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doctolka · 3 years

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The War of the Shadows

This is a piece that I wrote for my WIP, where a character needs to tell a story. This is the rough version (it covers basically the plot of another WIP that I've just started writing) that will be greatly (greatly) consolidated before adding it... but I'm pretty proud of it, and it seems to have worked better than outlining for me (and it'll put me over 90K words, so I feel like I should post it as a milestone)

Anyway, tell me what you think of it! I'm always open to feedback about style and diction and such.

Here's a link to my Guide on my world, Adoana, if folks are interested. Thanks a ton!

Current taglist: @starlitesymphony

Anyone else who wants to be on the taglist for my main WIP (or my other one, that's based off of the story below) feel free to let me know!

“It was the year 877 C.M. and the Shadow was the strongest it had ever been. All around Adoana, Cultists of the Shadow held high offices, and covens and gatherings in the wilderness were sacrificing the innocent, wary and unwary alike, to their dark god.

“There were few that fought against this Shadow, a flickering, guttering candle against the darkness of the night. They rescued some through skill, and some through luck, but most died, their souls consumed by the Shadow, whose hunger is never sated.

“It was with one of these that the War of the Shadows started in earnest, though it had been going on for centuries beforehand. And it was in this very kingdom that this band began their prosecution of the vile cultists. For years they fought, and they rescued no small few in their crusade, including the one now know as Finobrai, which is Evil’s Bane,99 before their swift destruction at the hands of their own prey.

“They were scattered to the winds then, each fleeing from their doom. Many did not make it, and their souls were sold for pittance to the dark lord of the Shadow. But this was not the end of the hunters. No. If anything, it only reinforced their will.

“It was the dead of the night, some years later, and the survivors from that night of destruction were gathered, and they had been quite successful as of late, bringing in bounty on many a witch. This night, they were charged by the king of Marasol to put an end to a coven that had holed up in a fort, abandoned for long years following the wars of the Firstborn.

“They gathered there most stealthily, all their information gathered, an ambush well set. But the cultists heard of their coming through lies and trickery, and laid in wait for the hunters. Again, it seemed a grievous defeat for the forces of light, and it was, but it was not a few that fled those corridors to safety, for the trap was ill-set.

“The one known as Finobrai escaped with his closest friends, alone unscathed of them all. But the king of Marasol worried only after the safety of his kingdom and wished the man to go back; it was after much promising and scraping and begging of him that he relented, and returned unto his very death willingly.

“None know truly what happened within those halls on that night, when Finobrai returned to the fort. Some say he sold his own soul, and that he was a friend of the Shadow from the first—what else could explain his repeated survival? Others say he was captured by the cultists, and transformed into a cursed Shadowspawn by them.

“The latter, I fear, is closer to the truth, though Finobrai was too wily to be caught by mere men. He crept about those halls, with his bow and his sword, and silently did he send them all to their master. But he was not the only hunter, that night.

“In the depths of the crypt, the foul cultists had summoned their lord, hearing that this lone hunter was coming for them. What, they asked themselves with mock bravery, could a single man do that a veritable army could not? And yet they were afraid, deathly so, and rightly so, and they gave their lord the body of a rat.

“Even the slightest of children knows what the Shadow does to its hosts. It twists them, and mutilates them, and makes them wholly different from how they began. And this was no different.

“The rat grew, it is said, to thrice its height, then to ten times, and it grew to stand a full head over the tallest of men. Its claws grew to wicked scalpels, its rear ceased to be that of a rat, and became that of a man with the head and shoulders and arms of some abominable rodent, and in the dark, it waited.

“Now did Finobrai finish all the cultists, and put an end to their vile pets, and he roamed the hallways, ever on the watch for more. He came then into a dark room in the bowels of the earth, unlit and dark, and he entered into it silently, ears ever listening for more of his prey.

“Many now might call him foolish, but his life had shaped him up to this point. He had grown on the darkest of streets, where the difference between life and death was seeing where others said sight was impossible. He had the best tutors in following years, to teach him the sword, and the best trackers later to teach him archery. Some hand guided him, that night, and every other night of his life, some say, a hand that was not that of the Shadow.

“As he stepped full into that room, he heard the beast behind him, whether by its breathing or some movement it made, and he spun about, making to strike at it, though the dark betrayed him, and blinded him, and the monster leaned forward casually, and made an incision over Finobrai’s heart, and removed the house of the soul, replacing it instead with the most vile of voidglass, into which the Shadow had seeped its own will, and Finobrai was lost….

“The Shadow controlled Finobrai, much as a puppetmaster dictates the movements of his puppets, and he ran then through the night, and through the next day, until he reached the borders of Kingdom Corval, for the fury of the Shadow at what had been done to its people knew no reason, nor any bounds.

“Here Finobrai earned another name, and that was Aminlo, the Never-Sated Hunger, for he butchered many an innocent man, woman and child, and the power of his passing was greater than that of any king, then or since. And when he was done in Kingdom Corval, few lingered, and fewer returned; their livestock butchered, and many a family and friend ended during the expanse of a year of utter terror.

“But the Shadow did not let slack here, but drove Aminlo on further afield, into the kingdom where he had first made the name Finobrai for himself, which was Kingdom Mirdta, and the waste dealt there was even greater than that dealt in Kingdom Corval. He left behind him a wasteland, full of smoke and bones, and rats and crows feasted on the carcasses even of the royal family.

“But here fate took a turn for the better, for Aminlo had killed all that could provide his heart sustenance, for the voidglass heart fed itself on the souls of the slain, and his inhuman strength left him as he came upon a patrol form Marasol, and he fell to them, and was imprisoned.

“For nigh on a year, Aminlo wasted in the prisons beneath Marasol, until it was decided that he should be executed for his crimes, in spite of his past services. But luck would have it that one of Finobrai’s men was not so easily persuaded of the evil in his friend, and strove back to the fort, seeking some answer for the darkness weighing on his heart.

“Here he hunted the long-abandoned halls—for none would now return to that haunted place—and at long last found a clay jar, sealed by some rune or other, and from within came the steady beating as that of a heart.

“He brought it back, mixed with joy and sorrow, to the famed Magistry of Marasol, and they took it and examined it while he implored the king to stay his hand but for another cycle. And the king relented, for he was a consciences sort, and felt to blame in part for the fate of poor Finobrai.

“At long last, and after many a sleepless night, the magisters performed their miracle. With their magics and their knowledge, they plucked the voidglass heart from Aminlo, and placed in its stead the beating heart of Finobrai.

“Thus Finobrai’s soul was returned to him, though much tortured through the long years of watching himself perform unnumbered murders, and it was long before he was well again. In this time, his soul turned to darker things; to revenge, to hate, and to burning desire to see the Shadow cast out, for now and forever.

“And after two years of his wallowing, he left Marasol once more, seeking his old friends and allies. But many had grown old over the years, or too comfortable in their common lives to risk going hunting with the man who murdered a kingdom.

“So Finobrai set off alone for a time, though he knew the dangers in doing so more than anyone, and for five years he hunted across the world for lore of the Shadow, reading from libraries by day and infiltrating and exterminating cultists and Shadowspawn by night, Finobrai strove for his answers. Across the highest mountains he tread, and across the deepest seas he sailed, and slowly but surely he found his answers.

“Now after these five years, Finobrai began again to gather hunters by virtue of his reputation, and ten years after that, his network stretched across every corner of Adoana, each man and woman striving to find anything tying the Shadow to the Mortal Plane—for Finobrai knew the Shadow better than any, and he said it must exist.

“Finobrai was an old man when finally they were ready to strike into the heart of their foe. And he brought with him to the place known as Casosindo the voidglass heart, and all his hunters, and they fell upon the enthralled armies of the Shadow.

“Many died in the plains outside of Casosindo, whose location has been lost to time, and many spells were wrought which heaved the earth, and burned the trees, but Finobrai and his most trusted hunters slipped by the host of their enemy, and came to audience with the Shadow itself.

“Here, in the depths of the dark fortress of Casosindo, Finobrai strove against the Shadow while his magister coiled his magics, spreading a trap that would bind the whole of the Shadow to the voidglass heart, though he knew not entirely the making of the coil.

“And when it was done, he released it, and the jaws of the trap sprung just so, snaring the being of the Shadow within the voidglass heart, and the survivors of the battle outside leaped with joy as their enemies crumbled before them. But there was no joy within.

“For Finobrai, in all his research and plotting, had known the cost of the coil wound by his friend. His soul was forever tainted by the Shadow; his soul, forever a gateway the Shadow could use to return to the world. And so he gave himself in also to the snare, and passed from this world to strive forever against the might of the Shadow, that Adoana would know peace.”

#wip #writeblr #writersociety #my writing #doctolka #storytime!

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doctolka · 3 years

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Intro to New WIP: The War of the Shadows Book 1

This is my last post tonight, I *promise*. I'm out of coffee and excerpts that make sense out of context. The former is probably going to be more influential....

Anyway, this is the opening scene (currently) of my new WIP, which takes places several hundred years prior to the other one (yeah, that one's still not done. I know), during the fabled War of the Shadows. It introduces the root causes of some of the disagreements and problems in the modern, and was actually the first plot I built for Adoana... So without further ado....

A Guide to Adoana...

Note: I'm leaving off the taglist for Adoana, since this is technically a new WIP and I don't like assuming people are on board... so if you want me to make a taglist for this, and want to be on it, do let me know!

It was a dark summers night when the first of the band began to arrive in the pre-ordained clearing. Chismos shone darkly overhead, the barest glimmer of its swirling blue light breaking in through the treetops. They had chosen this location well; they did not wish to be disturbed this night. It was an assured place, safe from prying eyes, and far enough away from the city walls that even the sharpest-eyed soldier in the highest tower would not see their meeting had they been looking straight at it.

They were very self-assured, these cultists, as they filed into the clearing, each bearing their respective talismans and rune-inscribed voidglass. This one was from the city, look at all his rings, glittering in the light of the candle he brought about; many cultists only used the finest candles. That one was a poor farmer, though his face lay hidden like the rest by a deep cowl, his rough hands worrying the rounded wooden bowls he held. That trio, warming their hands over a small brazier, they were merchants, their charges already placed: a stark white blanket, soon to be red, covered a set of folding desks; a set of seven voidglass-covered boards sat waiting, with a stack of parchment and charcoal beside.

The final two of the ranks entered the circle of dim light with heavy burlap sacks over their shoulders. They were contacts, the face of the organization that worked with the various undergrounds in the region: a supply of bodies, both warm and long cold, was always a profitable venture. This night, only on of the sacks contained a body as they emptied them onto the ground.

She was a fair maiden, long of hair and thin of bodice, a light green chemise. Likely she had been taken from her bedchambers, hoisted out after drinking carefully drugged water, or after a sharp knock on the head. The two contacts lifted her up to the prepared table, then began to distribute the tools of their trade: colored powders for the fires, some mixed with an incense that would drive those near the brazier to intoxication and even greater fervor than they could get into without it. The woman, directly next to the fire, would be driven to the brink of insanity, if not past it, her mind shattered by the sudden influx of alchemical magics, and leave perfect roosting ground for the beast the cultists were so eager to summon away from prying eyes.

Had they the care to look upward, however, they might have seen that there were indeed eyes to pry, several of them, in fact, perched like so many awkward birds amongst the long limbs of the trees.

Like birds they had feathers, poking out this way and that, in such a way that the trees might have had more fletching in them than leaves, so stuffed were their quivers. And all their bows were held ready to draw, heads already aligned with their targets; all that remained now was for the cultists to begin, and signal their watchers that all members were present.

As if on cue, the man with many ringlets marched to the head of the group, so that a line drawn connecting them all would make a fine teardrop, seven paces tall and four wide, with a sacrifice in the middle. He raised his sparkling hands high, beginning a low, sonorous chanting which the rest took up just after. His hands were filled with the dyes, secreted safely in pouches to burn in the fire. Marcus drew his fletching to his jaw with a creaking of bowstrings about him. The man tilted an arm back to throw as he inhaled, and Marcus released just as the man’s arm began whipping forward.

A burst of yellow powder was quickly followed by a less vibrant burst of red as the long, blade-shaped arrowhead split the man’s hood and temple. A cacophony of surprised shouts and screams rose underneath them as the hail of arrows rained down, each striking true as a mounted troop jogged into the clearing, lances high.

Some few dismounted, drawing their swords, while the rest rode about, back into the woods to harry the cultists back into the hellfire of the clearing. They were a motley assortment, their arms and armor as mismatched as if they were but farmers. Which, after a fashion, they were. Or had once been.

Marcus nocked and loosed again, choosing this time on of the contacts as he slipped past the ring of steel toward the untended horses. He fell with no fewer than four arrows through his chest—or rather her chest, her hood falling back as she fell—and plenty other littered the ground where she had once stood.

For a battle, it was silent, a ritual for the hunters just so much as it had been a ritual for the cultists. Stalk, ambush, kill. Rinse and repeat. That’s what Marcus had done for well over two years now, and many of his comrades even longer. With exception of the screams of the cultists, and the occasional grunt by a hunter as one turned to fight, it was quiet. No shouting orders, no horns or drums or horses galloping across a field.

It was, to put it bluntly, a massacre.

Tirosh dropped to the ground just as Marcus did, drawing his long hunting knife even though the fighting was wrapping up. He was a King’s Ranger, on loan along with a couple of others from King Relnero of Corval to help bolster their numbers. Fredrick was fighting to drive all of these witches out of the man’s kingdom, after all.

There was one cultist left standing as the rest of the bowmen slipped from their trees, dueling with one of their own. No one stepped in to help; Marion had it well under control, even though the last of the contacts was clearly trained. She was an expert duelist—she even entered in tournaments, sometimes—and even with her arming sword against the other’s longsword, it was clear to all that she was, once again, playing with the kill. Some of the men contended that she was really an Other-Kin, a Skin-Changer, and that’s why she acted the way she did, sometimes, but never within her hearing.

They twirled about each other, not in the dance that some poets call swordplay, but in the manner in which a caged wolf might stalk, and the way a deer might flee a hunter. Marion deflected thrusts and slashes alike calmly, letting them get almost close enough to her to hit before sweeping them aside. Finally, she deflected a straight thrust from the man, aimed high for her should, and swung around the outside of his sword arm, inserting her blade easily between his ribs and sliding it out in one quick pirouette. He had time to look down at the hole in his side before he fell; she had sliced both lungs and punctured his heart.

She wiped her blade on the man’s cloak as he gurgled the last of his life away. “That was entertaining,” she said lightly, returning the blade to its sheathe at her side, ornately worked with a red rose. “But why didn’t one of you louts see to the girl?”

“Just wanted to make sure that bastard didn’t have any tricks up his sleeve,” Fredrick growled. He always growled, though he was not an unkind man. “All you need is one time meeting someone as good as you out here to end the game, one for all.”

He was one of the few people who could get away with talking to Marion like that. Isaiah was another, but he was the one who healed their wounds and crafted their antidotes and poisons. He could talk to Fredrick like he was some lost puppy and get away with it. Not that he did, of course, but that did not mean he could not.

“And what of the rest of these, eh? You’d just trip over each other!” she returned, speaking first to Fredrick and then to all of them, sweeping out one long arm in a great arc. “Go see to the girl, and make sure all the fuckers are dead!

Marcus and Tirosh were the closest to the table and Marcus hid a grin from his companion as they loped over. He hated checking the pulses of the cultists. It was one thing to shoot a man, and another thing entirely to feel a man’s pulse and plunge a sword through his chest because of it. He supposed there was a mercy in it—they were almost always too wounded to survive—but it was a cruel sort of mercy, the kind that made him feel black inside, as though he were no better than these cultists that worshipped the Shadow. He checked the woman’s pulse while Tirosh gently checked to see if she was wounded; just because they hadn’t seen any wounds from the treetops didn’t mean they didn’t exist. More than once they’d rescued a victim only for them to die later on from some wound or poison they had overlooked.

Tirosh nodded his beak-like nose as he finished his assessment; the woman would be fine, when she woke. There wasn’t so much the question of if she would wake, since the incense had never made the brazier, though it was a consideration. Together the lifted the lady—who else would have dyed bedclothes? —as gently as they could from the table and tipped her up onto Fredrick’s stallion, Bright-eye. He always like to carry the victim back to safety, to Isaiah’s caring hands, even if they arrived too late. Something about it being his responsibility. He had a lot of those.

“Mount up, folks,” Fredrick called as Hisam and Regenor returned to the clearing, “I mean to be back in a warm bed by sunrise!”

Some of the men laughed at that, a rough, raucous laughter of men used to death, but still uncomfortable with it. At least the cultists hadn’t had a battlemage with them, or a medium such as a wand or staff. Only a week ago, they’d lost ten men in a raid much like this one because of a fellow with a wand. Isaiah had it now, though he was uncomfortable with the thing—he didn’t much care for violence.

As much as Fredrick wanted to be back into a town by sunrise, he didn’t make them push their horses. Fredrick didn’t make them do much of anything, really. He planned and organized their raids, and led them in that regard, put the time between raids was their own. There was nothing binding them to the party, save for the bounties.

Under typical circumstances, witch hunters like themselves would be under suspicious eye at the best from the law. Some kingdoms made them bring some witness or other—a sheriff or detective, typically—but in Corval the custom was to bring back the thumbs; the king would not stand for witches within his borders, and didn’t much care if they were caught in the act or ambushed in the streets: he would pay the bounty.

Fredrick’s group didn’t need to do that any longer—and each and every one of them thanked the ancestors for it; it was a most gruesome task—since they’d been personally tasked with removing even the slightest vestige of the ‘infestation,’ as the chamberlain had but it. Fredrick fell on the task with vigor.

They walked through the early morning, dew falling and fog rising as they worked their way out of the woods. Fredrick trotted on ahead, taking with him a good three quarters of their number, but Marcus was in no hurry, nor did it seem that Tirosh was. Though many of them thought the cultists less than human for what they did, some needed time after raids to come to terms with themselves. That category marked a significant group; the new had no trouble, or at least feigned not having it, and they passed on ahead with nary a glance to a side; the old had already come to terms, and had been for years. They had no need for quiet plodding. No, the ones that lagged behind were the ones that were old enough to recognize what they had done, but not quite seasoned enough to simply brush it away.

Marcus grabbed his reigns from Isaiah, swinging into the roan’s saddle with practiced ease. He had ridden a lot growing up, once he had gotten off the streets. It was one of his few comforts on the estates of Lord Darius Tyldian, one of the few things he could do without being watched by a half-dozen servants and guards. It was quite difficult to steal a horse, after all, from a walled-in area. Word had come recently of the odious man’s death. There were no estates waiting for him—for which he was eternally grateful and simultaneously put out—as they had all gone to his sister, an equally odious individual.

He fingered the sword laced to the saddle horn as he walked the horse through the mists. It wouldn’t be long now before they started north again, nearly to the border with Salos. They would have to be careful up there, more so than usual, since the mountain passes offered little in terms of cover, and even less in terms secrecy.

“So how’s the lass look?” Henrik asked, walking his horse beside Isaiah’s—to whom the girl had been transferred.

“Not terribly well, I’m afraid,” Isaiah said in his usual timid manner. “I don’t quite know what to make of it, for certain… I can’t say she’s been drugged, but nor can I say she hasn’t been! A typical bump on the head would leave signs, which I haven’t seen, so they must be using some sort of toxin of which I’m unfamiliar, I think, but there really never is telling with witches whathas been done. You follow?”

“Aye. That I do, at least in part,” the burly Sundlander said, combing his bushy blond beard with thick fingers, “You’re saying these witches is up to no good, that’s what you’re saying!” he finished with a bark. There was nothing much that could keep Henrik’s spirits down for long. No one was really sure why he stayed back with the mourners.

Isaiah shook his head. He knew Henrik was joking—he had to, he’d known the man for some two odd years running—but sometimes the man’s disposition got under his skin—especially when he had a patient he didn’t know what to do with. “Even the dullest of dimwits could tell you that, Henrik, and gladly pass along their title to you,” Tirosh interjected, earning a relieved grin from Isaiah. He might be as dour as could be from a man, but he was a good one, and of sharp tongue to boot.

Henrik’s scowl melted to a wide grin moments later, his feigned hurt evaporating like the morning mist under a hot summer sun. “Aye. That I could tell myself, though I haven’t any idea about handing a mantle to myself—waste of energy, if’n you ask me.” He wasn’t slow—though some considered him to be, as much due to his heritage as to his demeanor—and he always had a clever quip coming to deflect any real hurts.

Marcus tipped his head back as they continued to banter amongst themselves, gazing up at the stars that glimmered through the trees overhead. This was what life was supposed to be, minus the killing; walking through the woods with nary a care in world, surrounded by friends… too few people experienced such freedom. What would the world be like if more people were allowed to live happily?

Speculation and philosophy never got him anywhere. Too many ifs and buts; too many unknowns. Likely there would be just as many depraved sorts as there were now, if not more, what with those too lazy to work even for themselves. That was what was said, anyway, though usually by the people doing the whipping. It was almost ironic in that one of the few areas where all people, no matter their walk of life, were equal was within covens.

Not all covens were bad, despite what Fredrick would have a man believe. Marcus had run into the first kind some time before joining up with Fredrick, though it had been an incident with the second that lead him to fall in. The first kind he wouldn’t overly mind joining when he grew too old to hunt the others; they were a kindly, peaceful people, so much so that neither beast or Other-Kin would trouble them. They lived secluded lives, unlike the second kind—the killingkind.

The second kind was worth eradicating. They were named Cultists of the Shadow, politely, and witches when safest from their cursing. They lived in the cities and towns, they could be a man’s neighbor without him knowing… at least until he ended up a sacrifice for their dark god.

That was where Marcus had found himself, a year ago now, in the same place this woman had found herself in this night. He had spent the evening with a farmer on his way back to Marasol after his horse bolted with all his belongings; he’d mucked out his very first pigpen for his board, and found his bed instead being a cold wooden slab in the middle of the forest.

He attributed his survival in no small part to the incompetency of his captors, but mostly to the timely arrival of Fredrick and his band—not so differently from the raid tonight, in fact. That was how a sad majority of them got into the business, it seemed. Victims turned vigilantes, as some put it. Whether they’d found themselves on a cutting table, or next to an incensed brazier, or whether they’re home had been burnt down, or their village victim of an unnatural plague; they all had some grievance or other with the cultists. Few were those who could stay without a firm, personal vendetta.

#wip #war of the shadows #writeblr #writersociety #my wips #doctolka #original concept #new wip

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