Poison Relay 6 - Purified Joy; Korlus Stone-Blood
My long-delayed entry in the Poison Relay! I was tagged by Stack of Goats. Turns out I demanded to be next back in September and promptly forgot about. Sometimes life attacks.
The Victim - Aysun the Demon
It was strange when the tears began to disappear; they'd fade away before rolling down a cheek. Funeral mourners were mystified as their grief's manifestation evaporated. Children's wails became just sound and fury. A side splitting laugh would barely moisten the eye's corners before drying out. As the days went on with tears going missing the air thickened into haze and tasted tinged with salt like a sea breeze despite the ocean being nowhere nearby.
Slowly above the city a storm cloud coalesced and stifled out any other weather. Days became weeks of no tears and hazy air and an increasingly stormy cloud. As the tears flowed, the clouds grew. At the center of the storm, wings and a body began to materialize. Aysun the demon awakened. They hovered in the clouds, huge wings stretching further out, wide enough to eventually block the sun and cover the city.
Aysun's cultists wail in the streets as they salt wounds and burn themselves to add more tears. They spread plagues and assassinate to create more funerals and misery to be lapped up by their foul savior.
Kill the demon who feeds on tears before the city is consumed.
The Poison - Purified Joy
A physiology of pure evil rejects happiness as utterly toxic. Demons, wraiths, and the like can be laid low with a dose of purified joy, the only poison truly sanctioned by Good.
Seven ingredients comprise the recipe:
- Mingled clothing threads from the embrace of friends long parted, for kindling
- Breath used to reciprocate a declaration of love, to fill the the bellows
- Dregs of water that saved one dying of thirst, to start the brew
- A newborn's umbilical cord, to season the water
- Galanthus nivalis plucked fresh from the snow, left to steep
- Pottery used to feed a whole community, dissolved in the mixture
- The fur of a first dog or cat, sprinkled atop before taking off the fire
All demons know the recipe, for they hate and feat its result. The liquid produced is a crystal-clear amber color and shimmers when held up to the light. If applied to weapon or ingested by a being of darkness, the fiend destabilizes in a reaction of great violence. It also works similarly on intelligent undead. When used on anything else, it merely produces a lasting sense of well-being.
The Victim - Korlus Stone-Blood
A champion of the mountainsβ basilisk-worshiping warrior lodge. Korlus (8th level fighter) is six and a half feet tall and built like a boulder. He has survived the most esteemed trials of the lodge: holding a basilisk's gaze for a few moments. Though partially petrified from his ordeal, the king of serpentsβ blessing gives him hardened gray skin, crushing fists, and the metabolism of a glacier. Korlus has also mastered the lodge's preternatural art; their own gaze attack that sets enemies fleeing in panic. He does not lead the lodge, for the dedication required to pursue his mystic path precludes all other responsibilities.
The drystone lodge house sandwiched between a granite fissure above the tree line. Up to a score of 1st level fighters dwell here at any time meditating on the mysteries of the basilisk; a 4th level master oversees them all. They keep a live basilisk in a dark room deep within the structure.
Tasked with devising the lucky seventh poison and felling the doughty Korlus is Vodka Gobalsky of the Distillery!