Babylonian Horrors — Brian Barr

Joining together, nine Babylonian necromantic sorcerers were appointed as secret protectors of the royal court and the city by the King. In the shadowy halls of Babylon's underground temples, they met under the veil of night, engaging in the most secretive of esoteric rights. In their ancient Akkadian tongues, they shared their dark secrets, communed with the dead, joined with sister witches for intense sexual magic rituals. The necromancers used their alchemic knowledge to forge the nine saturnine flutes of death. Forged with the lunar metal of silver and blessed upon bone altars by the heavenly powers of the Mesopotamian gods, the flutes were consecrated with the blood and gore of many of the king's prisoners and enemies. The nine chthonic magicians used their understanding of the esoteric powers of sound, notes, and chords to connect to demonic forces, using them for their will. Each flute represented Saturn's grand and deadly force wedded with the fluctuating powers of the Moon, accelerating the demonic magic both planets offered to the musical instruments. Along with their shared lunar and saturnine attributes, each of the nine flutes also represented one of the great heavenly influences, which included the six traditional planets. One flute represented Saturn and the Moon's powers in league with the Sun, another with the Moon, a third with Mercury, then Venus, on to Mars, and Jupiter. There was a flute to represent the saturnine aspects of the Northern Lunar Node, also known as the Dragon's Head, and another flute to represent the Southern, the Dragon's tail. The flute that represented Saturn in its most purest power, without the combined influence of another planet, was made to be the strongest flute of them all, the dark forces at their coldest and most brutal. In the subterranean halls of their precious city of Babili, known to the Greeks as Babylon, the sorcerers would experiment with the flutes, testing their dark magical abilities. The flutes served a variety of purposes, from animating dead flesh to opening doorways that led to hellish realms. The sorcerers raised the bodies of deceased prisoners of war and other corpses that were once enemies of the King. They played the flutes during intense ritual meditations, focusing their minds and souls on bilocation, the ability to be in two or more places at once, and soul travel, as well as physical teleportation. When played, the flutes would emit a disharmonious sound, flooding the air with decay, chaos, and ruin. Their silvery coating shimmered in the light of the torches. Living dead men would be ordered to feed upon living enemies of Babylon. The undead cadavers were also ordered into the streets of the city, searching for more blood and bodies to fuel their rituals, as well as fugitives and runaways that evaded the King's paladins. Upon seeing the progress of his chosen necromancer's secret work, the King was quite pleased. Like most monarchs, if not all, he wished for his legacy and the glory of his kingdom to continue far beyond his own demise. As many kingdoms do, Babylon eventually became a relic of the past, remembered only in story and song, immortalized in recovered plates and along the stone walls of scattered ruins in a desert region. The arcane secrets of the necromancers, kept in the shadows of Babylon's underground tunnels, were recovered by traveling mystics and scholars. Those well preserved flutes were taken as well…