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[✗] [Mysticism Addition] The Rite of Clinging


The King Of The Moon
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The Rite of Clinging

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'The gates of Ebrietaes... I dread them. 
They shriek open in my nightmares, sucking me in.
But what must I lose to stay here?
I am mortal, brother. A fact I cherish. I will do what must be done to evade the Wastes, but I will not so readily kill myself for the comforts of undeath.

 

I will bide my time.’


Background

Spoiler

The Horned Priest sat beneath the sun. Perched atop a hill, he felt the caress of wind upon his skin. He knew warmth beneath the afternoon’s daylight. Beneath him, blades of grass weaved between the fleshy fingers of his left hand. Lower still, dirt and moisture locked the ground in place and promised him stability. 

A heart beat in his chest, and a thin smile lingered across his face. He was alive. A fact he did not take for granted. 

 

In his mind, the maddened founder of their shared art - his phantom - decried the horrors of Ebrietaes. The horror that awaited him for the rites he knew. It begged him to secure for himself an escape: undeath. This troubled the Priest; an anxiety all learned in the First Synod’s ways shared. He knew there was no real alternative to ‘ascension’. That someday he would be forced to forsake his flesh for a promise of eternity, lest he join the geists beyond the Wastes that he had spent so many years conjuring. 


To the creature’s right, he reflected on a rather unique sensation: a fleshless, boneless limb that was near transparent in the sunlight the rest of his body enjoyed. For this Priest was a mystic, and through this limb he had touched death. This hand did not feel the softness of grass. It was not kissed by the warmth of the summer day, nor could it grasp at the whistling winds or the dependable earth. Would all of him become like this someday? Was it worth the cost? The Priest pondered for some time. 

 

Night fell and the mystic withdrew to his hovel. By fireside he poured over their foundational tome, in hopes of a solution to this problem. A tongue of fire spat light across the surface of a dusty trinket in his abode: a jar, containing the red child’s limb that was once his own. From within that shimmering glass, inspiration struck.

 

And then the Priest lowered the Book of Phantoms, picked up his quill, and began to theorise a solution of his own.

 

Explanation


The Rite of Clinging is a newly theorised rite of mysticism, immortalised in the Book of Phantoms along with the collective knowledge of the past Synods.

 

Intended to permit a wight-to-be an extension of their mortal lives, before sacrificing their flesh for ectoplasm with the consumption of an apparition, the Rite of Clinging permits a mystic who has undergone the Rite of Amputation and still possesses their severed limb to delay their ascension. 

 

By bombarding the amputated flesh of their former arm with that from its ectoplasmic replacement in an exaggerated mimicry of hindering, a mystic can calcify their lost skin, meat and bone into a menhir-esque sculpture. 

 

In doing so, they form a disembodied ‘extension’ of their ectoplasm pool. Bound to the mystic by their soul blueprint, through a similar apparatus used to conduct seances, the stony arm left in the wake of the Rite of Clinging acts as a tether between the mystic’s soul and the physical object. 

This tether is initially diminutive, serving no real purpose without further enhancement. Should the mystic go on to subdue an apparition in the limb’s presence, and consume the soul-amalgam via the Rite of Consumption, they could choose to delay their ascension to wightdom. 

 

Ability


Rather than calcifying their own bodies within a year after the successful completion of this rite, forming a phylactery from which a wight will emerge in their place, a mystic may instead ‘cling’ to the defeated apparition, instead utilising their calcified limb as a cage and in turn constructing a phylactery separate form their living bodies. 

 

This has no immediate effect on the mystic bar extending their liturgy pool to T5 as well as the necessary prerequisites to open a door to Ebrietaes when in possession of the book of phantoms, as all wights can. The true purpose of the Rite of Clinging is to let a barrowlord-to-be carry on enjoying their mortality until the time of their death. Therein rather than being swept up into the soul stream their soul would instead be dragged into the phylactery formed by the Rite. 

 

Immediately upon loss of their mortal coil the mystic’s soul will be added to the amalgam already trapped there to re-emerge as a wight. Thereafter identical to any other of their kind.

 

From then on the sculpted arm (instead of a full statue-like body as is usually the case) would behave as the wight’s phylactery. Its destruction would mean their unraveling, and permanent death. The remnant corpse of the rest of the mystic’s body would remain just that: a dead body, no longer tethered to their soul and never able to rise again.

 

Due to the unnatural tether this phylactery places on a soul, if the ‘clinging’ mystic is killed prior to the consumption of an apparition and without an alternative resurrection mechanic to the Wilven Monks, they would be pulled into Ebrietaes permanently unless raised in some other form of undeath. 

This stain upon the soul remains even if the phylactery is destroyed before the mystic’s death. A deep pain is briefly inflicted onto the mystic as they would sense (and need to be OOCly alerted of) the tether’s shattering, and thereafter they would still be refused revival by the monks should they be slain, instead having to consume another apparition (any stored in the arm at the time is released back to the ST) directly through the Rite of Consumption or to seek out another form of undeath. 

 

Redlines


-The Rite of Clinging requires a mystic to possess their original severed arm from when the had the Rite of Amputation performed on them. A prosthetic, or a new limb created from Tawkin, would not suffice. 
-Once created, the empty phylactery sculpted by the Rite of Clinging must be ST signed. It may not be stored in an enderchest. 
-Carrying out the Rite of Clinging does not automatically grant a Wight CA. Such is only to be submitted once the requirements of mysticism's Rite of Consumption have been met and the rite successfully carried out. 
-Once an apparition has been consumed by the artefact, characters who have conducted the Rite of Clinging are bound to become a wight the moment their mortal body dies by any means outside of mechanical PVP.
-Once resurrected as a wight, characters who performed the Rite of Clinging are subject to all of the usual boons, banes and redlines of the wight CA, indistinguishable from any other wight bar an oddly shaped phylactery. 
-Limbs made from the Rite of Clinging are no more durable than standard menhir as defined in lore.
-If a ‘Clinging’ mystic is sapped or otherwise deprived of mysticism, the limb becomes innert until T4 mysticism is regained (if ever).
-The Rite of Clinging is knowledge that becomes inherent to any amputated mystic should they physically touch their severed limb again afterward (gleaning insight into its potential). The Rite of Consumption (required to make a wight) however must be taught by another, or found in the Book of Phantoms.
-The Rite of Clinging can only be performed on an amputated mystic’s own limb, no other can do it for them. There is no tier requirement for the Rite of Clinging, though for it to succeed in storing an apparition the mystic must have already reached T4 as is necessary to become a wight. 

 

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