Strange and Bizarre Tales of Creation

[Jen]

It’s the season of horror and I so so want some scary tales around Creation! Village with a hidden secret, death curse that plague a family, haunting of a murdered ghost, everything that would make your characters goes “That’s super creepy, let go investigate it!”.

[Jen]

After scaring myself after watching horror movies for inspiration I got some:

1. Mothers in the Southeast usually told their children not to play hide-and-seek at night and not to respond when someone calling to you from the dark, it’s believe that evil spirits will take your souls if you do.

2. Turning an incense stick upside down is said to bring bad luck and disaster, especially if it’s in 3.

3. People sometimes goes missing around the forested area in the eastern part of the Scavenger Land, the relative of the deceased will put up talisman around the house. It said that the thing that has killed the victim will call out to their relative using their voice to lure them to the forest.

Though I wonder if normal talisman would work or do you actually need an essence user for it.

[webkilla]

It is well known that in the far east the elemental pole of wood is supreme, and the very air is thick with both life and death in the form of wood essence.

There people are very cautious with everything they do, for even the smallest scratch can fester in seconds as everything grows very fast: Diseases, infections, mold - in the few shadowlands around those parts even the dead somehow remain 'alive', and are able to reproduce... though witnessing a birth from such a creature is a sight that will haunt any mortal soul for the rest of their lives.

Worse yet are serious injuries. Broken limbs will heal in minutes... even if the bones aren't set. The stiff-limbed hoblers of the east are usually shunned and exiled, for their deformity is difficult to cure: limbs would have to be re-broken, often over and over, so that they can be set properly... but you have to fast, or they'll just heal wrong again.

A dreaded word of curse in those areas goes "May your bones require daily breaking"

[Erinys]

Everyone knows that babies born on Calibration are unlucky. They have no destiny under the stars, so no Dragon or god can/will protect them from evil. These babies are doomed to grow up into heretics, evil criminals, deranged cannibals, Wyld mutants, bad luck magnets, Fae magnets, or worse. If anyone in your village will be possessed by a demon or get Wyld mutated or go criminally insane, it's the person born on Calibration. They can doom their whole village to famine, plague, slaver raids, cannibal attacks, Realm invasion, Wyld storms, landslides, hurricanes, or other disasters. If you're Immaculate, they cause bad karma or are caused by bad karma and incriminate your entire village!

There are only a few ways to stop it:
1. Make the mother drink so much maiden tea or abortifacient herbal medicine that she miscarries before Calibration begins.
2. Make the mother eat/drink medicine that makes her give birth prematurely, before Calibration begins, so the baby gets a clean soul and a normal safe destiny.
3. If labor starts on Calibration, kill the mother before the baby takes its first breath. Drowning in saltwater is always the best way.
4. Kill the baby on the same night it is born.

But people born on Calibration always become evil soul-eating ghosts! Even though they're only babies, they become bloated faceless colorless horrors that can open their mouths wider than their bodies and swallow people whole. Worse, they curse the village to cause more women to give birth on Calibration! The cursed baby must be drowned in saltwater, or buried at a crossroads under a talisman and a big rock and surrounded by seed corn, or buried outside the village/city/nation territory so it's somebody else's problem, or burned at a crossroads at least 5 miles from the village so the ghost is confused and can't find its way back to the village, or sacrificed to your most powerful god.

Then you have to pray to all the gods and Dragons to protect you from the evil baby ghost, just in case. Or get a blessing from the nearest Immaculate monk and then the whole village has to do penance to make up for the bad karma that caused/was caused by the Calibration birth.

Edit:
A woman who gave birth on Calibration is bad luck too. It's a good idea to divorce her and for others to refuse to remarry her, or to exile her from the village so she doesn't bring more bad luck, or even to sacrifice her to the Dragons or gods if you can get away with that. If you're Immaculates, you know the Dragons made her give birth on Calibration to show everyone that she's evil and has bad karma, but the monks frown on human sacrifice so you should just execute her for religious reasons (which is totally different from human sacrifice, honest!*) Or exile her.

(The above is 100% not true, Sidereals in the First Age actually proved it.)

*Yes of course that's still human sacrifice, duh. Even if no particular spirit benefits.

If your baby grows the top teeth before the bottom teeth, or skips over speaking individual words and goes straight to complete sentences, or grows a cowlick of hair that sticks up or is a different color, or grows a 'birthmark' that wasn't there at birth, they are a faerie changeling! They are a baby raksha, a raksha shapeshifted into a baby, or a fae-blooded monster who will grow up into a psycho soul-drinker. They'll lure people of the village, one by one, out into the woods/desert/snow/wilderness, suck out their souls, and then cause them to get in an "accident" that kills them.

There are only a few ways to get rid of a changeling:
1. Kill it with iron.
2. There are various ways of causing the changeling such pain that it runs away, and that forces the raksha to give back the real human baby they stole.
3. Use the changeling as an arcane link to thaumaturgically curse and hurt the raksha who did it, until they take away the changeling and give back the human baby.

Getting your real human baby back from the raksha is a risk, though. They might have a Wyld mutation you can't see that will drive them criminally insane later in life. Or they were already soul-eaten.



If you live near a shadowland and your baby is sickly and smaller than other babies, that means that ghosts stole your baby in the night, and swapped it with a ghost-blooded baby of their own. This is even worse than a faerie changeling. Your real baby has been eaten and its blood drunk by the evil ghosts. Its soul has already been eaten or joined the evil ghosts in the shadowland. The grave-changeling will grow up to be an evil ghost-blooded who will spy on your village. Then one night, maybe on the new moon or Calibration, they'll help evil ghosts infiltrate your village and conquer it to add it to the shadowland! Or it will help evil ghosts to curse your crops and people with barrenness and sickness.

[Erinys]

The Succubus on the Road
Sometimes, they appear as a man, sometimes as a woman. They may come to town as a trader, a peddler, a beggar, a refugee, a travelling thaumaturge, even a travelling monk. They're always charming, beautiful, friendly, humble. They always brings something the town or village has need of - the seed corn or trade goods most lacking, the expertise or medicine most needed - as though they had read the locals' minds. It seems almost impossible to find any excuse to refuse them a place in town.

For a while, nothing seems wrong. Then, one by one, people begin to change. At first just a few odd personality quirks, or a twitch of the face when nobody seems to be looking. More and more people in town become just slightly odd. A lock of grey hair in an odd place. A child who becomes just the least bit creepy in some unnameable way. If you ask, they will insist nothing is wrong. Truly, there is never anything you can put your finger on, anything you can definitely point to as unnatural or strange. You only feel it in your gut. And people who complain the loudest soon stop complaining at all.

But something is wrong. An evening will come when the few who haven't changed will find themselves stopped at every corner by one of those who have changed. Slowly, those who have not changed will be surrounded, herded into a barn or the central square.

Then, those townsfolk who have changed, ever so slightly outwardly, reveal the truth. Their skins bulge, blister, and peel off in strips, revealing the horror beneath. Each and every one has become a hideous, twisted mutant, their bodies warped but their faces still just recognizable enough. Bones crack and rearrange into a broken mockery of the human form.

Finally the outsider emerges from the hideous crowd, face and skin peeling away to reveal the monster underneath. And the feast begins.


Some say the Succubus of the Road is an Anathema. Some say it's a raksha, or a Wyld mutant able to shapeshift into a normal human form. They say it takes the townsfolk aside one by one and changes them. Or brings demons or raksha to possess them. Or replaces them with imposters. By the time people begin to change, it's already too late.

Some say every victim becomes a new Succubus.



More Calibration Woes
Children die all the time. It's a fact of life, the lot of humanity.
But when they die on Calibration, it's a bigger problem. They become ghosts who haunt lonely roads and bush at night.

Do not travel at night, especially on Calibration. If you must walk the roads and wilderness after sunset, if need forces you, be wary. Do not let yourself be swayed by a lost child crying by the side of the road or wandering the bush, begging you to take it in, begging for food or milk or help finding its parents. Harden your heart and hurry away without looking at it.

Sometimes, the child-ghosts only terrify those who try to help them. They follow them home, crying more and more, eating up the traveller's supplies, inconsolable, until they vanish at sunrise. Sometimes, they turn to their would-be savior with an empty face, smooth and featureless as an eggshell, with a piercing scream that shivers the spine and rattles the teeth.

Sometimes they do worse. Those who pick up the child, even a mere infant, find the child grows heavier with each step they take. They find they cannot let the baby down, or it clings to them with fingers twisted into sickle-claws. It grows in size and weight until it crushes the poor traveler beneath. Sometimes their bones are found in the morning, or many days later, shattered and picked clean. A woman who dares to put a night-foundling to her breast may find fangs sinking into her flesh, sucking out blood instead of milk, sucking out her substance until her empty skin collapses to the ground.