Juho Pohjalainen's Blog: Pankarp - Posts Tagged "aizuv"
Magic Sword
Stormbringer, Grayswandir, Sting and Anduril, Dragonslayer... as far as I'm concerned, a Sword & Sorcery tale is rarely complete if their hero does not wield a magic weapon. Here's the iconic weapon of one of my first heroes.
Void is a shortsword with a pitch-black blade - like a hole in reality rather than a slab of metal. It's light as a feather, well-balanced, and sharp enough that even a weedy three-foot-tall bugbear can cut off limbs with a single strike, or carve into hard stone as if it were soft clay. So far so good, but on a more sinister note, whatever strange substance its blade is made out of, it drinks light: nearby sources of illumination flicker and dim whenever the sword is brought anywhere near, and touching a candle or a torch, or a lit fireplace or a weak lamp, will have the light instantly snuff out and die. A very nice weapon for a sneaky skulker, then. But be wary, for if you can drink something, you can drown in it: more powerful lights such as the midday sun will render the sword brittle and weak, and powerful blinding bursts might even cause it to disintegrate altogether. It's never truly gone, reforming as soon as you place a hilt someplace dark for a couple days... but it's still an inconvenience, often a lethal one.
What is it made out of, how, and by whom? This is a sketchy thing, for no one truly knows, not even myself. It could be an advanced weapon of hardened dark - like an anti-lightsaber - constructed by alien beings with unknown superscience... or it could have been forged out of winter-metal by an ancient and semi-divine blacksmith, employing sorceries and blessings along with an enchanted hammer. Whatever it was, they built in one final secret, a sinister trait of the weapon that even Peal is only vaguely aware of:
It's intelligent. Be it a minor demon captured into the hilt or an advanced and efficient A.I. programmed by alien beings, the weapon has a will of its own. It's not much of a will, only minor instinctive urges that Peal can usually dismiss altogether without even noticing... but sometimes he feels the same murderous intent as the weapon does, and its faint whispers are all it takes to drive him over the edge. It may or may not be what fanned the flames leading to the infamous Red Mending.
Void knows one thing, and one thing only - it is a killing tool. Not for hunting like spears, not for chopping wood like axes, not for forging or repairing like a hammer: a sword is made for taking lives and nothing else. So it does just that. Whenever struck in anger, it will kill, even if the blade has to alter reality to make it so: should the victim survive, the universe will think them dead anyway and bring forth some crazy accident to correct the matter. Take a scratch of the sword, and a stray arrow will soon hit you in the eye, or your footing slips and casts you into the abyss, or if nothing else, you have a fatal heart attack. It's like a virus, maliciously rewriting the source code of the universe to work its will.
Void is a +4 weapon of Chaotic alignment, with an intelligence score of 7 and an Ego of 13 (Peal's ego is 32, indicating how unlikely it is for it to ever grab a true hold of him), and the special purpose to, sure enough, kill. Any light source will fall one step dimmer anywhere within thirty feet of it, or two steps within one foot - going out altogether if this would make it less than dim. Upon injury, the victim must make a saving throw versus death or, you guessed it, drop dead by next round.
This year's NaNoWriMo will feature another sword, cast into the distant past to do battle against the serpent-men that at this time hold humanity as livestock. It's a Lawful thing, to contrast the above weapon: its mind is that of a future scientist named Aizuv, a very neat and orderly person that wishes for humankind to unite and throw off the yokes of Chaos; while the steel forged around him has been enchanted to kill off snakemen specifically.
It might be technically the very first sword in existence: neither serpent-men nor their human slaves possess the metalworking knowledge for forging some, and mainly wield spears and bows.
Its precise powers and abilities are yet to be determined.
Void is a shortsword with a pitch-black blade - like a hole in reality rather than a slab of metal. It's light as a feather, well-balanced, and sharp enough that even a weedy three-foot-tall bugbear can cut off limbs with a single strike, or carve into hard stone as if it were soft clay. So far so good, but on a more sinister note, whatever strange substance its blade is made out of, it drinks light: nearby sources of illumination flicker and dim whenever the sword is brought anywhere near, and touching a candle or a torch, or a lit fireplace or a weak lamp, will have the light instantly snuff out and die. A very nice weapon for a sneaky skulker, then. But be wary, for if you can drink something, you can drown in it: more powerful lights such as the midday sun will render the sword brittle and weak, and powerful blinding bursts might even cause it to disintegrate altogether. It's never truly gone, reforming as soon as you place a hilt someplace dark for a couple days... but it's still an inconvenience, often a lethal one.
What is it made out of, how, and by whom? This is a sketchy thing, for no one truly knows, not even myself. It could be an advanced weapon of hardened dark - like an anti-lightsaber - constructed by alien beings with unknown superscience... or it could have been forged out of winter-metal by an ancient and semi-divine blacksmith, employing sorceries and blessings along with an enchanted hammer. Whatever it was, they built in one final secret, a sinister trait of the weapon that even Peal is only vaguely aware of:
It's intelligent. Be it a minor demon captured into the hilt or an advanced and efficient A.I. programmed by alien beings, the weapon has a will of its own. It's not much of a will, only minor instinctive urges that Peal can usually dismiss altogether without even noticing... but sometimes he feels the same murderous intent as the weapon does, and its faint whispers are all it takes to drive him over the edge. It may or may not be what fanned the flames leading to the infamous Red Mending.
Void knows one thing, and one thing only - it is a killing tool. Not for hunting like spears, not for chopping wood like axes, not for forging or repairing like a hammer: a sword is made for taking lives and nothing else. So it does just that. Whenever struck in anger, it will kill, even if the blade has to alter reality to make it so: should the victim survive, the universe will think them dead anyway and bring forth some crazy accident to correct the matter. Take a scratch of the sword, and a stray arrow will soon hit you in the eye, or your footing slips and casts you into the abyss, or if nothing else, you have a fatal heart attack. It's like a virus, maliciously rewriting the source code of the universe to work its will.
Void is a +4 weapon of Chaotic alignment, with an intelligence score of 7 and an Ego of 13 (Peal's ego is 32, indicating how unlikely it is for it to ever grab a true hold of him), and the special purpose to, sure enough, kill. Any light source will fall one step dimmer anywhere within thirty feet of it, or two steps within one foot - going out altogether if this would make it less than dim. Upon injury, the victim must make a saving throw versus death or, you guessed it, drop dead by next round.
This year's NaNoWriMo will feature another sword, cast into the distant past to do battle against the serpent-men that at this time hold humanity as livestock. It's a Lawful thing, to contrast the above weapon: its mind is that of a future scientist named Aizuv, a very neat and orderly person that wishes for humankind to unite and throw off the yokes of Chaos; while the steel forged around him has been enchanted to kill off snakemen specifically.
It might be technically the very first sword in existence: neither serpent-men nor their human slaves possess the metalworking knowledge for forging some, and mainly wield spears and bows.
Its precise powers and abilities are yet to be determined.
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