral lands.
We met the attendant who walked us to the forest's edge where we set the coffin down, just inside the treeline. I wasn't aware at this time of the customs, so I made to enter the forest to help start digging the grave before I was pulled back sharpish by the attendant. No time, he said. This was their ground. Didn't know what he meant, of course, but I followed them down. Didn't have to ask what he meant either, because I kept looking back up the hillside and I swear by the Serpent's Breath I saw that old man rise from the coffin and meet several other figures emerging from that forest.
They understood, took me back to the attendant's cottage, spent the night giving me some explanations, as well as ale and stew. They do a little of this in southern Voerlund apparently, though it's more abstract, and more of the soul than the body.
Undead Duke
From Issue 9
East of the capital contains some the oldest parts of the realm, where history was made by the first chieftains who banded together to form the great guardianship, which over time transformed through alliance and intrigue into the kingdom of today. The kingdom is divided into a three Archduchies, which are themselves comprised of several Duchies, and so on down to manors and villages. The eastern Archduchy is the largest, and though it is not home to the capital, it is home to one curious resident the reader is most likely familiar with: the undead Duke Casimir Henrik.
He has sat upon his ducal throne for seven hundred years, and sages from across the realm consult him in his free time on matters of history. He takes audience with burgomasters and other representatives every seventh day of the month, the best time according to his body of astrologers. He spends his nights in a lotus leaf stupor to soothe his mind, for the undead cannot sleep
He is attended to by a small order of royally appointed theurges who brew and burn incense throughout the palace. Physicians hired from far off lands apply oils and preservative agents to mend his withered flesh. The rest of his days are spent in statecraft, especially in consultation with his men-at-arms on the security and safety of his peoples, being the chief reason the duke remains.
Seven centuries past saw a series of extremely bitter succession wars across the eastern Archduchy. The Archduke was dead with no heir and every manner of relation from half-step-sibling to grandson of an old ally clambered for the position with little help from the then King's authority. Various lands were being forced to ally with candidates, but the Duke Henrik looked upon the situation with tired eyes, and retired to a deep cavern from which he did not emerge for a full week.
When the bribes no longer worked, the duke's fort was stormed by a force of "direct" heirs who fought to the throne room itself and plunged their blades into the Duke Henrik...who merely stared them down and clove one's head in twain with his axe. When a half-sister finally claimed the Archduchy, the Duke made himself quite clear. He bore the burden of guilt for the suffering of those under his protection. From then on, he, and only he, would oversee the protection of his people, their children, and their children's children, from all "royal nonsense".
The Duke's court changed rather quickly after his undeath. Though fearful rumor spread far and wide of the ghoulish revenant and his monstrous congregation, and while the people of Henrik's court understood little of what had become of their lord, they were in truth quite happy. He was a popular and non-intrusive ruler who often let the local level run itself. His court slowly became a gathering place for sorcerers, and the duke hired many astrologers to chart the flow of powers for him as he explored his new existence. He had passed out life and into a state that thoroughly unnatural, but necessary.
Seven hundred years later, the duke has ceased to resemble a human being, instead he is a dried corpse that moves only when necessary, and when he deigns to, his swiftness is shocking. His mind has wandered, and he has vetted generations of assistants and aides to help with his evolving number of tasks as duke, and he spends much of his lucid hours devoted, quite genuinely, to the peace and protection of his lands. Visiting nobles must check their prejudices and superstition upon meeting him for the first time, and the duke has been able separate friend from foe upon the earnest behaviour of such folk. He personally funds an annual series of banquets throughout the duchy, and though he may not attend them, for he has consumed neither food nor drink in centuries, cups are raised in his name, and in a lotus dream, he hears them and smiles.
Night's Deep
From Issue 12
They say the night is another world. They say that when the sun, that which gives shape and reason to all things, descends, that the far stars and the vastness beyond transient solidity reveals itself. Indeed, much of the defined world of light remains, but half-formless, its details lost save in the pallid mimic of sunlight we call flame. And beyond these shades, the Night, and what dwells within it.
Mankind knew about the night long before the advent of fire. Only the desperate would wander in it, and horrors lurked in its depths. When a sunbeam passed over the holy shrine of a small tribe and set it ablaze, humanity took that gift and spread it, and that shrine has never gone dark. It allowed humans to beat back the night, even if it was only a little. But it also let humans go out into the dark, and see for themselves things that ought not to be seen.
Certain enterprising individuals went out into the night for hours, and brought things back that were never seen in the day. They flaked in the fire light, and crumbled into fine ash in the sun. It wouldn't be known for many, many centuries that these were things of unreason, things that existed only as potentialities, given no definite form but the notions passed on by those who glimpsed them.
Soon, humanity's shamans, who themselves had used the formlessness of the dark before fire to commune with the ancestors, got it into their heads to go into deep places again, and finally, out into the night world. The shamans became magicians there, the lightless world full of unshaped potential, fleeting, but with fire to hold them fast, they might conjure and change things, and keep them as such.
But accidents were bound to happen, and just when humanity was beginning to grow comfortable with the dark, they learned they had limits. Man is of the light, of reason and solid form, and too much time spent in the formlessness was not good for them. People began to turn up dead, perhaps because of the old horrors that, while they shirked from flame, still existed in numberless multitudes beyond the small circle of reason's fire. Some people came back, but they were different, they hadn't been careful with their thoughts. Some simply never returned, and when the first party of explorers said what had happened, the chiefs and shamans forbade the people to even leave their huts when the far stars came out.
There is a certain place in the night, far out beyond the last glimmer of the campfire. In the spaces where the world churns silently to the impressions of our minds, there is a slip, a crack, or a fold, through which you cannot feel yourself pass.
Moonside Tower
From Issue 13
It is not uncommon for wizards to take up residence within a town for the sake of both convenience and reputation. The image of the bent-backed hermit-sorcerer in some weathered, toppling tower in the perilous wilds rarely invites anything but suspicion. For some wizards a tavern room in the town square is more than enough. Some magicians prefer to take the middle ground, and erect or take legal ownership of some structure in the confines or outskirts of a settlement.
Such a tower was once home to an old stargazer who lived overlooking the heavens above a small, clifftop village on the coast. It was a sturdy old conical granary, and once fitted with simple wooden flooring, the astromancer dwelt within, servicing the town with celestial omens and weather readings. By all accounts, the wizard was looked upon kindly, even if he did lead the eccentric life of a magician, cooped up in his tower, unseen for weeks at a time.
The village made a comfortable living fishing and trading with towns across the coast, and the soaring wealth of the people in these endeavours was credited to the stargazer. None could exactly guess - for who could guess at the powers of a wizard? Most settled on the idea that he simply meant them well, and was giving back to the community who so readily accepted him.
Such was the was the wealth of the village that traders now began to visit them instead. The wizard made himself available when he could for foreigners, but mostly he dwelt at the top of his tower, peering through his darkened lenses at the sun, or poring over astrological charts brought on lonely ships deep in the night. Foreigners returned to their homes with tales of the daytime stars and silvery noon-time moon curved about the sun they thought so beautiful.
It was after a long and harsh winter, with the air still chill and biting, did ships finally make it out to the village for the first time in over six months. But they thought they must have grossly miscalculated the length and difficulty of their voyage, for when they arrived, night had fallen and the stars shone brilliantly behind a great low moon that the bathed the village in a pale, soft radiance.
The traders went back to their ships to await morning after making the short climb to the town and seeing that it slumbered. But the watchmen on deck said with uneasy voices that, over their shifts, the sky did not pale, and what's more, the moon had not moved from its position above the stargazer's tower. Only twice again did traders from other towns come to the clifftop village, and each time did they return saying they had come upon in the depths of the night, with the large, low moon still in the sky over the wizard's tower.
A northern dragonship took port in a southerly seaside town, and most of the crew onboard found themselves in the various taverns and beer halls, and in each one, innkeepers and old sailors crowded about the northerners with anxious ears as they told their tale of the moon-ridden clifftop village.
They had run afoul of a high reef and took port near the clifftop village. It was the depths of night, they said, but the villagers were about, and went down to help them repair their vessel and speed them on their way. It was quick work patching the ship up, but the northerners felt all the while like they were being hurried, and they spoke especially fearfully of the villagers, many of whom they said bore the distinct aspect of something not of this world. As they set the oarsmen to rhythm, they looked with uneasy eyes at the clifftop. Multitudes of strange shapes were silhouetted in the frosty moonlight, and they flocked to the tall conical tower out of which they felt in their souls, something watched them.
Dragon Kings
From Issue 14
In days of old, mankind dwelt under the alien gaze of tyrannical dragons. Their petty kings and priests gathered dragonblood and scales for worship in the wake of titanic battles between their masters and the mysterious silver giants. Deep earthen chambers and windswept monolith forests were alike lined with crude clay vessels stained black with dragonblood, and great jagged scales were suspended on vines and dried gut across thresholds.
But the lion's share went to the little lords of humanity, and in time they gathered the blood and scales instead to their throne rooms. People took to worshipping outside such meagre chambers, praying to the dragons who heard them through their blood. But it wasn't enough for human lords that their seat of power was the center of cult adoration, so the various lords of that age began to paint themselves in the thick, dark dragonblood, experiencing rushing ecstasies of power, that let them know they spoke for the gods.
Priest and king became as one. Dragonscales were sewn onto armour and garments, and the dragon kings lined their throne chambers entirely in the collected sheddings of every hamlet and hovel. They smeared the blood onto their bodies, they consumed it, and immersed themselves in it. In the aftermath of dragon battles, priest-lords would make for the sites of conflict and there bathe in the fresh hot blood. They would return to their towns in a state of vile madness from which they would not emerge for days, all the while decreeing inhuman laws.
When dragonblood or sloughed scales are left untouched, they create what the world refers to now simply as dragonspawn: wyrms, wyverns, basilisks, drakes, bastard mutant offspring that spontaneously generate, carrying some aspect of their progenitor. But the strong and constant application of dragonish material had too a corrupting, mutative effect.
The petty lords of squalid human settlements began to exhibit monstrous traits beyond their blood madness. A taste for flesh, which to the dragons is domination, was extremified, and the monarchs partook in the devouring of prisoners. As time wore on, these kings and queens became less human, and more 'divine'. Scaled flesh, bony talons, deformed maws, the dragon-lords terrorized their subjects as manifest emissaries of the gods.
A stroke of fate led a dragon to pass over a village and smell the stink of its own kind below. While left a pathetic lump of cinders, the dragon-chief was carried off as a corpse, and soon humanity had retreated back into the deep below, past what the dragons could flood with fire. Their reign ended, but the dragon-lords lent their unnatural existence to man's eternal nemesis: the introduction of dragonblood into pregnant women produced that terrible enemy, the Draconian.
The elves found men as slave armies under dragons, and with their Arts slew many of the false gods and freed humanity of the shackles of talon and fire. And yet, despite the horror of their previous bondage, mankind still took blood and scale to steal dark dragon arts, to fight poison with poison, all the while a stone's throw from the madness that almost consumed them an age before.
Graveyard of the Sea
From Issue 15
Foreigners who pass the lonely northern cliffs have remarked over the years on the strange aspect of those half-drowned graveyards whose headstones seem to rise eerily from the encroaching waves. The smell of brine is thick in the air, noticeably more so than elsewhere in the area which routinely suffers high waves and storms that descend from the ocean skies. Visitors have not unreasonably put it down to the accumulation of salt in the sodden earth, but the truth of it is a secret the sea-faring folk are loathe to speak of.
The seas out yonder are forever black and heaving, laden with froth and thick fogs, they seethe with ocean life and the cascading wrecks of unfortunate vessels, caught forever in the maelstrom, never being able to fully drown and quietly rot in the depths. But the real dangers of the ocean lie not in the perilous storms, it is something in the air itself, which swirls violently and invisibly about the waters, and manifests itself as an crust of salt upon the ships that spend too long traversing the region. What's worse, however, is that it affects the crews of those ships. It gathers upon the skin, collects in the eyes, mouths and noses. It gains entry to the inner body, where it grows and grows, causes harm, madness, death, and worse. It seems perpetuated by the ocean air, for time spent inland causes the salt to dissipate. But not all sailors are so lucky as to afford lengthy periods away from the water.
If a salt-laden sailor is not killed by the crew after the madness takes them, they will die. But they will not remain so. There are stories told by salt-stiffened old captains, tales of ships crewed by the insane dead, their bodies shimmering crystal shells. Still further are other tales of dead risen from their shrouds, crawling over the decks on frosty nights, or from a mortician's dead hut, to return to the sea. And so it is that a sailor who has succumbed is laid to rest in a sea's graveyard, with the sea water washing over their entombed corpses to keep them at peace, for as of yet no old sea-farer can say if a sailor taken by the salt will die when shot or stabbed, damaged as they may be.
The sea-folk don't have a particularly good reputation, and not without reason are they regarded as sly and coarse, but they are relied upon as a hardy people who fish where others have not the skill or bravery. And so they simply affirm the foreigner's suspicions, and acknowledge not the spear-wielding men who sometimes steal down in low tides to seal back in the soaked earth crystal arms that search with vile vigour for something no living soul can guess.
Demon Church
From Issue 17
A smattering of houses and hedged fields on the rolling lands before the lush hills, the village was the gentle home of a people who had dwelt in bucolic comfort for many generations. That was, until a child playing in the glade happened to uncover a stone with strange markings. The people had their look and wonder, but it didn't end there for everyone.
Eventually, after many night-times of strange lights and eventually a vanished villager, the priestess uncovered their meeting place in the smith's cellar. She took their ensorcelled cult items, placed them under the altar of the hillside temple, and the coven were driven by a barely restrained mob into the wilderness.
Alas, the mild faith of the countryside was no match for the malevolence of what the coven had conjured. Festive spirits of the trees and earth, the people and the land and the gods formed their own little microcosm into which a vast outer darkness had sent a tendril.
Little by the little, the ministrations of the monks who lived in the bare stone church were changed. Prayers over the fields became charged with command rather than beseeching. The priestess delighted in the slaughter of the feast ox. In dreams, the villagers saw signs and symbols which they painted onto stones and furtively glanced at when they believed no one else was looking. The folk travelled less and less to markets, and in turn they found themselves visited less and less as something of a shadow fell, quite literally, across the village.
Months passed. Rumours spread amongst the neighbouring settlements and even into the towns that a village to the east had turned bad. A few travellers had reason to find themselves passing over the hill which closest overlooked the place. They never descended to it in seeking shelter or rest. Though it could be but dimly spied from that distance, such people said two things: one, that figures darted between the structures below, from around corners or behind trees, and into black doorways, with an intent impossible to read, though their movements inspired naught not but disquiet. And two, that on that bare hilltop devoid of bush or boulder, or rather, devoid of cover, all who passed over that spot felt as if they were caught in the open, and eyed by a hawk's gaze.
A few clerics decided to intervene once tales of the cursed village reached the city by the sea. An uneasy journey was made into the heartland, and townsfolk had to be coerced with coin to even point the way to the village. After a day's march and a night spent under a starless firmament, four clerics stood before the small village gate, and before a scene of creeping horror.
In the late afternoon, under a low, steely sky, the clerics looked upon houses with shuttered windows, entirely dark within where the doors lay open. Upon every single door there were daubed black symbols they did not recognize, but ones they did not like. Small bones were found hung in profusion from the few lone trees. The well was filled with corpses.
Were there any survivors, they were not found, especially after the clerics made their way to the hillside temple. It only took a bare few moments to take in the scene. The very stone of the temple was warped, the icons of the folk saints were transformed into idols of blasphemers, the holy symbols of small harvest gods subtly inverted, and the beyond it all, the altar, which had became a throne for a great shadow. It is presumed that whatever it may be, it continues to preside over the mouldering remains of the abandoned village that every shrine attendant and high priest warns against even setting eyes upon.