The Sword of Rapes

The weapon is infused with resonant, soul-bound magicks. With each cut, it transfers into its victim the full sensory experience of every atrocity committed with it, as if every single violation is happening to them at once. It has no need for sharpness though it is quite so; the horror it unleashes is its truest edge. Protective enchantments are required to hold it. Without them, even the wielder collapses into despair and self-destruction within minutes.

The process, though loosely understood tidbits pieced together from fragments of confiscated cultist journals, was as follows:

• Forge the steel with blood of a hundred children (many born to the cult), quenching the heated blade with it instead of oil, binding the screams of their suffering into its fibers to give it a hunger for more.

• Mark the blade with runes carved not with chisels but with cursed human teeth, each rune representing an act of suffering and laborious effort marking the blade with purpose and intent.

• Consecrate the weapon through ritual killings, maiming, and raping, its edge never seeing a sheath, always drinking fresh agony to strengthen its effects.

• Then finally seal the blade with its creator’s own hands, sacrificed willingly to permanently bind the cult’s accumulated torment into the weapon forever, with plenty of room to grow, as far as anyone knows this effect could build indefinitely; Increasing in potency and peril with every obscenity.

The origins of the blade are traced back to year 84 of The Civil Age. It was born in blood under the hand of an unnamed mage-smith, the founder of a cult called Pain’s Promise. This sect, at the time in a world rife with anguish, believed suffering was the only true constant of existence, and that only by embracing and mastering agony could they free themselves of fear; Liberating themselves from life's turmoil by bathing in every torment they could conceive among themselves and others. Their tenets demanded that they would cut or burn themselves, scourge, assault, maim themselves, commit the same against the world, not as indulgence, but as devotion. The leader, seeking to carve his ideology into the flesh of Gaiatia, forged a blade from an alchemically-treated black steel, then bound it in magickal rites that fed upon atrocity. With every murder, violation, and torture committed using the blade, the weapon became a vessel, drawing the horrors of its victims into itself. The cult carried out these unspeakable acts for years across the southern regions of Everwealth, and for a time, the land itself seemed to sicken around them. When finally vengeful soldiers of The Monarchy would hunt them to extincion for these heinous acts, they found the cult’s leader, blade in hand, his arms little more than mummified blackened claws fused to the hilt. His eyes, they say, were gone. But he smiled. The cult was purged, its name and especially the name of the sword's creator erased from history, in an act of retribution for for the wicked they had done, to erase it, give it not meaning or credence to inspire others to do the same. The weapon itself changed protective custodies until The Arcane Coalition was founded; Where then the monstrous blade was entombed below their prison-island Fort Sunless. some time after, where it has sat the last two centuries. But some whisper that the sword has not stopped feeding, that the torment of every poor soul dragged to that prison only strengthens the thing sleeping in its depths.

The sword’s existence was among the cornerstone arguments used to form the Arcane Coalition. It is proof of the danger of unrestricted magick. Even now, the Coalition keeps it as a trophy and a warning, an object that justifies their strict control of Spellcraft, for without their order, there would be more like it. In Everwealthy folklore, it is the blade that "eats pain and spits it back tenfold."