Mystara: The Black Vessel by Morris Simon

Author:Morris Simon [Simon, Morris]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-7869-0507-2
Publisher: Fanversion Publishing
Published: 2018-12-31T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 14

Mazrooth al Yedom had already forgotten Miguel Prado’s confession of racial hatred by the time he rejoined the two Yazi and Hernán Costa in his study. The wizard seldom concerned himself with human frailties. He regarded all obsessive thoughts, including his own, as illnesses to be treated or milked for the mental energy they contained. Mazrooth freely admitted to his own prepossession with Curse lore and magical objects that might add to his growing understanding of the mysterious malady that plagued most of the Savage Coast. The quest for more knowledge about the Curse, particularly its effects and its origins, had been a driving force for most of his life.

The wizard was convinced the origins of the Red Curse couldn’t be dismissed as easily as some scholars had, calling the pervasive vermeil in affected regions “dragon blood” and the rare cinnabryl “dragon bone.” According to the most popular legends, the powerful dragon Immortal known to many races as the “Great One” had rained his own blood and bone upon evil spider beings called araneans to chastise them for their cruel treatment of his descendants, the Wallara “chameleon men.” The Great One’s rage was so terrible that it destroyed almost all life in what is now the Savage Coast and remains to haunt all who come to the region as the Red Curse.

In his many years studying Curse lore, Mazrooth perfected numerous alchemical procedures to analyze the age and composition of both vermeil and cinnabryl. At first his research seemed to support the “Dragonfall” theory, indicating that both substances appeared in the region at approximately the same time, around fifteen hundred years before the present. But when Mazrooth turned his attention to the alchemistry of vermeil and cinnabryl, he learned that the two materials were completely unrelated physically. The faintly glowing red dust called vermeil seemed to be a magical organic substance, with many unusual cell components. Cinnabryl, however, was a rare metal that had no organic cell structures at all. The Dragonfall theory might account for vermeil, but not for cinnabryl, though both substances had magical properties and both had materialized at the same approximate time.

That rough date also corresponded nicely with the destruction of several major centers of civilization scattered throughout the Savage Coast. As a young wizard sent by the Herathian magiocracy to investigate the effects of the Red Curse in the eastern baronies, Mazrooth had explored numerous ruins of the ancient culture that seemed to have disintegrated at the time vermeil and cinnabryl first appeared. While most antiquarian sages referred to the ruins as “Late Oltec,” to distinguish them from “Classical Oltec,” Mazrooth believed the latter civilizations bore little or no resemblance to the original Oltec culture brought by the region’s first human settlers. The most obvious difference between the two was in the Late Oltec preference for tools made of black volcanic glass. Obsidian spearheads, knives, and tiny darts or arrowheads were almost always found in conjunction with cinnabryl deposits and virgin accumulations of vermeil.

Classical

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