Darkness & Glory

By Isaiah Burt and Victoria Blotta

Deep in the cavernous underworld known as Lurxaak lurk the glayruks, the bastard children of Hell with the blood of the archdevils themselves running through their veins. Darkness & Glory chronicles the exploits of one of the greatest of their kind, Razos Mephiston, in six perfervid tales containing things aberrant, lurid, and beyond the ken of mortals. Let this diabolical sorcerer set your mind and soul ablaze!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Oct 25, 2022
• ISBN: 9781387520435

Book preview

Darkness & Glory

Darkness & Glory

Copyright © 2022 Isaiah Burt

All Rights Reserved

ISBN 978-1-387-52043-5

Cover Art: Victoria Blotta, Senshilandia Art

Interior Art: Petr Joura

This is a work of fiction. All characters, locations, and plots are of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual people (living or dead), locations, and happenings is purely coincidental.

Darkness & Glory

Table of Contents

Foreword

I- Thicker than Blood

II- The Blessed Children of Yserian

III- At Death’s Edge

IV- The Incantation of a Thousand Deaths

V- The Skull of Innyriisa

VI- The Silver Hammer of Malythor

Foreword to Darkness & Glory

The shadows build around you; they are all you can see. Have you lost your way yet? Good. Whatever life you had before is gone. The world you knew no longer exists. You have entered Lurxaak now, and you might as well get used to it. Once here, there is no going back…

I love Darkness & Glory. I suppose that goes without saying, right? Every author loves their work, their brainchildren, the products of their blood, sweat, and tears. Still, I feel that it is worth putting to paper. I love Darkness & Glory.

The character who would become Razos Mephiston, a thousand tenebrous praises upon his name, started his life late one night when I was with one of my best friends, Colin Parker, in one of the restaurants in our hometown. We had gone there with our gaming club after a long, enriching day of playing Warhammer 40,000. Once there, we started talking about our favorite book series, and the Death Gate Cycle came up. (I read it after Morgan, the amazing woman who is now my wife, gave me the first book as her first Christmas present to me. That well-loved paperback volume still sits upon my desk.) After spending about an hour nerding out about the books as one does, we started to talk about what a Pathfinder campaign set in a similar kind of universe would be like. We started talking about what kind of races would be available for player character use, and I broached the topic of playing a drider. (For the unfamiliar, a drider is a creature with the upper half of a dark elf and the lower half of a spider; it is a staple of the Forgotten Realms D&D setting.) Colin told me that he felt a drider might be too powerful, so I came back with the idea of playing a race of my own creation. The way I described it to him was about as follows:

Imagine a tiefling with spider legs coming out of its back and shoulders.

Now, at this point, Colin had already watched me grow from an awkward, easily embarrassed, and often too loud teenager into a young man who was a little less of those things now that he was embarking on his first full time job and finally moving out of his parents’ house (and in with another member of the gaming club). As such, Colin’s response was something to the effect of a smile, a laugh, and saying, That is such a Burt idea. After a few hours spent poring over Pathfinder’s Advanced Race Guide and writing up the statistics and a short essay of lore, the glayruks were born. Shortly thereafter came Razos, then known as Razos No-Name.

From the start, Razos No-Name was much the same character as you will see in these pages. He’s grim and brooding, he has a dry sense of humor, and he would really rather be studying sorcery than contending with the dangers of the underworld. But, I suppose we can’t always get what we want, right?

The first incarnation of Razos met his end at the antennae of a greater rust monster (after falling off an airship and being saved by the party’s wizard), but I decided that I was not done with the character. By the time this happened, I was regularly communicating with my dear friend and mentor Daniel J. Davis; I had started my blog, Tales of Valor and Woe (link at the end of this book); and I was overall trying harder to break into professional writing. (I hadn’t published anything since my initial debut of the Demon Shaman base class by Flaming Crab Games in 2015, along with a few contributions to their magic item compendiums. I am still eternally grateful to Alex Abel for giving me my first chance.) Daniel and I met by way of being recruited for a promising roleplaying game project that never got off the ground. Afterward, I messaged him and asked if he would be willing to read one of my stories. To my delight, he agreed. The feedback he gave me was by far the best I had ever received since setting my heart on writing. He showed me what I could do better, how I could go about it, and what I was already strong at. And he did this time and again with every draft of every story I sent him.

He is also the reason why the first (chronological) Razos story, The Incantation of a Thousand Deaths, was written. Daniel sent me a message about a submissions call for a short story anthology being put out by a fairly well known author aimed specifically at writers who had never had fiction published before, and he told me that he knew I needed to see it as soon as it had come to his attention. I knew then and there that the time for Razos’s resurrection had come; The Incantation of a Thousand Deaths was born. Daniel served a sounding board for me through multiple drafts of the story until finally, I sent it off.

As fate would have it, that short story anthology never took off, either, but I was undeterred. I sent Incantation to every magazine publisher I could find who would take fantasy. It was during this period that I also penned the other stories in this volume with the same intent; most of them, like Incantation, were nurtured by Daniel’s feedback. Still, the rejections came and came until I decided to hell with the whole thing, I was just going to publish them myself when I felt ready.

But nothing’s ever that simple, right? By that point, I was thoroughly engrossed in releasing monthly installments of my Diabolical Ascension saga on Tales of Valor and Woe and commissioning art from the talented Victoria Blotta to go with it, and I was also releasing weekly installments of the novel Razos of Mephzaaryk on Webnovel.com, for which Victoria did the cover. (If you ever need an artist, I highly recommend Victoria. She is easy to work with, personable, and passionate about what she does. From the bottom of my heart, thank you, Victoria for breathing life into my characters.) I had also gotten my first freelance writing contract with Concept Moon Studios for their Instruments of Jehann project (which has proven, dare I say it, instrumental, in honing the quality of my prose). Thank you to Brandon Didley, Cassandra Thomas, Jessica Dorden, Everett Asher, Michelle Cerone, and Alana Ash. You all are my writing family, and it is my hope that each of you knows how very much you mean to me. Finally, I had also taken up the practice of swordsmanship, also mentored from afar by Daniel, who shares similar interests in martial arts. It was one of his articles on brainleakage.com that inspired me to read Sun and Steel by Yukio Mishima, and Daniel and I also talked about other texts and techniques. Overall, I was feeling pretty good about where I was at. I commissioned Victoria for the cover art of Darkness & Glory, compiled the tales into a singular volume, and put it up for sale on lulu.com.

Afterward, I went on to write the novella Legacy of Flames that was published by Azukail Games for the Sundara fantasy setting created by another friend and mentor, Neal Litherland. I had already purchased a nice smattering of the Sundara supplements, and so I kicked down Neal’s metaphorical door and told him that I really, really wanted to write fiction set in his world. He provided most excellent feedback and nurtured me as a writer. I am glad to know you, friend. I also want to thank Adrian Kennelly, head of Azukail Games (to whom Neal sent me on the basis that I deserved to get paid for my work, another sensation still alien to me), for taking a chance on a new writer. Furthermore, I also want to thank Adrian for putting me in contact with Tyler Thompson of Prudence Games, who read some of Legacy of Flames, liked what he read, and wanted me to write for PostScript, his post-apocalyptic science fiction setting. So it was that my next writing success, the novelette Clash of Fervors, was born.

Coming off the heels of these two publications was the great kerfuffle with Wizards of the Coast that shook the gaming ecosystem to its core: Wizards had announced that they were working to change the Open Gaming License (OGL) that so many third-party publishers had built themselves upon. It is because of the OGL that we have Pathfinder, and the OGL also extended to 5th edition D&D. Sundara, being published for both games, depended on the OGL staying as is. By extension, so did Legacy of Flames. There was a lot of uncertainty and community backlash since the OGL had been in place for twenty years with the good faith arrangement that it was impossible to change, even if Wizards wanted to. In the end, the OGL remained unchanged, but a lot of other things did not.

Including my Diabolical Ascension mythos. For the record, I’ve been a fan of D&D for most of my life. I cut my teeth on AD&D at ten years old, and perusing the Baatezu and Tanar’ri of the Outer Planes Appendix inculcated a taste for everything hellish. I had also already had a long-running obsession with Bionicle, which inspired my first storytelling attempts in the form of comics and narratives crafted with pencil, pen, crayon, colored pencil, and whatever else I could scavenge from the pantry or other parts of the house when my parents weren’t looking. Before anyone asks, yes, I always liked the red Bionicles best. The scribbles that were my first drafts of Diabolical Ascension at about the age of fourteen were little more than D&D fanfiction, inspired by my desire to create a character who was the equal of one of the archdevils and archdemons that had set my mind ablaze. I never quite shook that influence.

When I received the news about the OGL, I took some time to reflect on what Diabolical Ascension was and what