Sisterhood of the Crystal Cave
“Oh, I’ve tried to tempt them—believe me. Nothing works. You could lay a dragon’s hoard at their feet and they’d sniff that it wasn’t good enough. Vanity that deep doesn’t bend—it consumes.”
Origins in a Skull of Secrets
The Sisterhood began with three archaeology interns from the University of Titania—bright, ambitious, and convinced they were on the verge of greatness. On Umbriel, a scant few meters outside the formal perimeter of their sanctioned dig, they unearthed a crystal skull unlike anything they had ever seen. It was clearly old, impossibly smooth, and marked at the base with a strange prismatic lens.
Under lamplight, that lens bloomed with holographic geometry, projecting first a map of Ariel as it was before Terraforming, and then—when angled precisely into the pineal region of the skull—a coded sequence of musical tones. Rather than turning the find over to their professor, the interns convinced themselves that this was destiny, a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity they deserved to claim for themselves. The skull would become their step stool into academic immortality.
They were wrong.
But pride never admits that.
The Cavern of Narcissus
The map led them to Ariel’s psionic caverns, famed across the outer system for their gentle ambient resonances. But deeper caves were closed to tourists for a reason: the crystal formations there vibrated with pain, sorrow, terror, and in one infamous chamber—Vanity.
The Cave of Narcissus was once the hidden laboratory of the Kthoniker Sephiran Dubhan, who either shaped or merely exploited its vice-resonance. When the interns arrived, they thought themselves clever decoding the skull’s tone sequence to unlock the hidden door. What they did not realize was that they had no idea how to open it again.
For days, trapped in the echoing darkness, illuminated only by their flickering lamps and the shimmering geometries of Dubhan's notes, they rummaged through half-translated grimoires. They survived on quartz-filtered trickles of water and the occasional subterranean shrimp that wandered too close. All the while they were being slowly drenched in the ambient Vice of the cavern.
It worked its way into them.
Vanity always does.
Mother Carmun and the Birth of the Sisterhood
When their food and sanity were nearly gone, something answered.
A Preenwight, calling herself Mother Carmun, extended them a way out—a way literally and metaphorically. She opened the path back to the surface, but only after pouring into their minds a curated mix of flattery, ritual, and resonant suggestion. To Carmun, they were ripe soil. To the interns, she was salvation.
When they emerged, they were changed.
The trio left academia entirely and returned to Ariel with supplies, privacy, and a new mission. They converted the Cavern of Narcissus into their permanent home, decoding Dubhan’s cyphers by the skull’s glow, bargaining with Mother Carmun for knowledge, and performing rituals that fused their wills into a single three-part gestalt.
Thus the Sisterhood of the Crystal Cave was born—three women whose identities eroded into one collective personality: hungry, brilliant, and cosmically assured of their own importance.
Triune Will and Unified Dominion
Unlike most cults or covens, the Sisters do not maintain individual familiars or RAIs. Their will is joined so tightly—through ritual immersion, psychic resonance, and the Cave’s ambient Vanity—that any subordinate bound to one is bound to all. This results in familiars of unusual loyalty, recognizing the triad as a single entity with three voices.
In their early years, they imagined themselves alchemists of enlightenment, wielding pre-terraformed secrets to uplift humanity. But bathing endlessly in the Cave of Narcissus dissolved such altruism. All that remains now is ambition, entitlement, and a hunger for power that grows by the year.
They are meticulous, territorial, and catastrophically vain. To them, every other practitioner—no matter how talented—is an upstart, an amateur, a stumbling child playing with matches.
And yet, they are dangerous enough that those they offend rarely dare to say so aloud.
The Sisterhood’s Reputation
In certain occult corners of the Solarnet, the Sisters are whispered about with a mix of awe and revulsion. Their reputation includes:
• Unmatched Arcane Decipherers
They break cyphers that have baffled others for generations, thanks to the skull, the Cave, and their three-fold intellect.
• Manipulative Power Brokers
Their pacts are exquisitely worded traps. They give power, but never without extracting dominance.
• Brutal Competitors
They pursue esoteric artifacts with single-minded entitlement. If you find the same treasure they want, they'll simply assume it was meant for them—and behave accordingly.
• A One-Way Loyalty
They expect respect, devotion, and submission. They give none of it in return—not even to each other anymore. Only the collective matters.
They are not numerous. They do not need to be.
Their will, together, is a vector.
Mother Carmun — The Hidden Fourth Sister
Though never physically present outside subspace, Mother Carmun is the Sisterhood’s dark patron. Her goals are obscure—Preenwights rarely operate on comprehensible logic—but the triad’s Vanity feeds her resonance, and their search for power expands her influence.
The relationship is one of mutual exploitation, but the Sisters refuse to admit they serve anyone.
Vanity does not kneel.
Even when it should.
Motives and Current Ambitions
When word reaches the occult underground that House Volkert has acquired Sephiran Dubhan’s Rat-Thing, the Sisterhood becomes instantly ravenous. To them, Dubhan’s notes in the Cavern were only the first dish of a banquet—and the Rat-Thing is the main course.
They want it because:
It completes the legacy they believe they inherited.
Its knowledge is invaluable.
Someone else owning it is intolerable.
The Sisters do not believe they deserve the Rat-Thing.
They believe it already belongs to them.
Everything else is theft—and they mean to correct that.
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