RP:Witchy Brew

Part of the Saurian Onslaught Arc

Summary: Quintessa delivers live Razurath to Gevurah so that the priestess may test her death curse on the wretched saurians. The matron is struggling to target the spell on only the Razurath. The brew kills everything, darn it! Quintessa’s unique curse can nudge the matron’s spell, and together, and over nine hours with live music and a meal, they finish the death curse in its final form.

The Secret Shrine to the Spider Goddess, The Hidden Village of Zaneerh

Gevurah :: A storage room at the back of the temple has been repurposed for Matron Gevurah’s witchy brew. The room has been stripped of its Spider Goddess iconography and replaced with idols of Vakmatharas. Floor to ceiling shelves boast jars and boxes of body parts both wet and dry, bald and hairy, scaley and smooth, sapient and beast, dead and undead, blessed and baned and tricked and tortured and fed and starved. A large bronze cauldron sits at the center of the room surrounded by a flat skirt of crushed black velvet that covers most of the floor. Around the cauldron stand red, skull-engraved candles and black votive candles that have been arranged according to some divinely significant pattern. Thin lines of grave dirt connect the candles to form a fifteen-pointed shape that looks crudely like a serrated scythe blade. A permanent haze reeks of the body parts that already bubble inside the ever-burning cauldron: the palm of a beggar that never touched gold, the foot of a leper, the corpse of a ratking that drowned in a fouled well, a congress of diseased salamanders, a bushel of raven feathers that were smoked over a witch’s pyre, a gallon of Ferminville’s sewer waste, an orphan who witnessed its parents deaths, an old maid who died alone and was never discovered by a living soul, and a crateful of rotting durian that give the putrid fragrance a sickly sweet after taste that lingers at the back of the throat. Gevurah levitates high in the air, her back to the door, as she searches the shelves looking for an ingredient in particular. Her body sways slightly to and fro as if in a trance.

Quintessa has not moved far from her Razurath prisoners since she came here. After the personal effort she had exerted getting them here, she felt intimately acquainted with their suffering and wanted to do everything she could to maximize her presence as a symbol of it. Even after they had surrendered in Cenril, the saurians were not safe from the hex blade's malice. While the imprisoned watch from their cages, Quintessa makes grim work of the decapitated head of one of them, a purple Razurath that she may have heard was named Plum. Plum had spoken out of line on the way to Gaulon, and the changeling had swiftly made an example out of her. Now, she was a grizzly hand-puppet, something Quintessa would mock the prisoners with at ever opportunity she had. The rest of her sat to rot somewhere since Bloodbeak, her three meter tall cockatrice, wouldn't eat them. Such a waste. It isn't until she gets word that Matron Gevurah wanted to see her does she stop scooping out the gore and viscera of Plum's skull and put her work to the side. "Finally," Tessa says with a stretch, "I'll bring one of the prisoners in case she wants to get started." Why else would she want to see her? It isn't long before the rattle of chains is heard from outside of the drow's door as the hex blade drags a single, small Razurath along by his shackles. Reluctantly, he obeys, knowing what cruel fate awaited him if he tried to resist. The cruel fate that awaited in this room was not something he was aware of yet. Pale fingers twist into a fist as she knocks on Gev's door. "Matron!" she calls, "I'm here at your request. Do you require my assistance?"

Gevurah stirs out of her trance as the rattle of shackles draws near her door. She blinks several times as she fully returns to her body. The priestess had hoped a little astral projection would help her discover what her brew’s missing, but she returns to her body no wiser than when she left it. She rubs her eyes irritably as she turns towards Quintessa and descends gently towards the floor. In truth, Gevurah isn’t sure what she needs Quintessa for because she does not yet understand the girl’s gifts, but Quintessa’s dark inclinations had made an impression on the priestess when they met, briefly, in Cenril. “Yes, I need to see if I am any closer to isolating the lizards.” She growls irritably as she circles the cauldron and explains, “This damn thing kills everything.” Don’t worry, Tessa, it isn’t activated now. A smug grin spreads toothlessly across her dark mouth. “It’s the cruelest curse I’ve made yet. Chilling, gruesome deaths. But.” The grin evaporates suddenly. “Too broad.” She walks quickly past Quintessa to lean out of the doorway and shout a command in drow down the hall (if Quintessa understands drow, Gevurah shouted ‘The standard set!’) Turning back to the hexblade, Gevurah expands further, “Let’s see if this lizard dies faster than other races. Then I’ll know I’m getting close.” She eyes Quintessa and asks skeptically, “Are you a necromancer like my husband?”

Quintessa tugs on the chain of her current plaything to order him to follow, and he does so, submissively, without resistance. Slow steps bring the hex blade into the room, her mismatched eyes lighting up with curiosity. "A proper laboratory!" she gasps, a genuine smile brought to her pale lips. "Yes, yes, we'll only want the lizards dead, won't we? There's been enough collateral damage as it is." She has heard the rumors about the attack on Trist'oth and assumes that Gevurah wouldn't want to see any more drow die unless the payoff was great. Quintessa couldn't care less about collateral damage. "I study necromancy," she answers, "But I'm not like your husband. Magister Daath's mastery over necromancy is something I'm not sure I'll ever obtain. However, I do have a few natural talents that aid in my practice of dark magic." Quintessa grins, a devious idea coming to mind, "How about a small demonstration?" Even before she is done speaking her maleficent aura is already building up power, exerting a small field of pressure around her body. Mismatched eyes fall upon the small razurath and and a simple glare focuses the pressure on him, causing him to fall to his knees as his body is wrecked with fatigue. "This is my Hag's curse," the changeling informs the Matron, "A gift from my mother."

Gevurah leans against a plinth as Quintessa takes is the laboratory and the matron waits for her order to be filled. She moves at the pace of a being who expects to live for over a thousand years. Quintessa’s demonstration earns an appreciative non-smile. “Quite a gift,” Gevurah says as she walks to the Razurath to place a hand to the back of the its head. The priestess whispers a quick incantation to further appraise the extent of Quintessa’s handiwork. “Not bad.” A local drowess knocks at the door and Gevurah waves her delivery into the room: a human slave, a drow slave, and a vampire thrall. The drowess leaves as quickly as she can for she knows what’s about to come. Gevurah pulls an obsidian athame from a hidden pocket in her priestly robes. “Protect yourself,” she says to Quintessa without looking at her. She cuts into her heavily-scarred palm and adds 15 drops of blood into the cauldron as she prays in Ancient Drow to the God of Death. Light bleeds away from the cauldron, even as the fire stokes and the heat rises, its light dims unnaturally. After a minute her body begins to sway. The temperature continues to rise until it feels like she (and anyone alive in this room) has a fever. Sweat beads her white brow and dampens wispy tendrils along her hairline. After the second minute, a putrid gust blows out the candles and rattles the shelves. Suddenly the Razurath begins to moan and vomit as Gevurah calmly goes about lighting the candles with small fireballs generated in her uncut palm. She smiles as the Razurath begins to tremble and cough as its scales slough off like shale from a cliff. But that smile twists into a frown when the vampire begins to dessicate and the human’s flesh erupts in boils and the drow’s ebon skin blanches then bleeds from every pore. “Dammit…” Gevurah mutters as the four poor creatures’ bodies decompose into grisly sludge. Quintessa would also feel the curse’s effects, but hopefully have enough magical resistances to last long enough to suffer no permanent ill effects (perhaps an upset stomach and a little fever, nothing to cry about, Gevurah would hope). Regardless, as soon as Gevurah sees Quintessa take a turn for the worse, she deactivates the curse with a word before undo harm can come to Daath’s apprentice. The priestess throws up her hands in exasperation, billowy sleeves fluttering dramatically. “I’ve never had to work at not killing things,” she jokes dryly and fails to laugh. “Are any of your abilities good at targeting or focus?” she asks Quintessa without expecting much. Who knows. Maybe. She’ll try anything at this point.

Quintessa releases the razurath from her curse with a sudden snap when she is told to protect herself, and her aura instead turns inward, creating a barrier of misfortune around her. The hex blade stands quietly by, watching the Drow Matron work her curse while making a mental note about the process she used. Ritualistic curses could be quite powerful, much more powerful than the instant hexes Quintessa had been dabbling in, and she knew deep down that she could achieve greater things with the proper knowledge of these rituals. The changeling can feel the unhallowed energies eating away at her, but her bloodline was already corrupted by the same kind forces, so it doesn't immediately begin to affect her. Unfortunately for her, she was only half hag, and her human half wasn't resistant to the curse one bit. As soon as her aura is eaten away, Quintessa begins to bleed from the eyes, two long streaks of blood sliding down her face like crimson tears. It's painful, but she refuses to look weak now, not in the presence of somebody clearly more powerful than her. By now the other four are dead, but she still does not ask for a reprieve. Instead she endures until Gevurah is satisfied, taking deep breaths when the curse is lifted. "Yes," she says, nodding her head as she answers, "I'm good at seeing auras. Most things mesh with the weave of magic, you can see the outline if you know what to look for." She rubs the blood from her blue eye. "But the Razurath are different. They don't mesh with the weave. You can feel their absence... And that makes them easy to focus on." She clears her throat, still recovering from the prolonged assault of the death curse "For me, at least."

Gevurah pulls a black silk handkerchief from a small chest on the shelf that is used for storing such things. She hands it to Quintessa for her to clean her face. “I see…” She drums her black nails along the edge of the bronze cauldron. “Do you think you could redirect my curse towards that absence? Find some way to set that absence as the target?” An idea dawns on the priestess like an inspiration from Death Himself. Excited now, she speaks at length as she fetches a quartz prism from a basket full of gems. “Quartz are good for storing copies of spell signatures. They capture the nuance well that may be lost in other spell focuses. We can try an experiment.” Her free (still bloody) hand grabs an idol of Vakmatharas off a lectern and blesses it. She hands it to Quintessa to hold. “I’ll reactivate my curse, and you’ll try to manipulate it towards the absence of the weave in a Razurath.” How? Gevurah hopes the changeling would know. “We can try it a few times. I don’t expect you to succeed on the first try. But, once you think you have it, I’ll try to capture the mutation of my curse in this quartz, then pulverize it and mix it in the brew. If successful, we’ll need…” She stirs the brew with a giant bronze ladle to assess the volume. “We’ll need to repeat the process at least 7 more times, for a total of 8 prisms in the brew. That should do it. Hold onto Him” she means the idol, “He’ll help you resist my curse. Bring another Razurath.”

Quintessa's pale fingers pluck the silk handkerchief from the Drow Matron's grasp and immediately uses it to wipe the remaining blood from her eyes. "I can," she says, managing to smear blood all over her cheeks, "At least I think I can. I was imagining it while it was trying to kill me. Much like the death curse on that castle in Cenril, this curse embraces me first before it starts to erode me way to nothingness. I think I can use myself as a conduit for your dark power. I can think of no better use of my abilities in this situation." Her attention falls on the idol of Vakmatharas and she takes it gingerly, whispering a small prayer to her deity. "Yes, yes, Vakmatharas will help us!" Her grin widens to expose her pointed teeth. "We have plenty of testificates." Quintessa assures, "Even if it takes me ten tries I will get it right, but I think I know what to do. Yes, with our Dark Lord on our side we will surely create the perfect way to rid the world of these saurians." It would take a couple more Razurath slaves, but the hex blade would quickly learn how to curb Gev's curse to target specifically them and ignore other races though, admittedly it was a powerful curse, even close proximity to the razurath resulted in some backlash from the curse that Quintessa couldn't prevent no matter how hard she tried.

Gevurah grins darkly whenever Quintessa’s rejoices in Vakmatharas. The apprentice’s determination to get this witchy brew right earns her brownie points that Gevurah will share with her husband. Before they begin, the priestess leans out the door and shouts in drow down the hall. Turning back to Quintessa, she says in common, “Let’s begin.” Not long after Gevurah’s shout, a quartet of drow bards appear to provide a discordant, frenetic, head-banging jam to entertain the women as they work. They play from the hallway and Gevurah is careful to limit her spell’s area of effect to the brewery to spare the bards a speedy, sloppy death. Gevurah bangs her head to the familiar beat and, sometimes, when she thinks Quintessa isn’t paying attention, she sings the chorus under her breath (in the drow language) as she works. The drow and changeling enter a pattern. Activate curse, redirect curse to quartz, capture an imprint of the spell modification, pulverize the gem, mix it in the brew, test for efficacy, repeat until the spell is properly targeted. They stop often and as needed for Quintessa to recover. When the changeling pushes herself too far, Gevurah heals her and orders tea and food to restore her a little. At that point, the drow’s own stomach is rumbling and the women are forced to dine together, quickly, between batches. The process stretches deep into the night and all told it’s another 9 hours before they’re finished. When they are, when the spell affects only the Razurath and no other species, and the test subject bodies number in the dozens, Gevurah nods her approval at Quintessa. “Well done.”