Book of Bone and Ebony

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BATTLE SNAKES Toward the end of the First Age, a hunting party of Solar Exalted ventured into the far south to hunt down the behemoth Seshasa, the Primal Basilisc. In all, Seshasa was nearly two miles long, and her body was 20 to 30 feet in diameter along most of its length. The Solars, content with taking the Primal Basilisc’s head as a trophy, left the rest of the vast body to desiccate in the hot Southern winds. When the Deathlords were looking for more effective means of transporting their undead troops, it was the Malfeans who whispered Seshasa’s name into their ears. The mummified remains of the Primal Basilisc remained more or less intact. The thick, scaled hide protected the bones from eroding away in the hot sandstorms, and each immense rib arced up 20 to 30 feet to the Primal Basilisc’s spine. Several Deathlords took vast lengths of Seshasa’s remains for their own purposes, and they use them in the Age of Sorrows as a common form of troop transport in the Underworld. Each rib of a battle snake bears five soulsteel bands along its length. From each of these bands project three hooks to which a zombie or a nemissary’s war body is attached, folded into fetal position. Fully loaded, a single rib can hold as many as 15 of the walking dead. Thus, a full segment holds 30. A 50yard length of a battle snake comprises 50 segments and can hold 1,500 walking dead soldiers. Few battle snakes are made solely of Seshasa’s ribs any more. Some integrate ribs from cachalot, sea dragons or enormous land-bound behemoths or Wyld-spawned monsters. Ghosts or deathknights can use necrosurgery to combine segments from different creatures in a single battle snake, so there’s little limit on how long a battle snake can be. The movement used by battle snakes to cover ground, halfway between the gliding motion of a snake and the coordinated walking of a millipede, lets the war machine cover a wide range of ground, from the deserts of the South to the icy wastes of the North. DREAD BRACHIAL SAPPING ARRAY A complex and specialized siege engine, the dread brachial sapping array comprises between 50 and 100 arms, all joined at the shoulder. Using Bone Graft Technique (see Exalted: The Abyssals, p. 188), each finger is tipped with a sharp iron chisel. When set in place on the ground, the fingers and hands begin desperately clawing at the earth beneath them. The dread brachial sapping array is not especially fast, digging through only one yard of earth (or one foot of stone) in an hour, but given time, it can tunnel through anything but metal and the hardest basalt. Creating a dread brachial sapping array requires the use of Walking War Machine (see Exalted: The Abyssals, p. 226), requires the arms of 25 to 50 individuals and one success on the necrosurgery roll per five arms. The dread 107 CHAPTER FOUR • CREATIONS OF BONE brachial sapping array is not particularly effective in direct combat, but it could certainly rip apart an unarmored mortal without much difficulty. THE WEB IS THE SPIDER Aesthetics rarely play any part in the creation of undead war machines, but sometimes, the Deathlords meld beauty and lethality with the same finesse they exhibit when fusing soulsteel and flesh. The titanic war machine called the web is the spider looks like a vast spider web comprising yards of silvery sinew and thousands of foot-long sections of smooth soulsteel. It is animated by a thick, meaty tracery of undead flesh, limbs and muscles harvested from hundreds of bodies and carefully sutured together into one vast device. Thicker lengths of muscle and sinew connect the center, where the device bears the most strain, while fine filaments of gray sinew animate the cruelly sharp and delicate outer joints. Eight main spokes, each 60 feet long, radiate from the war machine’s central hub. When it walks, it arches its “back,” raising the hub high in the air, and uses its eight main spokes as legs. By extending or contracting its component rods, the web is the spider can double or halve its normal diameter of 120 feet. This war machine serves a myriad of purposes: It’s a portable bridge, a living net and a siege ladder for zombies. Most importantly, it’s an Essence source for ghosts operating in Creation. The device has a hollow soulsteel barb at every intersection for draining blood from the living. The bodies of the wounded and recently dead are hung on these barbs and exsanguinated. For every two health levels of blood the web is the spider consumes, it accumulates a point of Essence in one of the eight brilliant-green Essence batteries set into the disk at its hub. Each of these spheres holds 60 motes of Essence when full. Ghosts or Abyssal Exalted may drain off this Essence if the web is the spider permits them to do so, but it takes one turn for every 2 motes absorbed in this way. On those rare occasions when a Deathlord rides into Creation personally, the Essence accumulated in these storage devices is reserved solely for the Deathlord’s use, and anyone attempting to poach this proprietary Essence is severely punished or, more likely, destroyed and sent screaming to Oblivion. Labor-intensive and costly, creating the web is the spider is an enormous task requiring a huge amount of soulsteel as well as the muscle and sinew from no fewer than 60 corpses. It is easily the equivalent of most First Age engines of war. It is considered a size class 4 war machine and requires Resources for a soulsteel frame and a sufficient Artifact rating for the eight Essence-containing gems in its central disk. Assembling the web is the spider is unusually difficult, since it requires the necromancer to filet all the corpses used. It requires two successes per corpse used on an Intelligence + Craft (Necrosurgery) roll.
EXALTED • BOOK OF BONE AND EBONY WEAPON OF MEPHITIC DESOLATION The Malfeans, though dead, are not static creatures. When the Princess Magnificent with Lips of Coral and Robes of Black Feathers was routed by the gods of Great Forks, the dead Primordials realized that the gods, while in disarray, were still a force with which to be reckoned and that any significant penetration into Creation would need to take that into account. The weapon of mephitic desolation does that, while taking a terrible toll on the mortal population. Creating a weapon of mephitic desolation involves particularly difficult necromancy. Five healthy children no older than 10 must be ritually slain and their lungs taken out through the back of their rib cages and stitched together into a large bellows. Their throats must then be ritually desecrated and carefully tuned to the quavering disharmonies favored by the Malfeans, and on each of their small teeth must be etched one of the 97 glyphs of annihilation. The bodies are then stitched together in a circle facing out from the lung bellows and animated through the necromancy spell Walking War Machine (or better). Necromancy is required in this instance. Nemissaries will not do. The necromantically animated lung bellows pushes air through the dead throats, and five ghostly musicians possess bodies and take up soulsteel forks with which to torment the small bodies into singing threnodies for all Creation. On those cursed and trembling voices is carried the horror of disease. 108 The song of the weapon of mephitic desolation, in essence, exposes everyone in a half-mile radius to smallpox (see Exalted, p. 319). All who hear it, human or animal, must resist, survive or succumb to it. The effects of the plague song, obviously, depend on where the weapon is being played. The weapon has another, darker, purpose, however. The sound of the desecrated voices drowns out prayers, spoken and otherwise, increasing the difficulty of all prayers (including prayer strips) by three. The afflicted area is like a numb spot to gods with worshipers in the area. All living spirits in the afflicted area with Essence of 3 or more fall prey to a kind of lassitude (subtract five dice from their Perception dice pools). If the weapon of mephitic desolation is played within 10 miles of a Gateway to Yu-Shan, the Bureau of Humanity and the Division of Endings (within the Bureau of Destiny) will instantly go on high alert, and divine retribution of some sort is a foregone conclusion, though it remains to be seen if the Deathlords are aware of this consequence yet. Creating a weapon of mephitic desolation takes an extended Intelligence + Craft (Necrosurgery) roll to achieve 10 successes with one roll being made for every eight hours of solid work. Using Walking War Machine to animate a weapon of mephitic desolation requires [(8 – the necromancer’s Essence rating) x 10] motes of Essence in addition to the Essence required to invest it with power using Oblivion’s Avatar (see p. 102).
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AND A Compendium of Necromantic Lor
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