By Deacon Hush, Church of Whispers   In the annals of forbidden alchemy, no object is so feared or misunderstood as the Black Philosopher’s Stone. Known in esoteric circles as the Nihilist's Stone, the Black Stone is the opposite of the fabled Philosopher’s Stone, not a relic of transmutation and immortality, but of disintegration, oblivion, and transcendental undoing. Where the Red Stone perfects, the Black Stone purifies through subtraction. It does not bestow eternal life; it returns all things to the root of death.   To call it a Philosopher’s Stone is already a paradox, for it violates the upward arc of the Opus Magnum. It belongs to the alchemist not who seeks gold or glory, but one who has peered into the void and found in it a greater truth: that perfection is not accumulation, but annihilation. I. Origins and Context The Black Philosopher’s Stone is not a step in the Magnum Opus, it is its inversion. While the traditional work ascends through Nigredo, Albedo, Citrinitas, and finally Rubedo, the path of the Black Stone halts at Nigredo, then descends into a second spiral: Abyssum, Tenebris, Putredo, and finally Nullum, the moment of absolute dissolution. Unlike its red counterpart, which is birthed in crucibles of fire, the Black Stone is born in stagnation, fermentation, and the intentional putrefaction of one’s soul. It is a mirror turned inward, made not by conquering the world, but by surrendering to the absurdity of an inherently meaningless existence. II. Nature and Properties The Black Philosopher’s Stone is not merely an object; it is a metaphysical principle condensed into form. It is entropy made manifest, a relic that catalyzes the dissolution of identity, form, ego, and even history. Primordial Subtraction While the Red Stone multiplies, the Black Stone subtracts. It unmakes what is false, superfluous, or deluded. When applied to matter, it breaks complex structures into elemental chaos. When applied to the soul, it returns the ego to formless silence. Veilpiercing The Stone reveals not through illumination, but through subtraction. By peeling away illusion, it lays bare the root, a terrifying clarity where there is no name, no story, no self. The alchemist must be prepared to face this naked void without resistance. Void Resonance The Black Stone resonates with Nether, the inverse pole of Aether. Where Aether binds, Nether unbinds. Contact with the Black Stone may unravel spells, wards, or even memories. It is a solvent of reality, a true Alkahest. Silencing Effect In proximity to the Black Stone, sound fades, light bends inward, and time feels slow or fragmented. This is not illusion; it is the artifact’s subtle erasure of coherence. Words fail because the Stone draws things toward pre-linguistic un-being. III. Creation Soul Fermentation (Tenebris): The ego is left to rot like compost. One must resist the urge to rebuild or justify. This spiritual decomposition releases the raw psychic material necessary for the Stone’s binding. Voluntary Putrefaction (Putredo): The alchemist must undergo a deliberate Nigredo, not as a stage, but as a destination. All inner light must be extinguished without despair. Pride must be severed without humility. This is not asceticism; it is ritual decay. Netheric Conduction (Abyssum): Aether must be reversed, or burned out entirely. The remaining residue, the "ash of the anima," is then steeped in Nether, the negative field of potential. This is done under eclipse, within the void, or under an anti-aetheric vacuum chamber. Coagulation (Nullum): Once reduced to pure nullity, the remnants are coagulated into a solid through an act of non-will-complete surrender. The Stone forms, not through mastery, but total absence. It is not conjured. It emerges. IV. Uses To wield the Black Philosopher’s Stone is to hold the key to all undoing. Its most infamous uses include: Soul Unbinding: Severing the tether between soul and body cleanly, without residue or haunting. Reality Reversion: Undoing complex enchantments, wards, or illusions by dissolving their aetheric scaffolding. Disintegrating matter at a fundamental level. Self-Nullification: Advanced alchemists may use the Stone to shed their identities like skin, becoming living ghosts or metaphysical blanks. Conclusion The Black Philosopher’s Stone is not an alchemical tool. It is a philosophical confrontation, a metaphysical event, and a sacred heresy. It does not complete the Great Work; it abandons it. To the unready, it is madness. To the seeker of perfection, it is failure. But to those who seek self-annihilation, it is freedom. For the Black Stone does not promise what one will become. It offers liberation from the burden of becoming anything at all.

By Agatha Crowe, Pact-Writer of the Wyrdraev   Boggarts are shapeshifting swamp spirits, most commonly encountered in the guise of hunched goblinoid figures, coated in algae, muck, and reeds. Their base form is described as between amphibian and reptilian, but this is rarely seen. Boggarts constantly alter their bodies through sympathetic resonance with their environment or prey. They are not bound to a single flesh, but instead wear flesh like wet clothes, shifting as suits their trickery. Despite their grotesque visage, boggarts are not inherently malevolent. They are creatures of mischief, mimicry, and liminality, drawn to sites of neutral energy, stagnant change, and emotional residue. Boggarts feed not on meat, but reaction: fear, confusion, delight, shame. These spirits thrive when observed, feared, or loved. Abilities & Behavior: Shapeshifting: Boggarts can assume partial or full traits of those they study. By imitating the aetheric frequency of their specimens, they can align with their resonance and take an identical form. Nest Crafting: Boggarts are attracted to places of abandonment, where there is neutral aetheric activity, a perfect site for building their own sympathetic web. Although they do not build traditional lairs, boggarts gather sentimental refuse, including lost shoes, broken dolls, and old keys, and craft "nests" that radiate sympathetic energy. These nests are both feeding grounds and focuses of power for the boggarts. Sympathetic Magic: Boggarts excel at detecting sympathetic links. A dropped lock of hair or forgotten item can anchor their imitations. The more personal the object, the more convincing the mimic, and the stronger the sympathetic link. Clairsentient: Boggarts are sensitive to polarity in psychic fields, excited emotions such as delight and terror create resonance in the aetheric field when shared among multiple people, this results in an excess of potential sympathetic energy for links to be made. Boggarts feed off this energy, as well as wield it in their magic. Vulnerabilities: Iron and Salt: As with many spirits, boggarts recoil from iron and salt.  Naming Rites: Giving a boggart a name (and having it accept it) binds it to a persona, weakening its ability to shift. Some wytches "tame" boggarts by naming them and feeding them sympathetic energy.  Broken Sympathies: Destroying or corrupting a boggart’s nest can unravel its link to the area, forcing it to flee or dissipate. Be warned: such desecration often provokes retaliation in the form of hexes, curses, or misdirection. Field Classification Tags: Mutable Spirit Liminal Entity Clairsentience Sympathetic Magic User Potential Familiar Aethervore

By Deacon Hush, Church of Whispers   Nether, also known as anti-aether, is the negative pole of quintessence. Not merely its absence, but its inversion. It is the subtractive medium that unbinds all things through negation. It occupies the void between meanings, functioning as both a mirror and a fracture. Where fire transforms, earth stabilizes, air inspires, and water adapts, anti-aether rejects. Anti-Aether denies interaction by severing intention. It is through this denial that we catch a glimpse of the great unraveling of all things. If Aether is the silent grammar of the universe, then Nether is its aphasia, where syntax breaks, memory fades, and time forgets how to flow. I. Definition of the Nether Nether is the subtractive principle that opposes Aether in polarity but not in purpose. It is not evil nor chaos, but unmaking: the silent decay beneath being. As Aether is the invisible cohesion between things, Nether is the unspoken disassembly. It is not destruction through violence, but the erosion of definition, the death of names, the erasure of patterns. To the common mind, Nether is invisible, masked by the passage of time, the wear of entropy, the fade of memory. But to the alchemist, Nether is a reagent as essential as salt or sulfur. For nothing may be transformed that is not first undone. II. Properties of Nether Ontological Unraveling Nether chews on conceptual forms. It withers identity and lineage. Objects touched by Nether become less themselves: a man may forget his name, or a relic may lose its aura. This is called Aphanisis, the loss of presence. Temporal Reversion Where Aether flows forward as potential, Nether draws backward through the grave of what was. Alchemists have used Nether to reverse entropy or unwind time, but always at a cost. The past it returns to is often not the same.  Anti-Resonance Each thing in existence has a unique aetheric frequency. nether nullifies that vibration. It disrupts harmony, detunes essence, and silences the song of being. An object overexposed to Nether becomes untraceable to its origin, no longer of any world. This is the basis for some devices which read aetheric signatures. This is why many dark magics create taint in leylines. Non-Being Locality: Nether does not transmit influence, but erases connection. Where aether links distant loci through sympathetic tethering, Nether severs the connection. Netheric action in one place undoes its reflection elsewhere, disallowing pattern and continuity. Liminal Collapse: Nether emerges not between states, but beneath them, at the root of contrast. It denies the threshold and hollows the liminal. Life and death, sleep and wakefulness, these are not poles in Nether, but illusions. All opposites bleed into nullity. It renders borders meaningless. The soul might leak into flesh, or dreams might burn into waking. This is the principle behind theia mania, haunting, and necromantic resurrection, as well as prophetic dreams and some forms of trans-dimensional links. Entropic Drift: Rather than cycles, Nether follows a deteriorating spiral. Its flow is not orbital but deteriorating, moving from structure toward entropy. While aether curves through the “seasons” of change, Nether peels away layers until only stillness remains. It is not rebirth, but recursive forgetting. III. Inducing Netheric Reaction Nether is not summoned, but invited. It must be given space, allowed to starve something until it begins to feed. The following techniques are used to induce Netheric effect: Entropic Systems: Nether gathers where life recedes and systems fall apart. These thresholds are not merely metaphoric; they are chemical, spiritual, and emotional. Stagnation, decay, death, and forgetting are all natural forces where anti-aether is present. Abyssal Resonance: While Aether responds to harmonic creation, Nether reacts to recursive breakdown, sounds and patterns that fold in on themselves. These are frequencies that cancel rather than amplify. When played correctly, they seem to eat the air around them. Often generated through dissonant chords, sub-bass pulses, or infrasound frequencies.  Contact with Nihilist's Stone: A forbidden inverse of the Philosopher’s Stone, the Nihilist's Stone, or Black Philosopher's Stone, embodies absence instead of perfection. It is a dead crystallization of meaninglessness. To touch it is to feel oneself forget being. Unmaking: Nether does not arise from purification, it emerges when everything is stripped away, until only the hollow remains. Methods such as sensory deprivation, dream starvation, or heavy-doses of psychedelics can dissolve the practitioner’s identity. This emptiness becomes a vessel for Nether. Anti-aether is strongest in spiritual vacuums, real or artificial. These include sealed ritual chambers with all stimuli removed, as well as the Void. IV. The Role of Nether in Alchemy To the uninitiated, Nether seems monstrous, an annihilating force to be fled. But the master alchemist knows: nothing transforms without dying first. Just as the nigredo (blackening) stage precedes purification in the Magnum Opus, Nether must act before Aether can heal. It is the void into which we pour the self before refining the spirit. It is the fall into confusion, silence, shadow, or sleep before clarity dawns. Aether cannot sculpt what Nether has not softened. Conclusion: If Aether is the breath of the divine, then Nether is the pause between breaths. A god not of form, but of unforming. It is the dark mirror of creation, not evil, but inevitable. Without Nether, the world would drown in eternal coherence, never able to break apart and become again. To understand Nether is to accept the silence at the end of every song. To wield it is to embrace entropy not as doom, but as divine permission; to let go, to forget, to undo. In this way, Nether is not the enemy of life. It is the womb of becoming, the quiet mercy that makes change possible. Aether begins, but Nether makes room.

The wind howled across the tundra like a wounded god. Snow fell in razors, blinding and merciless. A woman stumbled forward, arms clutched around a bundle of furs. Her silks were long since tattered, her perfume faded by the days in the wilderness. Her name was Liora, once a courtesan of Dal’Kaldera, once proud and beautiful, now gray and near-dead, her skin mottled with frostbite. She had dragged her son across this wasteland for weeks. He was seventeen and gaunt, but strong in the way desperate children are. His name was Tyr. A clipped curse spat from his mother’s lips. Short for tyrant, she had told him, when the rot took her mind. You are your father’s child.   Now she fell. Tyr screamed and shook her body, but she didn’t move. Her lips were blue. Her eyes stared into nothing.  “Mom! Mom, get up!” “Tyr… It’s a strong name. Wintival would like it. The moon favors wolves, not kings,” her voice was barely above a whisper. Her breathing was shallow. “Mom… we have to keep going…” The corner of her lip twitched, she tried to smile, but couldn’t. The chapped lips and frozen crust of blood made it too painful. “You’ve grown up hard… I- I should have been… Don’t let the world use you, son. It’s taken enough from us.” Tyr began to sob. "I’m sorry… I-" She exhaled and went completely still, mouth agape in the frozen expression of her last syllable. For a long time, he didn’t rise. Just knelt. Just watched the storm erase her face. Something in him split.   And something else emerged.   The transformation was not elegant. It was agonizing… Every bone shifting, muscles snapping, and stretching. His breath turned to steam, then howls. When it ended, Tyr was no longer a boy, and Liora was no longer whole. He tore her apart beneath a deep yellow moon, full and bright enough to illuminate the sky, a striking tapestry of auroras, stars, and deeply shaded clouds from the departing blizzard. (edited)   When he awoke, stained in blood and horror, he wanted to die.   Then…   Bootsteps. Slow. Unhurried.   One-Dog was tall and fur-wrapped, clad in chainmail and wolf-hide. A steel mask covered his face, streaked with a single cobalt stripe. He stood over the blood-slick snow and stared at the feral boy curled in a ball. “...You’re a cursed little whelp,” said the man. Tyr, half-conscious, didn’t speak. He couldn’t. The man lifted the boy with one arm, his fur cloak crackling with frost. “Lucky for you, I like dogs.”   Tyr noticed two more following the man. “He’s cursed,” said Cur-Grin, a wild-eyed man with too many knives and sharpened teeth. He stepped over a puddle of blood and cringed, looking at Tyr skeptically. “He’s hungry,” said Kay-Nine, adjusting her goggles and scanning the prints around the corpse. “And alone.” She was young, maybe a year or two older than Tyr, but she carried herself with the strength and maturity of someone who’d already seen a lot. “You got a name, pup?” One-Dog asked. Tyr blinked. Said nothing. One-Dog tossed him over his shoulder. “Then we’ll call you Stray-Wulf.”  They brought him back to Galcea, the ancient skeleton of a frost dragon, half-buried in ice, ribs forming arches wide enough to hang hammocks from. The Order of the Dog made their home here. Mercenaries, all of them. Wintivalians, some devout, others apostate. They took contracts for coin or favors. They lived without a king and bowed to no crown but survival.   On full moons, they would lock him in a cage in the dug-out cellar underneath the dragon's skull. He’d howl and beat himself against the bars, but when he’d finally give up and go quiet, One-Dog brought him food, and he learned to behave and not attack the Order of the Dog.   He would train with each when not out on contracts or hunts.   The bones of Galcea groaned under the weight of snow and wind, but within the ribcage of the long-dead frost dragon, firelight danced off rusted weights and hand-forged iron bars. This was One-Dog’s domain, the gym, the forge, the proving ground. Tyr, still lean from hunger but thickening now with muscle, wrapped his wrists in leather. His breath fogged the air in short bursts. One-Dog stood like a statue of war, furs draped over chainmail, and that steel mask with the faded blue stripe staring back with no expression. “You’re weak,” One-Dog said. “But weakness is just the body begging to be challenged.” He loaded the bar with slabs of scrap metal, repurposed shield plates, and gearheads from broken siege engines. Tyr slid under the bar and gritted his teeth. “Strength isn’t just lifting. It’s enduring.” Tyr pushed until the blood vessels in his neck felt ready to burst. One-Dog didn’t shout. He didn’t count. He watched, unmoving, until Tyr dropped the bar and collapsed on the cold floor. Only then did he speak: “Again. One day, you’ll need to lift more than metal. You’ll need to lift a brother from the ground. A woman from the fire. Yourself from ruin.” Tyr groaned. Then he got up.   Cur-Grin’s teeth were filed to points, though whether they’d always been that way or he'd done it himself was a matter of debate. He smelled like fermented meat and always laughed too loudly. He trained Tyr in the ruins of an old cathedral, where statues of forgotten saints lay broken in prayer. Here, Tyr learned movement. Flow. Brutality. “Never fight fair,” Cur-Grin said. “Fight fun.” They practiced with blades and fists. Cur-Grin taught him to smile when his nose broke, to laugh when surrounded. In battle, morale was a weapon. So was madness. Tyr adapted well to this, recalling his street fights with the older boys in Glacikaldr.   Kay-Nine trained him hardest. She was lean, blunt, and brilliant. The gang called her “the brain,” but never to her face. She made bombs out of nitre and metal scrap. She taught Tyr how to lay traps, read signs from nature, and track animals and enemies as if they were one and the same. She would have him train blindfolded. “Feel with your nose. Your ears. You’re a wolf, aren’t you?” Tyr grunted. “I’m trying not to be.” Kay-Nine laughed, wild and ragged. “Don’t fight the beast. Befriend it. Make it heel.” She pelted Tyr with snowballs and whatever else was close. “You think the world waits for you to grow up?” One caught Tyr in the ribs. He tackled blindly, knocking Kay-Nine over. “Better,” she said, grinning with a split lip. “Now bite.”   He loved her. Of course he did. Once, he tried to say it. They were skinning an elk under Galcea’s ribs. “I feel things when I look at you,” he muttered. Kay-Nine didn’t look up. “You’re young.” “I’m not.” “You’re still learning to control what’s inside you, Stray-Wulf.” He stared at the knife in her hand. “Do you feel anything for me?” Kay-Nine hesitated. “...I feel responsible for you.” He didn’t ask again.   But he watched her back every mission since.   The years passed like teeth through meat.   They stole from warlords. They escorted priestesses across wolf-infested trails. They hunted beasts in the tundra and raided Emeraldites for their aldwan caches. Tyr grew taller, colder. They taught him to kill. To listen. To think. But more than that, they taught him to belong.   They weren’t just rogues and mercenaries. They were his pack.   He was loyal. He was dangerous. He was happy.   Then came the Dietakas.   The sky cracked. The sea boiled. Ice split and mountains fell. Volcanoes long dead stirred and erupted. Galcea, the dragon’s corpse, shook as the world remade itself.   Tyr had seen storms before, but nothing like the Dietakas. The mountains moaned. The very bones of the world quaked beneath his feet as winds howled with the fury of dying gods. Frostfire lashed the horizon, pale blue flame that did not burn, but froze on contact. The leylines of Templehelm were overflowing with arcana from the shattered barrier.   One-Dog shouted orders, his voice muffled beneath the steel mask. Snow stuck to his fur cloak, his chainmail clinking as he yanked a half-frozen gate shut. "Secure the south arch! Kay-Nine, get the packs! Cur-Grin, check the vents! Tyr, with me!" The wind screamed louder than any voice. A bolt of Dietakan lightning struck the ridge behind them. The sky bled light. Glacial ice cracked. The entire wall of the mountain began to slide. Inside, the skeleton shuddered. Bones the size of ships trembled. Frost poured in through every crevice, gnashing like invisible jaws. Tyr’s breath caught as Cur-Grin tried to hold a support beam up, but it snapped, and the rib crushed him. No scream. Just a sickening crack. Red on white. Tyr lunged forward, only for Kay-Nine to grab his collar and pull him back. “Too late,” she growled, face streaked with ice and soot. “He’s gone. Run.” But Tyr didn’t run. Not at first. He stood there, shaking, frostbitten, unable to breathe. He watched the people who saved him fall apart like bones beneath an avalanche. One-Dog, Kay-Nine, and Tyr reached the heart of Galcea’s spine. They slammed the stone hatch shut, bracing it with spears and will. Then the quake hit. The final one. Stone turned to salt. Bone cracked like glass. And the heart of Galcea, where they had built their war room, collapsed inward. Kay-Nine tried to shield Tyr. One-Dog tried to lift the weight.   Both failed.   Kay-Nine's hand slipped from Tyr’s as the frostfire swallowed her. She screamed terribly as Tyr still reached out for her hand. One-Dog made no sound as he was buried.   The ground cracked beneath them, and Tyr was thrown into a chasm of ice and darkness, shielded by sheer dumb luck.    He screamed, but no one answered.   He waited for death, but it didn't come.    Only silence.   Maybe it was a day... Maybe it was two, but the change overcame him violently. He was not strong enough on his own to pull himself out of the crevice, but the wolf had a will to survive stronger than the weight of boards and two walls of ice.    He clawed his way from the wreckage like a cornered animal. Hungry and mad. He made his way into the unfamiliar wilderness alone. Older. Colder. The world would not grant him a throne. So he would carve one from its bones.

It was the Moonfeast. The longest night of the year in Dal’Kaldera. Silver bells rang from balcony eaves. Holy women in white veils chanted verses to Wintival, offering frozen lilies to her statues. Snowdrifts filled the alleys in silent tribute. This was the empire’s holiest night, when warmth was forbidden and silence honored the chill of divine stillness. Liora wore pearl-tinted silk and pomegranate perfume, her laughter echoing through the upper galleries of Dal’Kaldera like the memory of spring. She was beautiful in the way broken glass can catch moonlight… sharp, dangerous, fleeting. She’d been a courtesan of some renown in Glacikaldr. She knew how to dance through frost, to sip from silver goblets, to speak in courtly riddles. King Drogo Raewyn, the blue-eyed monarch who walked like a wolf through the night, had taken her only once during Wintival’s Moonfeast, an act of passion or loneliness, Liora never could say. He vanished before the sun had rose, leaving behind nothing but memory and the stirrings of life within her. Nine months later, beneath a blood moon that carried whispers of the fall of Wintival and the rise of Zeolix, she gave birth to a boy wrapped in wolf-fur and fear. The priestess on duty looked at him, and then at Liora, and offered only silence. There was no record kept, no royal decree, no coin sent. Only the distant hum of midnight bells and the hungry red eye of the moon watching through frost-streaked windows. She named him Tyr. Short for tyrant, she once spat, in a moment of clarity too cruel to forget. “It’s what your father was,” she muttered, wrapping the newborn in the pelt of a gutted wolf. “A tyrant. Beautiful, cold, and convinced the world owed him everything. And now I owe you.” She laughed then… dry, bitter, unmotherly. The sound echoed like cracking ice across the bare stone of the chamber. Tyr was born under candlelight in a silk-curtained chamber, but that was the last warmth he’d know for years. As he cried, snow gathered on the sills. No one claimed him. No lords came. No coin arrived. There were only rumors and ridicule. The other courtesans whispered behind their fans. "She thinks she bedded a king." "Poor girl… clinging to a bastard for a ladder out." They weren’t wrong. By the time Tyr could speak, Liora had fallen from favor and into debt. The Capitol was a cruel city, and it showed no pity to women without patrons or children without fathers. When Liora was evicted from her workhouse, she and Tyr lived in alleyways, empty storefronts, and beneath the archways of collapsed towers. She still dressed herself in old silks, delusions of grandeur wrapped around thin bones. Her perfume masked the smell of pipe-smoke and rot. She would tell Tyr strange things when the moonshine dulled her. "You should have been a prince." "They'd have crowned you if I had any spine." "Why did I keep you... gods, why did I keep you?" Tyr, all ribs and frostbitten fingers, didn’t answer. He already knew. By age seven, he could beg with a convincing limp and pickpocket without being noticed. By ten, he could gut a rat and boil it into stew without flinching. He made friends with stray dogs and beat older boys with rocks tied to string. His mother grew thinner, quieter. She would disappear for days on end, and when she returned, her eyes were hollow, her teeth stained with cigar tar. Then came whispers. King Drogo had vanished. Lost to the peaks of the north, some said, others blamed the war with the Emeraldites, or a betrayal within his court. Liora's eyes lit with desperation. A storm of ambition overtook her. She stitched together every scrap of nobility she still possessed, scrubbed Tyr’s face clean, and marched up the palace gates. "He is the King’s firstborn!" she shouted through the iron bars. "Older than Remus! His blood is royal!" For a heartbeat, Tyr thought they’d listen. The guards paused. Messengers were sent. Then came the order: Exile. For the sake of peace, the court could not allow the whisper of illegitimacy to take root. If Tyr was Drogo’s son, he was a threat to Remus. If he was not, he was a dangerous rumor. In either case, he and his mother were branded liars and exiles. They were cast out of Glacikaldr that same day. No coin. No escort. Just a warning and a shove into the white. Snow swallowed the road behind them. Liora walked ahead, her silks flapping like torn flags, muttering prayers to a goddess who had never answered. Tyr followed, silent, his hands deep in his pockets, already learning what it meant to walk alone. Above them, the moon turned dark, dead and careless. And far off in the trees, something howled.