The Solstice of Shagth

High Fantasy Horror, in my world of Magefell

The deep and unknowable plunges of Urmengal cast the sky into an angry rage. Mallets of rain thundered as if thrown up out of hell and then rejected by heaven to curse the ground between. The sun had died; blackness reveled in the night like it would never return.

Yet the darkness was not absolute. Oh that it were.

Pale splinters of sickness pierced the rain like bone punching through rotted skin. The moon should not have so speared through the black and rain, except that they parted for it like sinister guards, letting in an evil more vile than they.

The ground gave unwilling way to shadows cast by things which had no choice but to stand, or creatures with purpose all foul, as the moon continued to its final and terrible height. Then, at an hour unmarked it shone in horrible light on all within the dark of Magefell that night.

No wisdom or prudence could now prevail, for any such counsel would be brought to confusion under the garish luminance of that ancient one; He whose fell night came not on a year, but every 606th day. Such guidance for this night had to be established prior, for without forethought all plans failed in malevolence.

–

Neither foresight, wisdom, nor prudence had befriended Horthar Iterund, however. They had each pursued him on several occasions, and he proved unfortunately nimble. Rubbing his hands together, he felt that the cold of the second winter bit more than it should. If his eyes and skin did not deceive him, he thought the pale light was doing some biting too.

His sense did not deceive him, but he had little habit of listening to their warnings, and if he could move his current theft of Ilmater’s temple goods to Intrehsict before morning, he could fence them before word reached reputable ears.

Miles deeper in the forest, an indeterminate mass of flesh, bone, and some frozen screams held in delightful physicality sloshed over the ground. Some trees it passed and they would never grow again. Others their hartswood was lovingly taken and laid beside them, and the screams they uttered which few could hear, he savoured.

The mass quivered as it stopped.

Trepidation had never dined with the wiser ways of thought, but it struck Horthar now, though it was many nights too late. For his part, he had begun to mentally sift through the piles of looted churches, widows out at funerals, and others all the way back to home. A laugh, curiously nervous he thought, escaped him as he remembered pawning his mother’s ring. She had been furious when she woke up.

He stopped. That was it. An old rhyme came to him. One of Ascendants and their ways, one of an old and evil god chained to a single day. Was it this day? Ah, no. Couldn’t be. Wouldn’t someone have told him?

As his bones slithered through his skin, and his teeth began to grin on the underside of his jaw, he wondered what day that was, it was probably close. Screaming, the silence clattered out of his mouth in sharp razors, sucked greedily in by some aberration before him.

His marrow met the night air, and his nerves and veins draped carefully over him like a crocheted blanket. Slushing back into his skeleton and inflating him like a balloon, Shagth wrought his final touches and Horthar at last floated above the ground. A tree grasped him with tentacle branches, touching first the marrow, then bone, nerves, and finally flesh, all on the inside.

“You were much fun.”

---

If you liked that, you might also like other lore I’ve written about Magefell:

The Flooded Forest