Book of Bone and Ebony

EXALTED • BOOK OF BONE AND EBONY
immediately scoured from her memory, and she is left with
only her Incapacitated health level, gasping for life. The
spell, once cast, is active only for one scene.
BLACK FAITH
Cost: 30 motes, 1 lethal health level
Target: Caster
Screaming obscenities that glorify the Malfeans, the
sole fathers of Oblivion, the necromancer cuts himself
across his belly and lets his blood spill before leaping into
the Mouth of the Void. This act is preceded by half an hour
of silent worship and prayer, which follows immediately
the sacrifice of one ghost’s pain and corpus to the Abyss.
This spell represents the final effort of a desperate
necromancer. His actions prior to his leap are meant to endear
himself as much as possible to the sleeping gods of nothingness
and to cause them to dream of him as he dives. His fall
is nothing to be taken lightly — as the necromancer plummets
toward the certainty of the Void, he slowly dies. His
accoutrements are burned off by the sheer lack of flame, and
his skin and bone peel away into shreds smaller than dust, as
even dust dies. The last thing that remains is the corpus of his
falling spirit; it boils slowly away as it blurs past the entrances
to the Malfeans’ tombs, Oblivion excruciatingly digging into
the necromancer’s soul until he is no more.
There is a single moment between the final loss of the
spiritual vessel and the final dissolution. This is the time of
judgment. If his actions have pleased the Malfeans and if
his mission benefits them and if they are not angered to
have their slumber disturbed so greatly, they revoke his
dissolution. The act of being destroyed, too, is a thing
which, if cast into the Void, can never have been. The
necromancer who dared call so loudly into the nightmares
appears, having never been destroyed. He is most likely in
whatever place he needed so desperately to be, the Malfeans
hearing his plea and letting it be so. Sometimes, the
Malfeans decide that the necromancer would better serve
them in another place, and he unexpectedly arrives there.
This rarely used form of transportation facilitates the
necromancer’s appearance anywhere, from the Labyrinth
and the Underworld to the wide, bright world of Creation,
spirit sanctums, Yu-Shan or Malfeas itself. Wards have no
effect on his ability to arrive in any given location, since
before being there he was, literally, nowhere.
Should the Malfeans fail to be impressed by the
necromancer’s performance before his dive, he has committed
a rather inspired and complete suicide, and he is
irrevocably dead. Use of this spell is very much a Storyteller
device, and it is recommended that players discuss its
use with their Storyteller before enacting it.
THE CLAY OF WARPED DREAMS
Cost: 60 motes (committed)
Target: Area of effect
140
The necromancer stands in the Labyrinth with a
minimum of three sacrificial ghosts behind him. As a 10minute
prayer to the Malfeans comes to a close, the caster’s
black will envelops the sacrifices and destroys them utterly,
devoting the Oblivion of each to the dead gods
whose slow nightmares define the place where the caster
stands. Temporarily appeased, the unthinkables that rest
in tombs above the edge of the Void gift the caster with
control over that small portion of their restless slumbers.
With the completion of the Clay of Warped Dreams,
the necromancer gains total control over 10 square miles
of the Labyrinth, in any configuration he desires. The
landscape shapes itself to his waking dreams instead of the
tortured malice-borne thoughts of the Malfeans. He can,
with a successful Perception + Occult roll made by his
player, be totally aware of any space within his power that
he could not normally see. His ability to shape the Labyrinth
can manifest as physical attacks — swarms of tarnished
silver moths fly at his whim, stabbing stalagmites of bone
and gouts of boiling brains. Such an attack is made with a
Wits + Melee, Archery or Thrown (as appropriate) roll,
with additional successes equal to the necromancer’s Occult
score. Additional effects, such as the creation of
poisonous gases or dangerous beasts or imprisoning a
victim, are possible at the Storyteller’s discretion. Vastly
dangerous creatures can be created by borrowing the
Malfeans’ nightmares, but it is time consuming, and such
creatures are highly likely to be swallowed by entropy
when those dreams are reclaimed.
This control endures as long as the necromancer
commits the Essence or (at the Storyteller’s discretion)
until a dead god stirs enough to actively reclaim it.
Deathlords make use of this spell in their rare convocations
of peers, creating vast and affluent palaces beneath
the Manses they keep in Stygia. Often, only a grudging
respect for the vast power a Deathlord’s tentative allies
have, the certainty that each has planned contingency
and the expenditure of motes necessary to invoke the
spell prevent the host at such a gathering from abusing
his power.
FORSAKEN LIFE ENGINE
Cost: 50+ motes
Target: Area of effect
With a simple wave of her hand, the necromancer
conjures into being a vast engine, with cogs and levers of
bone, pulleys strung with iron-reinforced spinal cords,
oiled with blood and bile and emitting voluminous clouds
of black soot. The engine, twice as high and wide as a
yeddim, stands several dozen yards in the air, supported by
heavy iron beams. In the bottom of the machine is a wide,
dark hole. When this mysterious orifice is empty, only a
pathetic trickle of smoke drips upward from the large and
soiled pipes on the top. When a living creature is put in