Incunabuli

"Jorge."

Jorge shifted in his hammock, exhaled fitfully. He wrapped a hand round his sleeping head, hunched his shoulders, dozed on. Beside, the speaker, a short sailor in cornrows, moaned. "Jorge, get up. There's something wrong." She seized the hand, yanked on it. Jorge sputtered awake.

He blinked torpidly, sniffed. "Margot," he mumbled, sniffed again. He shuddered, frowned. "I was having the most awful dream."

"Just get up. Something's wrong."

"Aren't you on watch shift?"

"Come one. Everyone's on deck."

"What?" Jorge rolled out of his sling, stood barefoot on the planking. He shivered, pricked by goosebumps. About him, rope hammocks hung between stout hold beams, swinging gently. All were empty.

"What's going on?"

"I don't know, just please come with me. I can't go alone," said Margot, dragging him to the hatch ladder.

"This isn't like you," Jorge stuttered, rubbing his arms.

They clambered into a night awash with mist. Chill rivulets clung from the decking to Jorge's feet, ran from the masts, yardarms, and railings. Ragged lines of cloud hung white under the swollen moon, trailed like slow ribbons from the veiled peaks of mountain islands shrouded in the distance.

"Cold," said Jorge, shaking his feet.

"There they are," said Margot.

She headed to the starboard gunwale, where two dozen or so sailors stood fast, silent, shivering, at the rail. They stared down and out at the distance, rapt. Some chattered, cold, even sobbed, but none spoke. Jorge and Margot wandered over. "Oh…"

Out on the water, some hundred meters out, stood wide outcroppings of dark, flat-topped basalt. Geometric collections of pillars, only feet above the water, clothed in curling vapor and dark weeds swaying in the mist. Atop them lounged beautiful, pale creatures.

Lithe, bare forms. Long and athletic, rested with heads cushioned by folded arms or affectionately on neighboring chests and laps. Seaspray glistened on their grey-alabaster flesh and voluminous lengths of black tresses. Some dozen creatures, in total, peacefully asleep amidst the rocks and weeds.

"Blimey," whispered Jorge. A half-hearted smile of relief passed over his features.

Margot looked sick, nodded. "Just like the stories."

"Story's don't say anything about feeling like doom's hanging over your head, though."

"How can something so beautiful be so dreadful?"

Someone nudged Jorge, pushed him a spyglass. "Take a closer look, you two," they whispered, voice cold. "And maybe you'll understand."

Jorge squinted through the lens, directed it to the creatures. He turned the focus, teeth chattering.

"My…" He scrunched his nose, exclaimed softly at inhuman details couched in beauty. Lovely faces, set with eyes so black and so large as to show bulbous through translucent lids. Shapely legs, strong, half again longer than a human's, and ended by oarlike flukes. Sculpted lips, parted in sleep to show needlish carnivore's-teeth.

Jorge pulled the glass from his eye, shoved it to Margot. She looked, squinted, blanched, handed it away fast. "Be glad to get past them."

"Too bad, then," whispered a bald sailor from along the rail. He took his glass back, pointing ahead of the prow. Jorge leaned to see. Amidst the looming islands, countless more basalt stands stood from the sea. Indistinct, swathed in fog and weeds. All littered with lovely, predatory forms.

"They overwinter, here," said the bald man, grimly. "We'll be lucky to get past the lot, by morn. Slow going, for the rocks."

Jorge shivered. "Think I'll head back to my sack, then." He turned, nodded to Margot, who quivered. "Don't envy your watch."

"Wait." The bald man hissed, caught his arm.

"What?"

"You ever encounter them before?"

"No," said Jorge.

"Then take these." He handed him two globs of beeswax.

"Oh." He went pale.

"Lest they start to sing."

"The lobby is practically a brawl," said a silver mask, plopping into velvet upholstery. Silk-gloved fingertips pinched at the nose bridge, pulled the visage away. Tired eyes and a pointed nose showed, beneath. "People are throwing things. And there's no more wine. I asked," said Clove, rubbing her temples.

"Shame," said her companion, a dark woman with cropped hair. She, too, had an aristocrat's mask on thin cord about her collared neck.

The two looked out from a high box, stage left, on an sumptuous auditorium half-filled with folk in evening wear. Some, seated and quiet with concerned thought. Most, up and outraged. Aisles thronged with pushy clammorers in dark suits, dress coats, and feathered hair embellishments. Ringed hands and wine glasses raised in gestural pique. The mezzanines' rails overflowed with indignant gentlefolk and balancing noblemice, who all alike frowned and pointed to the shut curtains hind the stage's gold and marble proscenium arch. Below, nervous eyes and brass instruments flashed in the half-hidden orchestra pit. Across, fellow masked box-goers leaned to mutter and conspire dourly.

"Suppose that's why the interval has dragged on, so."

"It's terrible," said Clove. She adjusted her tulle cravat. "The composer, that fellow from Adaleutia, has disappeared. Someone's threatened to duel the producer," she rolled her eyes. "And that assinine princeling from Lisa is demanding everyone in the stalls be escorted out."

"They were applauding rather inappropriately."

"They were applauding at novelty, Karene."

"'Novelty,'" mocked Karene. "That soloist was essentially nude." *

"Poor thing," said Clove. "I'll not envy the attention she draws, after this."

"Who was she, anyway?" said Karene, lip wrinkling. "Some underfed waif? It's a shame what the Company has stooped to."

"Haven't you heard?" Clove raised her eyebrows. "The cast is supplemented by a troupe from Adaleutia. Brought on specially by the composer's request. Evidently, he's very proud of his heritage."

Karene toyed with a gold cufflink. "Was that the other language in the sailor's duet? The one from off stage. Adaleutian?"

"No. Come to think, I've never heard it before."

"Very inappropriate, then, introducing nonsense tongues," sneered Karene. "A blatant break from civility."

"It gave me chills, really," said Clove. She picked up a pair of opera glasses, polished the lenses with her silk fingertips. "And not nice ones."

About the auditorium, most folk had resumed their seats, fewer and more sedate than before. A nervous, muttering energy followed them; muted, but yet undiminished. Up and behind the mezzanines, a heavy chime rang twice.

"Nearly time," said Clove.

"At last. Last bell was ten minutes ago." Karene frowned, watched tailcoated ushers attempt to quiet the house.

"Look how few remain," Clove mused.

"Can't blame them. The performance is aesthetic scandal." Karene turned to her friend. "Do you think we should leave, too?"

"No. If the night's to be scandal, it's ever more worth watching. We'd best see it through."

Karene nodded, pursed her lips. The chime rang again, and the front lights dimmed with a subtle hiss. "Finally," she said. There was a final scuffle to resume seats. Near the back of the house, a belligerent old man was dragged out by staff. Hundreds of opera lenses flashed, resumed their places in silk and ring-couched hands. The house lights sunk to black. Silence gradually swelled.

Invisibly, the stage opened in a surrurant swish of velvet and runner rings. From the orchestra, a thin and amelodic quaver of bassoon began to swell. And as it swelled, there bloomed in the stage's heart a spotlight. First a pinpoint, then a cold flood, revealing as if by starlight a lone performer on a curious set. The audience immediately began to mumble.

It was lone, grey-pale woman. She reclined, head bowed, clothed in naught but liquid spills of black tresses on an angled bed of rock. Curious pin-lights of stars glittered above, somehow reflected in the sea of blue and white-tipped silk which appeared to lap at her half-submerged calves.

Surprise caught in Clove's throat. She raised the stem of her theater glasses, squinted agape. "Oh, beauty," she muttered.

"Oh, scandal," said Karene, frowning, but likewise fascinated.

"Look at her–" On stage, the silk-water woman raised her head. The bassoon swelled, quit into silence.

"Eyes," finished Clove. Black orbs, larger and more liquid than any human's. Beside, Karene shivered visibly at the sight, knitted her shoulders. Below, the auditorium did likewise, twitched like a lot of rabbits shot suddenly dumb and dreadful by the gaze of a fox in the undergrowth. Someone whimpered. Another sobbed. None moved.

"What is happening?" Karene turned to her friend, fear large in her eyes. She dropped her glasses, half stood. "Please, I feel wrong. I think we really must–" Clove seized her wrist, held her still; enraptured, for the creature on stage had begun to sing.

A clear contralto note spilt warm and lovely from smiling lips. A sound so invitingly antithetical to the dread of moments before that the auditorium gasped in choked relief. Then, a complimentary swell of strings.

Another note, ascending. Another peal of strings. Folk began to stand. Another. Higher, quivering with liquid vibrato. Members of the orchestra faltered in their accompaniment, began to clamber from the pit. Yet another, all instrumentation forgot. The aisles and mezzanine rail clamored with pushing, weeping masses. Clove rose, dragged an unresisting Karene to stand with her.

On stage, white, predator's teeth gleamed in limelight, parted with rounded lips in a tremulous solo; unadorned, multitonal. Inhumanly beguiling.

In the spotlight's dark periphery, folk rushed blind for the stage, scrambling over and crushing seatbacks and fellow patrons alike. Bodies tumbled willingly from boxes, balconies, and mezzanine. Screams rang out, somehow softer than any charmed note of song. The singer beamed.

Clove and Karene clung at the rail of their box. "If we stay here, we will die," stammered Clove.

Shaking, Karene glanced to the back of the box, to the crashing riot, to her friend's panicked eyes. "I know."

"Come."

Hand in gloved hand, they leapt, tumbled to the maddened sea below.

Sirens

In 3.445, just five years past, a tragedy came to play at the Royal Opera.

A performance of momentous anticipation, composed and constructed by a multinational collection of the era's greatest musical and theatrical minds. Its opening performance, which would host the Coast's most esteemed and evaluated patrons of the arts, was forecasted to be the most expensive and profitable showing of either ballet or opera in history.

Its title: Water Music. The most calamitous and literally deadly tragedy to have ever graced the world of Coastal arts.

What would begin as a shockingly-nouveau performance, renowned for sparking outraged duels and fistfights during its intermission, would be remembered for causing over two dozen fatalities, mass hysteria, and the parading of a siren's corpse through the streets of Fortenshire.

A siren: A creature absent for a century or more from the lexicon of modern folklore. An Othersome brand of sea-monster so reduced in perceived danger as to be considered threatening only by sailors, who had long-ago learned to avoid its charming ways.

Indeed, a tempter and a beguiler of prey grown over-wary of its predator's charms. ** An eater of manflesh so limited in its wiles as to have curtailed even its own depredations, opting instead to dine on seal, muscle, and oyster. A creature reduced from legendary terror of the sea to strange sea-mammal; more alluring, but no faster or more deadly than its better: The shark.

And yet, somehow become the unexpected star of an ill-fated opera, recruited by a foreign composer of strange sensory and social orientation. How this came to pass, none can precisely say, for the man himself, an Adaleut by the name of Andrei Ilyushin, sunk into hermitage and obscurity after the incident.

What can be known is this: Ilyushin was a man of auditory genius, capable of drawing harmonic inspiration from sources he claimed only he could hear. He was also a social recluse, apt to disappear to the vast beaches on the wild Sea of Khawdor for months at a time. Rumor supposes that it was on one of these long hiatuses that Ilyushin encountered a siren, one made cordial by generations of non-predation of humans, and befriended her.

Further, what can also be supposed is this: Ilyushin was immune to one of two of the lethal, otherworldly*** gifts possessed by siren-kind. Sirens, as scholars understand them, emit constantly an aura of infrasound from an organ adjacent to their bronchi. A strange energy which unnerves all but the strongest of wills, summoning a sense of panic and impending doom. For this, the composer, gifted as he was with an uncommon reckoning of sound, had no fear. He had ears only for the siren's second gift: Incredible vocal range and ability.

It is by this natural ability that sirens beguile their prey. A human being, afeared by subaudible emmanations from within the creature, sees only a welcoming, beautiful man or woman singing the most welcoming of melodies. They have no mind for razor teeth, or black eyes, or paddle-legs: Only safety and welcome in the face of inexplicable horror. By this charm, sailors of old were so very easily drawn from the decks of their ships and devoured.

This queer immunity was both the genesis and the undoing of Ilyushin's masterwork. The composer, ignorant of the danger which he had befriended, wrote a bittersweet opera inspired by his inhuman friend. A doomed romance between a sailor and a siren. A groundbreaking piece uniquely composed of both Firlish, Adaleutian, and Otherworldly languages. An epic featuring as characters many a siren, only one of which would be filled by an anonymous star: The genuine article.

By what cunning Ilyushin managed to smuggle his siren into the venue, let alone the Firlish Capital, none can say. Despite his distaste for society, he was yet a fellow of great means, and in the end commanded the secrecy necessary to hide his star soloist in the opera house's undercroft in time for opening night.

That day, it is said, the Royal Operahouse was haunted. By the influence of the latent siren, several cast members were driven to melancholy and understudied at the last minute. Many musicians and property staffers became deliriously, miserably drunk. The director was barely preventing from hanging herself. How the performance ever progressed to its fateful entr'acte, folk can only marvel, for all the while, the Company was forced to endure Ilyushin's unconscious sabotage.

By intermission, Water Music's audacity, combined with the awful effect of a nearby siren, had driven the house to artistic outrage and the bring of violence. Indeed, several duels are rumored to have been fought in that time, most notably one by the producer, who lost. Nudity, incomprehensible language, provocative and vicious applications of ballet: All were an affront to the artistic gentry. The lengths to which Ilyushin had managed to unkilter his audience were sufficient to cause a substantial quantity of walkouts; and these quitters of the performance were perhaps the most lucky.

When the opera's star was finally unveiled, only barely made-up in human guise, Ilyushin's tragedy came to its raucous conclusion. Unaware of both humans' norms and her effect upon their behavior, the siren whipped her audience into wanton, panicked fervor. She was, as it rushed the stage, only the first of the riot's many victims that night.

Ilyushin is rumored to have realized his terrible error only then. Whether he saw, from his seat at the Royal Box, what became of his Othersome friend, none can confirm but the man himself; and he is long since fled.

Since its calamitous first performance, Water Music has been performed only once again. Once, this year. It was met with incredible success, both as a result of its legendary history and its all-human leads.

By its effect, the folk of the Coast once more know the terror of the siren, of beautiful tempters on shorelines and seastones. Queer monsters, once reduced to pretty sea-mammals, now again remembered as beguiling eaters of mens' flesh.

And with every passing year, stories of siren attacks creep from port cities with ever greater frequency. Though absurd, though impossible, it would seem that sirens themselves have heard the stories, found new hunger and new ambition in the cursed tale of Andrei Ilyushin.

Author's Note

A new take on introducing lore topics. Sirens were, on their own, maybe too mealy to describe without some flavor. Add a extra dash of story, and here we are.

Does this approach a dangerous level of fluff, for the lack of crunch? Maybe. We shall see.

Footnotes

* Northerners are rather accustomed to a degree of gender-neutral nudity. To them, to be warm enough to shed any amount of clothing is a luxury, one which they don't hesitate to share in the company of spas, saunas, and boiling hearths. The Coast as a whole, namely the aristocracy and their haute arte, is more prudish.
** Some scholars suppose that the siren, since it evolved not on the Coast but in the seas of the Otherworld, was never meant to pursue humans as prey. Its skills, they posit, were meant to terrify other sea-mammals and simply woo each other. Their beautiful forms, then, are no more purpose-built for luring than the bodies of other fairies. A matter of opportunistic happenstance, and an unfortunate one for human prey.
*** Sirens are among the most common creatures of the Other found on the Coast. They, like others of their kind, and black-blooded, black-eyed, and allergic to iron.

Brown husks of leaves drifted on the autumn road. Sticky branches shivered above, loosed what cladding they yet possessed to spiral in the bitter wind. Not far over the squat, umber hills, a raven croaked. Down the lane, a clapping of horseshoes swelled.

A rider in grey came along. He rode sedate and boredly, tucked up into his fur collars for the cold. His mount, a pudgy roan, crunched unconcernedly over the leaves, ears low. They sauntered with slack reins.

The breeze kicked up. Leaves rasped. A faint yell followed, muddied by the wind. The rider startled. His roan perked her ears, huffed. The reins stiffened. "Gee up" mumbled the rider, eyes suddenly bright. He squeezed his boots to the beast. They set off at a canter.

Seconds later came another yell, high and afeard. Other voices, too, jeering. A rush of three ravens startled up ahead, where the road went deep into a brown grove. Rider and horse passed under those bows, broke into a gallop.

They rode for a minute or more before the shouting's source, now quiet for awhile, showed. Ahead, in the mottled grey shade of the copse, hunched two figures in leathers over a fallen, bloodied third. One, a ginger woman, was tugging at the fallen's boots. Her fellow, a scabby man, was working at the other end with a knife. Seeing the rider, they quit their desecration, turned.

"Ho there" said the rider, pulling furs from his mouth.

"Ho yerself," said the woman. She wore her hair drawn back tight. At her hairline, a few flecks of blood showed bright on the scalp, fresh.

"What's become of him?" pointed the rider. His steed nickered, unsteady at the red which pooled midst the leaves.

"Ragwretches, from the bush," said the man, behind her. He put down his knife, covertly held the hand behind his back.

The rider frowned. "Ragmen, at this time of year?"

"Ye. Dreadful large ones," said the ginger

"They clocked your friend here and scarpered, then?"

"You've guessed it."

"And left the two of you unscathed?"

The scabby man nodded. "Miracle, it was." He stepped a mite closer.

The rider leaned in his saddle, peered round him. His brows raised, crinkled. "Clocked him with a pistol gunspring, at that." He gestured to a metal point protruding from the back of the dead man's skull. "Rare seen a wretch with a pistol."

"Miracle of miracles," said Scabby. "He sacrificed himself to save us."

"So, you're stealing your fallen comrade's boots," said the rider. "And, what, his gold teeth?"

"See, it might look like that, but–"

"You two are cutters, yes?" the rider interrupted.

"Aye," smiled the scabby cutter, showing rotten teeth. "How'd ye guess?" He stepped closer. The roan twitched her ears.

"And you work for what bank? Tiber and Fellowes?"

"Spot on. Good guessin'."

"Then I'll tell you," said the rider, smiling. "That I am a commissioner for T and B." He opened his coat, showed the insignia on his lapel. The cutter's eyes went wide.

"So you'd best not use that pistol you're hiding behind your fat ass, and…" He swung about, glared at the ginger, who'd been creeping up behind. She grinned, sheepish. "Tell your little minge here to reconsider knifing me, lest you meet a team of real cutters on a hit."

Both backed off. The scabby cutter went pale. The ginger reddened, blotchily. "M'apologies, Commissioner," she mumbled, surreptitiously tucked a knife into her boot.

"Likewise," said her fellow. He tucked the pistol into his belt, looked to the corpse. "You're not gonna, ah…"

"Report you?"

"Ye."

The Commissioner squinted, pointed to the corpse. "What was his standing?"

"Ain't had any."

The commissioner shrugged. "In that case, don't make a habit out of it." He nudged the roan, started off.

"Enjoy the boots."

A key rattled in the lock. Some muffled giggling sounded through the walnut paneled door. The bolt turned. Hinges swung, and the giggling came through in a flurry of snow and winter's-night air.

It was a red-nosed pair, wrapped up in coats and swathed in giddy vodka fumes. The first, a scarred, long-nosed man, grinned, wobbled slightly. The second, the giggling's curly-headed source, hung on his shoulder. She was small, expensively made up, and better dressed than her scuffed-leather companion.

"I must say," she said, ceasing her giggle to frown dramatically at the parlor interior; all leather armchairs, shelves of curio, and dark wood. "You live better than I'd expect."

"Ah, well," drawled Dacre, fingering the buttons of his coat.

The young woman let him go, wandered to the brick hearth. "A new townhouse," she said, warming her hands. "And staff to keep your fire, at that."

"N' good taste in lunch*, I hope."

"Dinner, Dacre," giggled she, rolling her eyes. "And we mainly drank. You cutters have such odd slang."

"Ex-cutter, and a lucky one." Dacre insisted. He tossed his coat and scarf to a chair, moved to loop an arm round his companion. She slipped coyly free, moved to examine the books and oddities which cluttered the room's surfaces. Dacre followed close behind.

"Goodness, you do own an excess of skulls. How gruesome."

"Aw, Silve. 'S only five."

Silve tapped the silver teeth of one blackened skull. "Who was this?"

"Some dead chap."

Dacre received a frown. "Rather goes without saying, doesn't it? Given you own his skull?"

"Fine. M'enemy," Dacre said, tucking his chin on Silve's shoulder.

"Why'd you kill him?"

The man shrugged. "Didn't. Enemy, b'still my partner. Got his head lopped by an eidolon, so I kept it."

"Oh," said Silve, shirking. "Why would you do that?"

"Seemed like a good idea, a' the time." **

Silve tisked, moved from the skulls. Dacre wobbled, unsupported.

"What about these?" said the woman, indicating a glass dome containing dozens of blue coins.

"Agadese ducats. Call it m' rainy day fund."

"Where'd you find them?" Silve peered at the coins, at the runic denominations on their faces.

"Some hole inna mountain. Inside statues." None too gracefully, Dacre peeled the coat from her shoulders.

"What kind of statues?" said Silve, pushing the coat at him.

"Living ones," he tossed it away.

"Queer."

"'Orrible."

"Hmf," said Silve. She moved to a side table, leaned on the wide arm on the chair beside. "What's this?" she said, pointing to a mossy glass cylinder which occupied the table. Something moved inside.

"My friend," said Dacre, joining her there.

"Oh," brightened Silve, kneeling to look at the glass. "A pet?"

"A mince toad."

At that, Silve recoiled from the glass, the water-eyed amphibian within. She frowned. "Ah."

"Ain't nothing to scoff a'. Little bastard's more faithful than most." He looked grim. "'N longer-lived."

“Have you no friends but toads?” she grinned.

Dacre looked sour, arms folded. “Like I said, longer-lived.”

“Don’t tell me all your friends are dead?” consoled Silve, cleaving to his side.

Dacre shirked from her. “S’what I implied, init?” His tone was abruptly cold.

“What of the cutters you earned your fortune with?”

“S’ one man’s fortune,” Dacre mumbled. “For there weren’t none left to share it with.”

Gingerly, Silve patted him, hiccuped pitchily. “I’m s–”

“Don’t,” said Dacre, turning his lip. “Got nothin’ to do with you.” He slumped into the armchair, kicked his hobnailed boots over the side.

Awkward, Silve peered at him, made a show of twirling one brown ringlet. Dacre, his coquetry vanished, paid little heed, chin tipped to chest. Silve raised an eyebrow, sauntered to the hearth. Firelight flickered on the drunken sheen of her eyes as they slid over the cluttered mantelpiece.

“Sword grip,” she mused, touching a broken hilt. “Jar of pretty white arrows." She touched a point, delicately. "And…" she smirked, plucking up a battered wooden thing. "Er, what do you call this?"

Dacre's head snapped up. "A helmet," he insisted. "M'first."

"But it's–"

"Helmet," he interrupted, loudly.

"Just a bucket with eye holes," giggled Silve.

Dacre reddened, glared at her. A network of pale scares stood out on his worn cheeks. He stood.

"Sorry," mumbled Silve, eyes wide. With a terse jerk, the cutter took his bucket from her limp hands, replaced it on the mantel. He scooped up her discarded coat, proffered it. "Y'should go."

"But–"

"Can't be laughin' at m' past." Dacre

"Dacre, I want–"

"Get." He shoved her towards the door.

"Want to know more about it," blurted Silve.

Dacre settled, blinked. "Y'do?"

"Yes. I shouldn't've laughed. It's just…" She worried the coat. "So extraordinary, your life. I like you for it. I want to hear about…" She gestured round the parlor, to the collected oddities. "All of it."

Dacre's face softened. "Didn't think you reckoned it tha' way," he said, passed a hand through his hair.

"I can stay?"

"Aye. M'sorry I snapped." He looked sheepish. "Guess cutterings'a bit silly, sometimes. Gotta be that way." Stiffly, he took up on a nearby sofa, gestured for Silve to join. She did, and, hesitantly, leaned into his shoulder.

"Now," said the once-cutter, gesturing to the collected marvels of his venturesome times.

"What d'you want to know?"

Dangerous Wonts

Cutters are a folk of peculiar taste. A caste whose proclivities, influenced by a culture of labor unrivaled in peril and horror, have grown primal and queer.

They do not begin this way. Novice cutters, untested, desire much the same as simple soldiers. Food, drink, good beds; company and gold to share and afford them with. And of these novices, many enough never grow weirder in their wants, for after even one bleak venture, the weak and the timid are alike culled by fear and mortality. Those who do live grow stranger by each venture.

With every delve into the dark and the forbidden, a cutter may come to desire and fetishize the unusual. As folk exposed to the extreme and the traumatic are wont, they may seek distraction and sensation either superior to or in sublimation of their fell experiences. To some, violence becomes normalcy. Either as a pastime, a solution, or both. Casual criminality, brazen squatting or trespass, and predation of junior cutters are everyday activities. Other cutters acquire a taste for numbing substances. Laudanum, strong absinthes, and coquelicot, namely, are habitual favorites. Enough of these sorts end their careers not by venturing's dangers, but by the addictions acquired in an attempt to forget them. These behaviors, while common, are not yet among the oddest cutters learn to exhibit.

A fetishization of particular elements of gear numbers among the venturing folk’s chiefest obsessions. Arms, armor, and specialized equipment are marks of a cutter’s success, of the gold earned and burned to obtain them. Among such equipment, a superstitious desire is especially present for three distinct items: Boots, backpacks, and helmets. These are staples of the cutter’s trade. Boots, for long marches in the wild and the black; and for cathartically stomping one's foes. Packs, to safely ferry gear into and loot out of a venturing locale. And helms, colloquially known as “buckets,”*** for which cutters hold superstitious reverence. Cutters will readily bicker, tussle, even kill, if given enough mad impetus, over such icons of their trade.

Many choose additional accoutrements for which to obsess. Some, obsessed with cleanliness both physical and mortal, crave soap and gray salt. Others, terrified at the prospect of encountering the unknown, hoard bestiaries and books of lore. Lots, conditioned by poverty and romanticisation of wealth, carry a store of gold at all times; one which they will never spend, only clutch for strange security.

The queer predilections of cutters, though uncountable in their variety, are in the end joined by a few pervading traits: By obsession over material gain, the behavioral consequence of a trade defined by stealing wealth for greedy solicitors; and by an eerie tendency for gallows humor, a jovial manifestation of defences formed to resist the black effect of often-hopeless work upon the mind. A product of camaraderie, of the self-reinforcing fellowship, built of a communal rejection of mortality, without which the venturing life would be impossible.

A guardian of the mind, without which a cutter, retired or alone, is naught but an oddity: A collection of hoarded curios and memories best forgot.

Author's Note

While playtesting some cuttering scenarios, it occured to me to consider the actions and desires of player characters and extrapolate it into an in-world subculture. By this lens, what is a venturing sort, but a lot of awful habits, collected oddities, and a mad disregard for death?

Footnotes

* To cutters, who often spend protracted periods of time in odd hours or subterranean depths, will describe any meal of the day as "lunch." If two meals are had in a day, the second is known as supper.
** Cutters are renowned for their ability to acquire packs full of useless items for later hoarding.

*** These are sometimes actual buckets. The cooper's trade is one valuable amongst novice cutters, for they are capable of producing a brand of inexpensive personal protection called "barrel armor." Such armor makes its headpieces if literal wooden pails.

They stood within a cloud of flies, stared at the stinking bulk before them.

It was the carrion wreck of a cow, prone on the browning pasture and surrounded by gore-stained scrub. Flies spiraled to and fro from the hollow of its ribs and belly, torn open and bereft of innards.

"I found her like this, my poor querida," said a weatherbeaten man in a felt cap, somber. "Please, help me repair things." The others, a pair of cutters, looked at him quizzically

"Farmer Jamaro, you know we'll help…," said an oily-haired man. He held a handkerchief to his mouth, breathed shallow in distaste.

"Provided you pay," added the third, a pale woman with a long nose.

"But we can't put your cow back together."

Miserably, the farmer shook his head. "No, no. Señori Louis, Clovette. My Firlish fails me. I beg you repair my relations with the lemures."

"The whats?" said Louis.

"The lemures," said Jamaro. "The shades, dark spirits. They have surely done this, for they are angry with me and my family."

Louis raised an eyebrow. "The spirits killed your cow and absconded with her innards?"

Jamaro bobbled his head, shrugged. "Si."

Above the kerchief, an eyebrow raised. "I suppose we can try. Why do you think these, eh… lemures, are angered?"

The farmer gritted his brown teeth, shook his head. "I have no way of knowing. We, my family, have always been in good terms, making lemuria often, to please them. Very good terms. Never bad."

Louis gestured with his free hand. "Where do they live, the spirits? Can we speak to them in any way?"

"They live in the sea caves, the sacred grottoes, but none are allowed to see them."

At this, Clovette perked up, worried. She tugged on Louis' sleeve. "Good Messieur Jamaro, allow us a moment to strategize." She took Louis by the arm and pulled him away.

Louis looked at her askance. "Qu'elle?"

Clovette spoke covertly. "Louis, we are dumb salauds. Remember, when we killed the ugly creatures in the caves?"

"The stupid fishgut beasts? Who smelled of liver? We killed them for the swag the drunkard mentioned."

"Yes. In the sea caves."

Louis's eyes widened. "Merde, we are dumb. We killed the spirits."

"And angered the rest," said Clovette.

"Wait, wait" Louis screwed up his eyes. "We can still make bank at this, I am certain."

"Oui. Try."

"Messieur Jamaro," said Louis, turning to the farmer, smiling. "How do you propose we appease the lemures?"

"Oh" said Jamaro, frowning. "Only a great lemuria would suffice."

"A what?"

"Lemuria" said Jamaro. "An offering of food. A great one, for they seem to be angered deeply. I would do so, but I fear to show my face to them."

The cutters met eyes. "Bring the uglies food. Not hard," muttered Clovette. Louis raised an eyebrow, nodded.

"We can do it," he said.

The farmer smiled, clasped his hands. "Bien, bien. I will tell the butcher."

Clovette frowned. "For what?"

"For the offal, the food."

The cutters met eyes, grimaced. "Figures," muttered Louis, swatting a fly off his cheek. "Maybe we wo–"

"Where do we offer it?" interrupted Clovette.

"Deep in the spirits' home. In the cavernas, the halls of the dead."

"What?" startled Louis.

"The deepest sea grottoes."

Louis looked as if to speak. Clovette cut him off. "We will do it at twenty-five percent more."

The farmer shrugged, sadly. "I must see the lemures appeased, for my family. I must pay."

At this, Louis huffed. "It will be done, Messieur Jamaro," Clovette said. She stepped to shake hands over the dead cow. Flies alit upon their wrists.

The cutters set off. Louis looked sour. Clovette spoke lightly. "Mon ami, it is like we have generated our own fortune, with this job. Do not worry yourself over his talk of caves."

Louis shrugged. "You are right, bien sûr. We have faced the lemure spirits already. Only have to feed them, now."

"'Spirits,'" said Clovette. "How tough can they be?"

With confident step, they set off across the scrubby pasture, wound round the buzzing wrecks of a hundred gutted cows.

A summer's breeze slipped through the kitchen window, through hanging pans and swaying sheafs of basil. Heady, sedative, laden with sea salt and the sweetness of orange groves in full fruit. Neath the window, sprawled on a countertop, dozed a fat ginger cat. By the hearth, in a crooked chair, slept a plump old woman. Nary a hint of black remained midst the grey of her nodding head.

"Nonna!"

The kitchen door banged open. A young boy in oversized boots charged in, waved a floppy hare overhead.

Nonna grunted, blinked awake, smiled at him. "Digo, cucciolo. You have had luck."

Digo swiped a lock out of his muddy face, presented the kill to his grandmother. "Snared him by the gully. Please, can we have a stew?"

"Yes, but you must let me teach you to butcher it."

"Yes!"

Nonna rose with effort, beckoned Digo to the counter. She lifted the cat by the belly, and, as he protested and wriggled, moved him to the floor. With lined, thick hands, she brushed off the worn wooden surface, retrieved a pair of shears and a knife hanging overhead.

"Give it to me," said Nonna. Digo did. "And pull up that stool and watch."

Stool legs scraped over stones tiles. Digo perched beside her, nearly taller even while sitting.

Nonna took up the hare, felt and bunched the skin about its legs. "You gather it up, the skin, and cut here." She pointed with the knife and did so, at the ankle joint.

"Both legs. You can tear it, if you are strong. Then down the belly." She gripped the skin, and, with force, shucked it free of the pink carcass. Digo watched, nodding. The cat circled below, meowing atonally.

"You just snip off the feet and head." The shears crunched as she did so. The latter she took, shook before the excited cat, and tossed out the open window. A ginger flash followed, purring. Digo grinned.

Nonna chuckled. "Everyone gets to eat."

She took up the knife, pointed at the pink and veiny hareflesh. "Watch carefully at this. The gutting. Cut here, through the bones." They split wetly under her blade. "And tug the guts out from here." Nonna picked out the entrails, piled them neatly on the countertop.

"For the cat, too?" said Digo, grinning, swinging his legs.

"No, no" said Nonna, gravely. She took up a lidded wooden bowl, scooped the pale innards inside, and covered them. "We put them out tonight. Very important."

"Why?"

Nonna looked to him, gestured with the bowl. "For lemuria, Digo. For the spirits." She put the bowl down, nodded seriously.

"Everyone gets to eat."

Spirits

In the warm, seaside hills of Alagór's southern countryside, where ancient spiritualism still mingles in equal measure with Avethan faith, folk believe in spirits.

Lemures, they are called. * Shades of the restless dead. Revenants, clad in cobbled flesh and coiled organs, who come at night from their chthonic sea-cave haunts** to demand food at the doors they knew in life. They mill and they moan, banging on walls, lowing wetly for succor. If they find what they want, a simple offering of spare offal, they will depart. If they are denied, they'll take their meal another way: Violently, from the bellies of selfish folk and their livestock.

To placate the lemures, village folk practice a modest ritual offering: They leave a portion of spare entrails, saved from the week's meat, in a bowl on the doorstep on sabbath-night. By morning, it will be gone; taken by the lemures. This offering is known as lemuria.

The smallfolk of the south have practiced lemuria since years immemorial. They hold it among the central tenants of their faith. To feed the departed is less a burden, less an action taken under threat, than it is an act of charity. To them, the spirits are pitiable things; wretches who suffer in a cursed afterlife and know no better than to beg and to hurt. To offer them a spare chicken liver once a week is the smallest, the only possible gift. Charity to humankind is among the requisite dictates of Aveth, and, to those who believe, lemures are still human.

The Southerner's Lemuria is not unlike the traditions of the superstitious Awnish of the far North, who leave gifts in respect to local älves. Though, unlike älves, who may provide good fortune in the form of surreptitious favors, offerings to lemures offer no benefit sans freedom from harassment and predation. Also, unlike Lemuria, the traditions of Awn are viewed by outsiders as harmless idiosyncrasies, bereft of spiritual meaning. *** Offerings to the lemures, however, are viewed rather differently by the wider Coast.

Parasites

To visitors from other lands, lemuria seems a bizarre practice indeed. The countryfolk's charity to miserable spirits looks, to the wider Coast, like the willful feeding of bonafide monsters.

To them, lemures look appear as departed ancestors, but parasitic, shambling organisms that both consume and construct their bodies from entrails and assorted carrion. † The Southerner's ancient, charitable tradition occurs as a perverted solution to the problem of a millennia-long monster infestation. A solution not for humanity's favor, but for the benefit and nourishment of lemures.

As scholars would define it, lemures are a sort of parasitic scavenger. Vague, headless skeletons of cartilage and weak muscle which depend on surrogate tissues to function. Driven by rude instinct, lemures cloak their weak frames in found tissue; cobble together a rude, personal anatomy.

By what physiological power lemures fuse offal into a functioning, gross whole, none can say. What can be said is that it doesn't work for very long, as lemures hunt constantly to replace their decaying body of organs. Only a lemure's soft, headless skeleton remains and grows. That, and its long claws, attached to both hands and feet, suitable for handling and harvesting flesh. To delay their decay, lemures hide from daylight, most often in the depths of sea caves, where the salt soothes them, or in the dark of abandoned structures.

Much to the dismay of the countryfolk who fed them, lemures have become a popular target for errant cutters in recent years. The sea caves where the squelshy spirits make their hives, having been revered and undisturbed for millennia, are quite full of treasure from both modern days and ages past. The lemures, who often drag bodies back home in order to break down their organs, have inadvertently collected a wealth of pocketed gold. Smugglers and pirates, long ago wise to the shades' spiritual falsity, have also made caches there for centuries by luring the monsters out with piles of cow intestine, then depositing their swag behind for the beasts to inadvertently guard. For the temptation of gold, cutters would certainly drive lemures to extinction.

In response to sudden predation after comfortable ages of hand-feeding, the lemures of the placid Alagóran countryside have begun to adapt their behavior. In some villages, rather than quietly accept lemuria every week, the monsters are instead hunting. Slaying and gobbling villagers and beasts alike, and, on the nourishment and strength of their entrails, growing terrifyingly large. Hulking lemures, trailed by coveys of smaller kin, are now rumored to wander the hills and olive groves even in daylight, militant and hungry. Cutter gangs, town militiae, and monsters slayers face them with equal surety, though their losses are higher than ever before. Despite losses, few long for peace with the lemures.

Few, save the countryfolk and their modest charity.

Footnotes

* From the old Nor stem lem-, referring to the gut or gullet. Observers of lemures reliably describe them as being made of cobbled guts and innards.
** In old Southern myth, sea caves are often portrayed as gateways to the realm of the dead. This has only a modicum of truth, as such caves are rarely gates to the real underworld, though they are indeed home to monsters aplenty.
*** Northerners are stereotypically atheist, apt to look upon the followers of Aveth and other religions with confusion and mild superiority. Conversely, the Northerners observe a battery of superstitions, most of which are known to the pious Southerners as odd hypocrisy, if not heresy.

† Sir Gemus of Ire, among the first biologists to address lemures as an object of study, describes the creatures as being primarily composed of a substance like piled, raw liver and coiled gut.

A flurry of snow whistled into the pub. Boots clomped on creaking oak. A gloved hand pounded shut the door, swollen in its frame.

"Blimey. The heat's relief," said Ewan, stamping scabs of snow and muck from his hobnails. He brushed frost from his bristled chin, licked frozen ooze from a healing split lip.

"Aye," said Row, just behind. She dropped a furred traveling hood, unlaced her cape with crooked, white-scarred hands. "Whiskey'll make it better."

They stomped to the bar: A long, polished oak-bench, hung with sausages and bottles, opposite a brick hearth just as wide. There, in a veritable cave of masonry, grumbled a blistering fire. It hunched in a nest of coals and deep ash, gnawed the glowing ends of pines log pushed into its lair.

At the bar sat a collection of three soldierly types in winter uniform. Thready patches adorned their coats, shaped like roses couched in thorns. They sat amidst littered glasses and spiked helms, speaking low.

Ewan found a stool, undid his gloves and brass coat buttons. Neath the open duster showed a belt hung with no shortage of steel. Steel, and a fat purse, which Ewan removed. He sat, fingering the clasp. Row joined, nearest the soldiers, rested elbows on the bench.

"Bottle o' whiskey, your best," said Ewan to the grey-plaited publican. He thumbed her an iron-bound gold pound from the purse.

"And whatever food ye got," said Row.

The publican nodded. Broad crystal tumblers appeared atop the bar, then a square, purple bottle. Ewan popped the cork, sniffed. "Oh, lovely peated stuff, this. Reminds me of home.," He poured for both of them.

"Aye," said Row. She wrapped crooked fingers round her drink, raised it in mock toast. "To Jengory, home of good whiskey and silly bastards."

Ewan punched her shoulder. Whiskey sloshed. "And to golden ventures aplenty." They drank.

"Oi now."

Row turned, eyebrow raised. One of the soldiers, a broken-toothed man with a scrub-brush mustache, had leaned over. His fellows, a pimply woman and green-eyed man, leered behind.

"Aye?" Said Row, over her shoulder.

"Couple'a cutters, ain't ya?" said the soldier, nodding. He slurred a hint.

"True, that," said Ewan, squinting. "And you're Lothrheimers."

"Come from out o' town, have ye?" said the mustache.

"From the last county over."

"Fresh off a venture, I'll bet." The soldiers nodded exaggeratedly. "With all pretty gold in yer sacks, free to spend."

"What's it to ye?" snapped Row. She turned, rested a scarred fist on the counter. Her clenched knuckles squeaked like rubbing glass.

"Row…" hissed Ewan, straightening. He slipped a hand into his coat, flicked his eyes about. The publican had gone. The other soldiers had tensed, risen from their stools.

The Lothrheimer bared broken pickets of teeth, a rough grin. "See, we're much alike," said he, creeping closer, exhaling fumes of liquor and bad liver. "Get to drink 'n fight, wear all swords and armor." He turned a lip, clownish. Row met his pinprick gaze, seething.

"'Cept we don't got get paid half so well." * His eyes flicked to Row's fist. "Nor have such pretty hands."

He lunged, seized Row's wrist. The other soldiers leapt, too, dove to tackle the cutters. Stools clattered to the floor. Glasses smashed and bounced. Row staggered back, thrust her free palm at the soldiers.

A series of loud, energetic clicks split the air, fast as a fluttering heartbeat. The broken-toothed man abruptly ceased his assault, winced, released his grip. Behind, his fellow Lothrheimers recoiled, began to cry out.

Row snarled, thrust both scar-spidered hands at the shirking soldiers. The clicking intensified, quickened. Red blotches sprouted on the trio's flesh, grew to burbling blisters. They screamed, gasped. One, the pimply woman, bolted. Ewan seized her by the belt, swung her cross the room into the blazing hearth. Ash billowed. At the bar, hanging bottles burst their corks and spewed under the boiling scour of the cutter's crooked hands.

Abruptly, the clicking quit. Row slumped, rested quivering palms on knees. At her feet, the two Lothrheimers squirmed, mewling, shed steam and smoke from smoldering hair and boiled eyes. The soldier Ewan had thrown lay afore the hearth, feebly patted flames from her uniform.

"Shite" said Ewan, looking about. Wine and spirits still trickled from burst bottles behind the bar. "Pubkeep's gone. Bet she were in on it. Bastards." He approached his fellow cutter. "Suppose you're fine?"

Clumsily, Row seized their bottle from the bar, drank eagerly from the neck. "Aye," she coughed. "'M fine. Let's find someplace else."

She turned to the door, clapped Ewan on the back. He flinched under her touch.

"What?" said Row.

Ewan hesitated, looked to the ruined bar, the wrecks of soldiers, then the yellow eyes of his friend the magician. He patted her in turn, gingerly. "Nothin," he said, grimly.

"Let's get out of here."

Rolf snapped his fingers, lit a cigarette in the resulting flame. He puffed, leaned back in his seat, shook the spark from his calloused thumbtip. Beside him, a woman with cropped, red hair frowned. Rolf raised an eyebrow at her.

"Showoff," scoffed the woman, plucked up a flute of wine. Rolf smirked back.

Round the table, the other diners chuckled. One, a long-nosed lad not dissimilar to Rolf, spoke. "Pish posh, Pricille. You're just mad he didn't offer you a light." The others chuckled.

"Magicians," Pricille scoffed, averted her gaze. About the rose garden where they sat, a dozen more tables like theirs were thronging with similar long-nosed family. Folk, clad in light suits and navy blue, steel-accented Firlish uniform, tittered and drank, sometimes amusedly plucking flirty rose pixies from their padded shoulders.

"Really, though," said the previous lad, waving a glass. "By the family's standard, your fiancé's hardly showing off. Not in the least."

Rolf nodded, wiggled his fingers. Thin, white scars, some still dotted by suture marks, marred his long digits. "This is nothing, comparatively. 'Specially to our elders."
He set his free hand on Pricille's shoulder, leaned to speak conspiratorially.

"See them?" Rolf said. He pointed with his cigarette, indicated a table of officers in Academy sashes. "My aunt Hurli and some friends from the Academy. See their gloves?" Pricille nodded.

Rolf squinted, waved the smoke. "Wear them for the scars. Each of them has a full hand each, at least. No parlor tricks, either."

"What can they do?"

Rolf exhaled dramatically. "Jolly impressive shite. Deadly, like. Blow out your ears; melt your skin; poison the lot of us ten times over."

Pricille frowned into her wine, then at Rolf. "They don't actually do that, do they?"

"No. Not any more, at least. We hardly know they ever did, in the first place. For the Army, you know."

"Why have them, then?"

Roft chuckled. "Well, why does any magician practice the art." He shrugged. "Because he can."

A thin cousin across the table piped up. "Grandpapa's used his tricks, that's for certain." She nodded to an old man some tables away, his waxy skin pulled thinly over sunken cheeks and knotty, mismatched, tattooed knuckles. "He'll tell you all about the ancient stuff."

"Awful stories, but impressive," said the long-nosed lad. "A real magician. Right enviable."

Rolf and his cousins nodded. The thin woman grinned, spoke low. "We simply can't wait for him to die."

Pricille looked aghast. "That's awful. Rolf, why?"

Rolf raised his eyebrows at her. "For his knucklebones, of course."

Abscission

You can tell a magician by the hands. By the knotted joints, the digital scars; the remnant lines of surgeries cut to wrest carpal and phalange alike from their fleshy beds. By the knucklebones, plucked, discarded in favor of potent artificial surrogates.

These hands are the marks of magicianry’s most cardinal art: Abscission, the surgical replacement of human hand bones with structures of rare device and latent power.

Abscission, though few practitioners will admit it, is a relic-art of high sorcery; of the terrible heights of body modification so enjoyed by the sorcerer-kings of old. Only by the remembered ways of these kings can magicians reliably commit surgery of such minutia and complexity as the excision and replacement of their own fingerbones. **

The daunting complexity of such surgery, let alone threat of injury, is often sufficient to deter half-committed practitioners of the art. Appropriately, ambition is a trait aspiring magicians rarely lack. They'll gladly screw their hands to the surgical clamp, proceed to slit skin, splay tendon, muscle, ligament; and extract their mother-born bones.

At this, many enough can succeed, given a bit of book-learning and butchery. Fewer can set a new knucklebone in place, fuse vein, ligament, and fickle nerve to make a digit which again lives, let alone works and conveys desired powers. Fewer yet can even obtain a knucklebone to implant, for such constructs are precious things indeed.

Every knucklebone is a coveted masterpiece of design, a product of not only sourced marrow and bone, but of steel, stone, glass, and queerer materials beside. An intricate organ; desired by many, afforded by few, and understood in design and manufacture by scarcely any at all.

Only the merest of magicians' fingerbones are commonly crafted today. They are rude tricks. Simple mechanisms, built from rote recipes and fit only for magicians of small power and low aspiration. *** Greater bones are coveted things. They languish, secreted neath silk gloves and jealousy, fast in the hands of aristocrat practitioners and dead sorcerers; rarely used, if at all, but no less valued for their desuetude.

Recipes for great knucklebones are rare indeed, but not unknown. They are hidden in deep tombs, scrawled in the page-memories of incunabula. Magicians devote long lives to the discovery of these recipes, only to hide them away in jealousy, often unused. To craft such bones is a terrible task, in any case, often requiring no milder ingredients than priceless stones, condensates of human flesh, or the power of a legendary sorcerer's stone.

Many folk, be they possessed of artful goals or simple greed, find the hands of living magicians to be objects of supreme covetation.
A brand of criminal exists which will gladly plot to sever the hands of known magicians. † Magicians themselves eagerly inherit the severed digits of elderly relatives. †† The most devious, namely those of Empereaux, oft conspire against their kind, commit murder for new additions to their hands.

It is better, perhaps, to hunt precious bones not in the living, but at their source: The tombs of ancients. An ever-increasing number of knucklebones, artifacts of a quality and age oft unseen outside the heights of rich magicianry, now rest in and circulate over the calloused fingers and gold-greased palms of magician cutters. They are wrested from old complexes and ancient sites at a rate never before experienced, quickly find their way to happy buyers or the inexperienced hands of hedge magicians.

A selection of knucklebones most often found in the hands of cutters are detailed below:

Matchstick. A steel thumb-bone, oft marked with a manufacturer's stamp. Plentifully available in magicians' circles. Some days after implantation, queerly broad, calloused pores form at the thumb tip. When scraped, they produce a bead of volatile liquid, which readily ignites upon a second scrape. The flame is like that of a proper lighter, but larger. Every day, the bone produces sufficient fuel to burn for a half minute. It does not, however, inure the host thumb to the heat of any fire which may burn atop it.
Thundercrack. A porcelain bone, made small for the first phalange and inlaid with copper contacts on the joint. When the joint is popped, it creates a sonic boom akin to that of a small lightning strike. An effective, deafening weapon, but a hazardous one. Thundercrack bones require small quantities of phosphate salts in the host bloodstream in order to pop, and stiffen displeasing if not popped in some time.
Germ. A little glass bone shaped for the fingertip phalange of the ring finger. Contains a tiny, suspended organ and floating capillaries. The organ in question varies, depending on the bone's make. Most are venom glands, cut from scorpions, weird fish, and young serpents. Others, rare versions dug from the oversized knuckles of Naussians and other such sorcerers, contain globules of plagued or blighted flesh. Whatever a germ bone contains, it will readily produce. When its joint is popped, once per day, it will well a liquid carrier for its devoted substance at the pores of the host fingertip.
Woe. A copper metacarpal, thicker than is natural, with green glass joint-ends. Coiled gold rests neath the glass, and a long, concave focusing-plate lies along the bone's underside. Also known as "stoke bones" or "magician's fire," bones of woe are a magician's most recognizable and awful weapon. When activated, a queer gesture which requires locking the involved joints, the bone begins to burst directed, invisible radiation with every heartbeat, clicking capacitively and loudly. This radiation quickly boils water and heats metal. The effect of a single bone of woe is diffuse and ineffectual at range, but scales with additional, adjacent bones, which serve to focus and intensify the bursts. Placing one's palms together further focuses the effect, with practice. A single bone at touch or close range causes sensations of dreadful burning. Two may boil flesh at two meters, given time. Three or four makes a weapon of rare horror indeed. Cutters rarely earn more than one full hand. Woe bones' operative organ will only function with an appropriate measure of phosphate salts in the bloodstream, and will greedily consume them.

Quantity	Damage	Eff.Range	Req.Salt	Zone of effect
1 bone	2/round	2 meters	1/round	A half-meter wide beam, sufficient to affect three body areas. Unchanged by bone quantity.
2 bones	4/r	3m	2/r
3 bones	6/r	4m	3/r
4+ bones	8/r scaling	5m+	4/r scaling
Two Hands		Range	Salt reserves
Damage and range scale above 4 with the addition of a second hand of bones. Though 8 bones of woe are near-unheard of, distribution in both hands is valued, as they add 2 meters to effective range when cupped to focus the beam.		Damage falls off at a rate of -1 per meter exceeding effective range.	An average human may circulate up to 12 pinches of phosphate salts in their bloodstream. Replenishment via hypodermic takes a round.

Author's Note

Happy Halloween.

This one is a total rewrite of an early article, now better-developed after much cogitation. I'll add more bones, in the future, along with a wee table for surgery.

Additionally, I'm actively constructing systems and stats for broader salt-based finger-magicianry, for inclusion in that system doc I keep developing.

I have included generic stats for bones of woe, as they, more than the rest, are least easy to adapt to one's system of choice.

Footnotes

* This is a popular misconception, part of the romantic lure of venturing. Only a fraction of cutters make money substantial enough to be jealous of.
** Tradition and a typical wont for secrecy dictate that magicians perform abscission upon themselves, one-handed. Rarely, a close accomplice or trusted minion will be employed as assistant. Even then, the magician will perform necessary cutting without assistance, for simple, perverse pride.
*** The Crown Academy of Firlund is the largest known producer of knucklebones. Their manufacture is private, limited only to faculty and magician military officers.

† The Holy Inquisition is especially fond of removing the hands of magician assassination targets.
†† As resizing knucklebones is an impossibility, inherited bones are often worn in different positions in different owners. A ring-finger third phalange made for man may serve as a woman's middle finger-bone of the same row. Often, magicians' hands are knotted and painful for precisely this inherited mismatch.