The Beast Fears Fire - The Hemlock-Poisoned Narratives

Poisoned Narratives [Ignorance 3]
Impulse - to Repeat.

Sōng have always been a literary people, credited with inventing wood-pulp paper way back in the histories of time before the empire and the resource collapse. Letters, journals, novels; the written word in all its forms, these remain a major part of Sōng life and culture. Storytelling and story are things that a lot of Sōng respect a great deal and Sōng thinkers and scholars often have a lot to say on the power of narrative. It's through them that the east has its notions of memetics, which has it's obvious utility for hunters and scholars of the monstrous.

If someone set out to craft a weapon to use against the Sōng as a culture and a people, poisoned narratives would be an excellent choice. No one is really certain if someone did deliberately craft them; suspects on that account are those who originally inhabited the Teigou (the more popular choice, and thus the occasionally used name of Hemlock-Poisoned Narratives) or their more modern rivals among the Murrenic peoples who populated what had once been the Oak Province. It's equally likely that the narratives are the by-blow of some feral god or some manifestation come through the forest from Dim Stroen.

Whatever the case, the narrative takes time to manifest. It's not a spirit, per se, and no one's ever perceived a poisoned narrative as such. Most of the time, they play out without anyone aware of an external force causing the events that the narrative causes to play out. It's only with hindsight and some literary study that the narrative gets caught at all.

Poisoned narratives are drawn to certain circumstances and relationships and influence the people involved to play out the events that make up the contents of the narrative. Poisoned narratives always end badly for their characters whether tragedies of black comedies (the two most popular literary forms in the Teigou). What's more, they tend to spread the badness around, causing phenomena that seem to be spiritual in nature, and making accidents befall those close to the chosen characters in the narrative. As the narrative picks up power and builds toward its climax, people in the area tend to experience spontaneous, shallow painful cuts, as if they were cut by invisible paper. This is usually the only warning an experienced investigator gets.

Poisoned Narratives do eventually manifest as furtive human figures dressed in many-layered robes made from stitched-together pages of a manuscript in Sōng hand. Their manifestation is the only vulnerable part of the narrative, and is more likely to appear as things start going "wrong" with the narrative, otherwise, they tend to try and remain hidden until the story has played itself out.

Harm - Front A poisoned narrative exists to play itself out and cause ruin through the actions of its chosen actors.
Stage 1 The narrative chooses its characters based on relationships and circumstance. People acquainted with the "characters" chosen might notice a change in behavior or a circumstance that reminds them of a story.
Stage 2 The narrative builds, causing its "characters" to act in ways that suit the narrative and may be wildly different than they usually behave. They will tend to take on the characteristics of the characters they are meant to portray and will behave in oddly dramatic ways otherwise. Those close to them are also in danger of being caught up in the sense of drama or even in roles of minor characters.
Stage 3 The narrative builds to a crisis. The paper-clad figure may manifest independently of things hewing close or not to the narrative. Bystanders will start suffering from paper cuts.
Stage 4 The narrative reaches its climax. The principles definitely die, as do many bystanders, apparent suicides (wrists or throats slit by their own suicide notes, usually...), and the narrative moves on.

The Editor's Brush
If you believe that someone you witness is caught in a poisoned narrative and want to try to break it, face Ignorance.
On a Hit, you're able to identify aspects of the story the poisoned narrative is attempting to bring about and get +1 Hit forward on your next attempt to derail it.
On a Hard Hit, you get the paper-clad figure to appear, somewhere, or, if it's already active, you learn its location and can go do terrible things to it in order to drive it off.
On a Miss, it turns out that your efforts to thwart the narrative only propelled it further. Suffer 1 of the most painful Harm you will ever experience and advance the Front a stage.

I couldn't see the books were on the shelf.
Poisoned narratives tend to be cowardly and try not to co-opt the actions of would-be heroes and adventurers. Whether this is because those folks often possess the skills to ferret out the narrative and break it or whether they are likely as not to generate their own through misadventure and larger-than-life personality. They also tend not to develop around those types of people unless they are already in full swing (that is to say, actually a Front).

The stories behind most of the narratives have been collected by scholars and survivors of the poisoned narratives' actions and collected in a book called the Throat-Cut Swallow, which is disturbing but otherwise safe reading. The book does have one unusual aspect, however, which makes it invaluable to those who study the Other. The presence of one of the stories (any one will do) written in Sōng script in a book will prevent it from becoming a lexicon, no matter what about the Other your write down (and proves a good psychological litmus test for any would-be scholar of the Other. If you can't handle the preface, you are not going to do well with the main body). Also the presence of the book on a shelf of lore about the Other will usually prevent those books from becoming Lexicons.

Some people claim that the book can be used as a weapon or a talisman of protection against creatures of the Other, but details on how this is done are sketchy at best.