Mutant Ghosts of Fatal Onyx Concept Test

THE LAND OF NIGHT The Northeast holds a small forest locked in endless night. When the sun shines over the rest of Creation, this woodland stands out because it remains cloaked in per- petual darkness. The moon and stars shine normally over this land, but the sun never shows. The trees are equally unusual: many sorts of etiolated trees with bone-colored leaves and chalk-white bark as well as the rare blood ebony trees, which rapidly die if exposed to sunlight and have jet-black wood and blood-red leaves and sap. An abundance of fungi live among these unnatural groves. Mobile puffball mushrooms a yard wide creep slowly between mushrooms up to five yards tall. The mushroom spores do not affect the animals native to the Land of Night, that are all unusually large versions of nocturnal creatures. Strix and giant carnivorous bats feast on the fungal trees and occasionally supplement their diet with living flesh, while the deer have jet-black eyes twice the size of normal members of their kind, while their ebon hooves and antlers contrast sharply with their unnaturally pale fur. Most of the hobgoblins who live in this realm have the large-eared heads of bats: their faintly clicking sonar allows them to ignore the perpetual darkness of their homeland. THE SHADOWLAND OF FATAL ONYX The center of the Land of Night holds a city called Fatal Onyx. This small shadowland benefits from the perpetual darkness of its surroundings. The buildings are all made from sculpted bones, from the pale yellow of ancient and well-polished ivory to the stark white of a sun-bleached skull. The ghosts of Fatal Onyx move to and from the Underworld as readily as any other ghosts. However, Wyld energies also taint this shadowland, and so the ghosts of Fatal Onyx are all as black as soot; they look like shadows given a three-dimensional form. Their eyes and mouths give only minor variations in their uniform darkness. While ghosts in Fatal Onyx start out as shadowy version of the forms they take in the Underworld, over time they mutate and change as much as anything else in the Wyld. Some grow taller or wider (or both), and their limbs occasionally transform into flippers, wings or claws. Some ghosts lose all limbs and become feature- less, inky blobs crawling across the landscape. These transformations gradually fade when ghosts return to the Underworld, though the recovery may take decades. Ghosts find such mutations almost as terrible as living men would. The ghosts can leave anytime they wish—but most remain and accept their progressive deformity, for the shadowland does not protect the ghosts from addic- tion to the Wyld. A trio of exceedingly powerful and ancient nephwrack necromancers are the absolute monarchs of Fatal Onyx. They call themselves the Triat. They all look the same: fluid, misshapen shadow-creatures barely recognizable as humanoid, with long, snouted heads crowned with glittering diadems of onyx. Just as all of their kind, they hate the living. The Triat also loathe the chaotic existence of the Fair Folk and their hobgoblin servants. The Triat founded Fatal Onyx as part of a crusade to cleanse and conquer the Wyld—and the Wyld caught them. The three nephwracks use the black ghosts as packs of hunting beasts that run screeching and howling through the Land of Night. When night falls in the surround- ing Bordermarches, the nephwracks lead their ghosts to hunt anything they can find, including hobgoblins, Wyld barbarians, beastmen, weaker Fair Folk and unusu- ally careless Exalts. The three nephwracks resist further Wyld mutation because the Wyld has made them one of its stories, as the dread huntsmen who rule the Land of Night. The nephwracks do not care what they catch. Only the hunt for living prey matters. They prefer to take mortal (or immortal) victims alive and carry them back to Fatal Onyx for a slow, agonizing death and consumption. They especially enjoy torturing hobgoblins. Captured raksha face the same fate unless they can buy their freedom with gifts and sworn promises of large favors. A far worse fate awaits mortals or Exalted captured by these monsters. In addition to using their blood to power their foul necro- mantic rituals, the nephwracks possess a terrible artifact that enables the user to devour dreams, emotions and souls as the Fair Folk do. The nephwracks obtained this artifact as ransom for a pair of captured raksha nobles. The Triat periodically allow their best hunting ghosts to ravish one of their captives. Even a small taste of this twisted pleasure is one of the greatest joys a ghost can obtain, and this lure attracts thousands of ghosts to Fatal Onyx and their own entrapment in the Wyld. The Triat would prefer to hunt mortals and the occasional Exalt. However, their packs of ghosts are so addicted to the Wyld that most refuse to hunt in Creation. Therefore, the Triat must usually settle for hobgoblins. Now and then, the Triat raid the caravans of slaves taken through the nearby Bordermarches, on their way to raksha domains.