Black Stone Heart
Izorpo strode up into the rocky prominence. Her black dress and cowl billowed in the wind like an ethereal aura, and she surveyed the battleground. It was a morass of humans, elves, demons and other creatures strewn about in various states of death and dying. Everywhere she gazed, it was a large seething and roiling mass looking like the muscled skin of some serpentine beast.
Izorpo grinned, her pale skin and beautifully chiseled features appearing skeletal in that moment. She had time to prepare her ritual; she hated to be hurried in these things. As she laid out her implements, she thought back to the beginning of it all…
Good failed her when the Duke’s soldiers stood by and watched as raiders had burned her hamlet and killed her mother and father as they attempted to defend their daughters.
Good failed her again. When the soldiers finally attacked the raiders, their intent was to take the spoils. She and her younger sister. Her sister died at the soldiers’ hands as they raped them both.
Good failed her the last time. When abandoned by the soldiers, she wandered to a convent, only to be refused entry. “She must be evil. Look what had befallen her.”
The witches that finally rescued her, taught her ‘good’ was an illusion. They also taught her that only another type of evil could defeat evil.
Izorpo studied hard and excelled at learning. She looked down at her makeshift altar. In the middle was her black-stone-heart, the necromantic relic which served as the focus and reservoir for life energy. Many novitiates never completed training and fewer still completed the creation of the relic.
Izorpo completed training faster than anyone in the coven’s history and set out to hunt and bind the soldier who had raped and killed her sister. We ritually create a black-stone-heart when life, death, memory, and will of the caster unite with the blood and life force of the first kill.
Izorpo savored the memory. Your first was always the best.
