Void-Scoured Scholar

Void-Scoured Scholars are rarely rewarded in ways recognizable to ordinary society. Their pay, when formalized at all, depends on who dares to employ them. Academic institutions like the Lumenarch Collegium may covertly fund their research with stipends ranging from 40–80 Drakemetal Tokens (DT) per tenday, but only when the Scholar keeps their more unsettling theories out of public view. Wealthier patrons obsessed with the Dragonfall Crisis or azhra phenomena may pay handsomely—100–150 DT per tenday—for exclusive insights, cursed manuscripts, or personal rituals.

However, many Void-Scoured operate on the fringes, eking out a living by selling scraps of forbidden knowledge or relics salvaged from void-touched ruins. Others receive payment in access—sealed libraries, corrupted leylines, or ancient vaults few others dare to open. For some, compensation is beside the point. The pursuit of entropy’s truth, and the faint hope of reversing its mark, are their only real rewards.

Void-Scoured Scholars occupy a precarious and often misunderstood niche in Novendragos. Their primary role is to document, decode, and interpret the remnants of Void incursions—cataclysmic events where reality frays and hostile metaphysical phenomena intrude upon the known world. In societies that prefer to forget the horrors of the Azhra, these scholars serve as reluctant archivists of nightmares, ensuring such knowledge is neither lost nor repeated.

In Kendron, they are tolerated within the more esoteric wings of the Lumenarch Collegium, often granted isolated research chambers deep below sanctioned halls. In Nelamdra or the Drakarchate-claimed borderlands, they may be kept on retainer by risk-averse governors or shadowy guilds hoping to weaponize what the Scholars uncover. In the One City, they might be priest-librarians recording unthinkable truths for a populace already too familiar with cosmic wrongness.

Though rarely thanked, their work is vital. They are society’s immune response to contamination—studying the unnatural so others don’t have to.

The Void-Scoured Scholar is regarded with a blend of wary respect and quiet revulsion. To most, their presence is a reminder that the world is not safe—that breaches exist, that horrors seep through, and that someone must look into the abyss to keep the rest of Novendragos blind to it. While their intellect is undeniable and their knowledge invaluable during crises, they are not celebrated but rather endured.

Among the elite of Platinus or the structured meritocracies of Kendron, they are treated as necessary but unclean—permitted access to resources and research, but seldom granted positions of authority or trust. To common folk, they are whispered about as “marked by the Void,” and children are warned not to make eye contact with them.

Despite this, the position is not considered “low-caste.” It simply exists outside the familiar hierarchies—a liminal role both envied for its access to forbidden truths and pitied for the cost of knowing them.

A Void-Scoured Scholar’s toolkit is less a collection of academic supplies and more a personalized array of safeguards, instruments, and coping mechanisms tailored to their unique burden. Most carry a heavily annotated field journal bound in treated hide, resistant to the elements and warded against psychic intrusion—not through magic, but via intricate geometric scripting derived from studies of Void harmonics. This journal is their lifeline, containing both their observations and carefully encrypted theorems meant to isolate reality-warping anomalies.

They often wear reinforced scholar’s garb designed to withstand environments prone to planar instability—robes or coats lined with dense, null-reactive fabrics, paired with mirrored goggles that protect the eyes from distortive auras. Many equip a personal resonance analyzer, a small, handheld device tuned to track shifts in ambient frequency and signal the presence of extradimensional intrusion.

Less visible, but more telling, are the tools they keep hidden: pain inhibitors, sleep suppressants, or mnemonic anchors that keep their minds tethered when their memories or identities begin to erode under the pressure of what they’ve seen.

Absolutely—perhaps more than any other discipline, the work of a Void-Scoured Scholar is laced with profound, existential peril. Exposure to the Void, even indirectly, corrodes the boundaries of the mind and self. Scholars often experience memory loss, emotional numbness, or identity fragmentation as a result of long-term study or proximity to corrupted artifacts. Some develop dissociative episodes, where they briefly believe they are someone—or something—else entirely.

Physical dangers are no less severe. The Void is not a place but a condition of unbeing, and contact with it can unravel flesh or overwrite biology. Some scholars return from expeditions altered—eyes that don’t blink, voices that echo with unnatural harmonics, or skin that no longer registers sensation. Worse still, some carry parasitic ideas: fragments of thought-patterns or whispering compulsions that root themselves in the psyche and slowly spread, like a cognitive infection.

Most terrifying of all is the possibility of complete unraveling. There are documented cases of scholars vanishing mid-sentence or collapsing into tangled coils of impossible geometry. These aren’t exaggerations. They’re warnings.