Bladelings, Shadows of the Gray Whisper

The song begins. A choir of priestesses open their black mouths, exposing teeth like nails. Their voices fit together like a silver tapestry, holes in the harmony gashed into the piece with artful violence.

The high priestess Bloodsmoke smiles beatifically, black ichor dripping from the thorns of her face.

Personality: Bladelings are grim and seemingly humorless, somber and sad. To be a bladeling is constant agony; the spines that grow from their bones pierce their leathery, nearly metallic flesh, making wounds that never heal, constantly rubbing at raw nerves and oozing oily blood. They are determined to survive, fanatical in their faith in their secret gods. They are born hunters; their games are games of endurance. They bear no grudges; what wounds they have are open and still fresh. Their songs sound like the clashing of iron and the shriek of tortured metal. Their secret is this: they are not really a people. They are only shadows of the things that made them, and perhaps their love of life is perversely greater because of it.

Bladelings have formal courtship rites, although because of their physiology they are incapable of close embrace beyond the age of three years. Their tradition of consorts resembles that of the baatezu in this way, a purely cerebral way to cement alliances and provide checks and balance on power. Naturally, relationships are created and supervised by the priests and druids, the true leaders of the bladeling people.

Physical Description: When they're first born from the flesh of the Blood Forest, they're smooth and naked, covered in black oozing slime.

At first it seems as if stiff hairs grow from their bodies, flexible at first within the first year it is clear that the spines are more than mere hairs - they're as thick as fingers, made of steel and wood and dark weeping ice. The patterns of substance are the same as those in the forest's walls.

They grow tall and massive: over six feet in height, over three hundred pounds in weight. Yet they're surprisingly nimble, swift runners and quick on their feet. They're black as wraiths, with purplish eyes dark and shining as opals.

The spines protruding from the iron bones of a mature bladeling can grow over three feet in length, as thick as longswords; most are under a foot. Bladelings speak in low and gutteral voices, filled with resonant echoings

Bladelings have no natural limit to how long they may live. Immune to most hostile elements and diseases, many are centuries old. The hero Adamok Ebon lived for over a thousand years before leaving her home to explore the planes. It is only the custom of ritual sacrifice that has prevented overpopulation, despite the Blood Forest's slow but steady growth.

History: Once they were tieflings native to the Outlands, children of spinagons and hamatulas in the main, with humans enslaved to an empire ruled by Seven-Hills, the gate-town to Baator. It had existed since the founding of the desperate pact the gods of the Celts made with Lord Dispater. When a loophole was finally found and the gate-town banished to Dis, the Land was left with a large number of planetouched, hated by the Celts and the baatezu alike. With no home, they wandered the wild woods of the plane, eventually discovering a bloody grove that would accept their sacrifices, and give them a daughter in return. The slow symbiosis between the tieflings and the Gray Whisper they carried with them in an ark prevented them from becoming absorbed into other planar populations, and so they wandered the planes, rejected by all they met.

Eventually a prophet rose among them. Using the name Iron Feather he spoke of a vision of a blade-covered woman with the strength to protect them and give them a home. Traveling first to Sigil, they were met with derision and nearly Mazed before the prophet told them that the home they sought was among the blades of Acheron. Planting their ark in the darkness of the fourth plane, a forest bloomed.

Relations: Bladelings believe that keeping their existence secret to the multiverse at large is vital for their survival. Trespassers to their city of Zoronor are killed, crucified on the thorns as a tribute to the goddess of the wood. In rare cases, however, visitors have been permitted to leave in exchange for vital services and a geas preventing them from speaking of where they've been. They are bitter for the sometimes violent rejection by the peoples they met in their time of wandering, but their bitterness has led only to fanatic caution, not to thoughts of vengence. How can you take vengence against the entire multiverse? Better to create your own universe within.

Alignment: Bladelings are orderly and quiet, generally deferrential to authority figures. However, they lack compassion for outsiders or their own kin, seeing death as a logical solution to most disturbances of the peace. Law runs strong in their veins, as does a fair amount of evil and nothing of good. What can a bladeling, without kin, born from wood and ice and steel, ever know of caring or kindness? It would perhaps require a new physiology. The bladeling would have to be remade.

Bladeling Lands: Zoronor is known as the City of Shadows. Perhaps it's only a shadow of Baator, and the bladelings lost shadows of the baatezu. Perhaps it is a shadow of the Forest, as the bladeling druids believe. The bloody grove in the Outlands whose shadow the Forest is is lost to history.

The Blood Forest, home and goddess both to the bladeling folk, is one massive plant, a gray, fleshy, leafless tree covered with thorns, winding around itself tightly to protect its children from the icy bladestorms of Ocanthus. It rests imbedded in a large sheet of wicked-sharp ice on that fourth layer of the battle-plane of Acheron, its dark gray invisible in the lightless airy void. Incorporated within it, they say, are the still-living bones and organs of its victims.

Among the banes and torments of Zoronor are tall spine-covered buildings within the blood-washed mother wood. The forest-goddess is named Hriste, the Gray Whisper: "Her sap is our blood, her wood is our flesh." Bladelings are born from the thorns and the ice shards that pierce its substance. The druids take the young blade creatures in to the city nursuries, perhaps to find their Names.

The Vault of Voices is a great iron vestibule in the center of town, palatial in appearance. In Zorontor there is a ring of eight statues of fallen bladeling heroes. In reality, these are sleeping amnizu sent by Prince Levistus; they will awaken when the bladelings are firmly behind the baatezu cause.

The Blood Forest grows slowly over the centuries. Once it had a single hollow center; now there are five different cavern-groves, seperating the expanded city into different levels. The Market Quarter branches in one corner, filled with stalls that sell food sold by the city's hunters (often rust dragon and crow), stygian water purified to drinkability, and slices of bitter meat cut by druids from Hriste herself. Rare and expensive is the flesh of sentient outsiders or goods brought by the few outsiders allowed to enter the city and live. Money is given to each citizen by the city government, according to how well each performs her tasks. Their coins are made of iron, inscribed with sacred runes. In any case, opiates are a product that might sell very well in Zoronor if a canny merchant could find a way to deliver it. Bladelings in Sigil might all be junkies.

The Divine Quarter is the location of the College of Sorcery, the Mauseleum of Rust, the Pool of Remembrance, and the statues of fallen heroes. Because of the nature of Acheron, Zoronor is controlled by feuding houses: house Ebon, house Thorn, house Ferric, house Sanguine, house Eldritch, house Martial, house Stoic, house Silverpoint, house Swift Claw, house Deep Razor, house Stigmata. The houses, located in the High Old Quarter, are ruled by a motley collection of self-proclaimed princes, queens, dukes, and so forth, but the true power in the city rests firmly in the hands of the theocracy. Because of the nature of bladelings, they are united behind their priest-king.

Iron Feather is the original prophet-king that led the bladeling people to Acheron, fleeing the wrath of both the baatezu on one side and the Celts on the other.

House Red Dirk was sent away by the druid priestess Bloodsmoke, who wishes to establish a new tree far from the Prophet's eyes. They have yet to return.

Status is determined by duty and obedience, though pride is taken in larger spines and great endurance.

Religion: Male priests, led by the great Prophet-King, worship a secret goddess called the Unifier. The Unifier is the legendary being who united the warring factions of Baator, causing it to separate from Acheron before the modern planar structure. She is pictured as a woman surrounded with blades. The bladelings believe she went on to create the rest of the planes in their turn, each forming where she blocked the light of creation. Worship of the Unifier is forbidden in Baator; long ago a powerful noble and many devoted followers were exiled in punishment for refusing to reliquish their faith. Curiously, they were not destroyed.

They found a race of druidic tieflings in the Outlands. Introducing the Rite of Soul Piercing, they entered the race, and led them to Acheron to continue the worship; the tieflings' druidic magic enabled them to survive there, while the power of the baatezu enabled them to thrive. The constant experiments and the fierce, deep power of Ocanthus caused them to evolve into the alien creatures they are today.

To honor the Blood Forest which is their mother and protector. Druid priestesses sacrifice outsiders captured during semiregular hunts; they are crucified on the great thorns that emerge from the walls of their goddess.

The souls of their dead are insubstantial shades, dwelling in a grim half-world that is Zoronor and yet lies apart. Bladeling petitioners have two paths: they may rejoin the Mother Tree and be ultimately reborn, or they may go to dwell in the Vault of Voices, singing softly for all time.

Amatsu-Mikaboshi is a god of utter evil. He manifests as a humanoid shadow, as an old man with a hooked nose, or as a beautiful woman. Some say he is the secret patron of the bladelings; others say he's their secret tormenter. Perhaps there's no difference. There are no temples to Amatsu-Mikaboshi in Zoronor, but the god has used bladeling-like messengers to communicate with those mortals who recognize him. Supposedly, these are the true bladelings, and the citizens of Zoronor are but reflections.

Names: Bladeling names are descriptive and poetic, but they also have a secret soul-name which represents their previous incarnation: this is known only after puberty. A member of the Blackwater Guards, a hunter named Wanderblade Ebon, revealed her secret name (Adamok) proudly when she left for the City of Doors.

Common Names: Amber Echo, Grim Remembrance, Barnacles of Darkness, Serpentine Knife, Quickedge, Harshquill, Slipshadow, Poisonpoint.

True names: Adamok, Ruthic, Simtogin, Gisomon, Tobikaine, Saulit, Evakron, Sethikrit. Bladelings adopt the truenames of heroes who have died in the service of the Wood Mother. They believe in reincarnation; Adamok Ebon was a girl who during the Piercing of Past Knowledge at the Pool of Remembrance remembered her days as a hunter and was seized with uncontrollable wanderlust. Access to the Pool is strictly controlled: those bladelings who have tasted it more than once have been known to become addicted to its waters. A few even discovered the Society of Sensation, and forsook their people for access to the sensorium stones.