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The Sigil That Is a Doom Upon Scribes
Tomes of Amaxathroth > Ink, Blood and Parchment |
Many ages past, proud kings ruled at the swampy mouth of the Nal; of their slaves and priests naught is to be told, even within the most ancient of bound tomes treasured by sorcerors of Magak and Harumetha. The many-pillared ruins and great, crumbling statues beside the Nal are given over to roosting vagra that await the scent of rotting flesh upon the wind, or toppled into the waters where krevakile lurk. So is the fate of all works of man; this I have seen.
From this kingdom of a long past age, swallowed by the poison jungle of Kresh, came the Sigil of Fifteen Points and a doom upon scribes. There is but one true path to form the Sigil, for each other leads, midway, to the formation of a lesser sorcery of anguish and destruction. Even the true path must be taken with haste and precision, lest the scribe linger for too long upon a certain Calling Sign; it will be many days before that unfortunate can know in certain surity that a plague of demons will not burrow upward from the palaces of the Undergods to place spikes through his organs and drag him down to an age-long flensing of flesh and bone.
He who first formed the Sigil of Fifteen Points might be the most refined murderer of all the ages, and who can say in truth that each and every doom contained within the Sigil is known? I have scribed the Sigil but twice; the once to better know the character of its originator, and the twice in extremis and without other recourse. This, I say with the weight of knowledge: better that the Sigil was lost to the world, alongside the being to spawn it, but no torture is so exceedingly subtle and sadistic that a lord of men will forsake its use. No, if there is but one mark to distinguish the hearts of those who strive and die so as to rule, it is the lust for such. The world will crumble into the void, riddled to ash by the maggot-spawn of the Undergods, before men will set aside the Sigil.
A man might die the once, but ten thousand times, and in as many ways, might he scream and wish life to end. Without the fear of this and fates far worse, no lord, king, nor callous sorceror might have authority over even the weakest of men. This secret is in the heart of all men, and well known to women - yet each man is surprised by its utterance afresh, and thus do men so set their fate as slaves.
There was an age in which the Sigil was well known indeed amongst sorcerors and scholars about the Meddin Sea. Barbarous Emmegdio slew man, beast and demon alike, and wore the skin of all as proof of his prowess; upon driving out all other killers of man, he enslaved most harshly a thousand women to raise city walls within the mountains of Espaga. In time, no living man remained to dare challenge his rule, but the pleasures of enslaved flesh paled with the decrepitudes of age. Cruelty is ever as a river, hungering for any path to the sea; Emmegdio who called himself King became enamored of the power and suffering brought by sorcery. By dark chance, the Sigil of Fifteen Points came to Espaga, and the lives of Emmedgio's slaves were spent as water in the exploration of its manifold dooms. For year upon year, the city of the woman-slaver echoed to screams and the cackling of demons, and the stench of death grew ever thicker.
Strange and secretive priesthoods are all that now haunt the empty city of highest Espaga, but Sigils both true and false found their way far and wide in the age of Emmegdio; this lure to doom and enticement to torture is hidden within sorcerors' towers, sealed inside the vaults of kings, and set upon ancient parchments arrayed before the ignorant of the bazaar of Abekabar.
[ Posted by Reason on November 26, 2006 ]
