encyclopediamalazica

The Nameless Ones

Page history last edited by D Morin 1 yr ago

The Nameless Ones

A cult from the time of the Human First Empire. It's symbol was a twisted staff.

The Nameless Ones, with their charges and hints and visions, their cowled purposes and shrouded desires. Creatures of fraught antiquity, if the Trellish legends held any glimmer of truth.

DG, UK MMPB, p.175

'a Nameless One...grey-faded robes...hood drawn back to reveal a stern woman's visage. Pale eyes...The staff she held in one hand seemed to writhe in her grip.'

DG, UK MMPB, p.294

'... around its dark eyes was a mass of white-etched tattoos against black skin'

BH, UK Tpb, p.42

'The tattoos continued, covering every part of him. A common enough trait among warriors of the South Clan, yet the style was not Semk. Arcane script would across the assassin's brawny limbs, similar to the carving she had seen in the ruins outside the temple. The Language of the First Empire.

With growing suspicion she rolled the body over to reveal the back. And saw a darkened patch, roughly rectangular, over the Semk's right shoulder blade. Where the man's name had once been, before it had been ritually obscured.'

BH, UK Tpb, p.43

"'Cast out, cast down. In the time of the First Empire which was not, in truth the first - for the T'lan Imass claimed that title long before. They were the left hand, another sect the right hand - both guiding, meant to be clasped. Instead those who would come to be Unnamed, in their journeys into mysteries -' She chopped with one hand, gesture Mappo had not seen before among the tribe's elders. A gesture, he realized with a start, of a Jhag. 'Mysteries of another led them astray. They bowed to a new master. That is all there is to say.'"

DG, UK mmpb, p.649-50

"They came upon the four bodies at the edge of an upthrust of roots that seemed to mark the entrance to a vast maze. The figures contorted, limbs shattered, their dark robes twisted and stiff with dried blood.

...

Nameless Ones. . . Priests of the Azath, if such entities can have priests.

...

'They are known on the Jhag Odhan ,' Mappo said, 'as the Nameless Ones.'

...

'That cult,' Apsalar muttered, 'is supposed to be extinct.'

...

'My master scoured them from the Empire, yes. A task for the Talons, as Dancer will tell you. A necessary cleansing, a plucking of a thorn from the Emperor's side. Slaughter and desecration. Merciless. Too many vulnerable secrets - corridors of power - oh, how they resented my master's entry into Deadhouse -'"

DG, UK mmpb, p.738

Special Abilities/Powers

Ritual of Release

(BH, prologue)

Ritual of Purging

The Twisted Staff

'She raised the staff...The twisting, buckling wood seemed to reach hungrily...growing, filling his world until he was lost in a tortured maze'

DG, UK MMPB, p.295

Sayings

'We do not see in years...But in centuries'

DG, UK MMPB, p.294

Link to the human First Empire?:

'The sheer...frivolity, Mappo. The materials alone for this tome are a craftsman's annual wage. No scholar in their right mind would waste such resources - never mind their time - on such a pointless, trite subject...Look, Seed Dispersal Patterns of the Purille Flower on the Skar Archipelago...And I am convinced that these works are thousands of years old. Thousands ...The civilization that brought forth these works must have been appalingly rich. The language is clearly related to modern Seven Cities dialects, although in some ways more sophisticated. And see this symbol, here in the spine of each such tome? A twisted staff...'

DG, UK MMPB, p.148-9

Mappo remembers where he has seen the script Icarium is referring to: 'seven robed and hooded figures approached. Each held a staff...those staves seemed to writhe...the wood like serpentine roots, or perhaps those parasitic trees that entwined the boles of others, choking the life from them...the twisted madness of the shafts was in fact runic etching, ever changing, as if unseen hands continually carved words anew with every breath's span'

DG, UK MMPB, p.149