Soulstone

Mountain crystals, which don't have much of a sell value, but these particular pieces, all in all 10 pieces have been revised and ground in the past, and now they are perfect spheres, ancient and powerful spells cast to them. They have no special markings on them, they are all pure white in color and they reflect light perfectly as the result of decades of hands touching and stroking them. Some believe that these stones are the hearts of the biggest mountains, which then were ripped from the mountains.

Nowadays there are only rumours about how these stones came to existence. It is said that a mage called Carnevorus, who lived in a great tower, in the outskirts of a great city created these stones. The families which lived in the city, sometimes sent their boys to serve the mage as apprentices. One day then, Carnevorus lost his temper with the current five, helpless boys and renowned of his bad temper Carnevorus then went on a journey to get rid of those boys for a while. He would eventually have to go back, because he was under a contract to train those boys. Travelling for several years, doing research on mountains and then finally choosing ten mountains, suited for his purposes, he - with the help of great incantations and spells - reached his hand and ripped the hearts of those mountains to himself. All in all ten, purest of white in color it's said. Nobody knew, what Carnevorus planned fow these stones, who after getting the stones, returned to his tower, to his apprentices and got to work. He researched the magical properties and their capability of containing magic for years.

It so happened, that one night, one of Carnevorus's apprentices was cleaning his master's room and - being the little thief he was deep within - took one of the beautiful, stunningly white hearts and fled the tower to city, to sell the spoils of his theft. Using his knowledge of the tower and the stories the people of the city had devised, the apprentice (named Frean) sold the stone to a smuggler, who paid a high price for it. After doing this, Frean returned to the tower, absolutely sure that he could never be caught. Little did he know of his master's plan for these stones. Originally, Carnevorus had planned to magically reinforce the hand-eye coordination of his students by copying a small piece of - for example - an acrobat's skills to the stone, a process which according to his experiments worked fine, except that a piece of the subject's soul was locked in the stone so that the skills could be maintained in. Angered by this theft, Carnevorus thought of a way to get the thief caught, and this is what he figured: If the stone could copy skills, but took a fragment of the subject's soul with it, wouldn't it be possible to capture the soul as a whole and force the now soul-less body to answer questions? So Carnevorus began to research on this possibility and after a month full of research and experiments he was ready to test this on live subjects. And who else would be the testing subject than Frean, who didn't have a clue of what was going on. He arrived in his master's chambers, where one of the stones laid on a pedestal. Carnevorus ordered the apprentice to take the stone in his hands and look deep into it's depths and so Frean did. When Carnevorus saw that Frean had did as ordered, he said in a loud voice 'capture', which he had set as the word which would activate the stone's power. Frean, now a soulless body just stood there, holding the stone in his hands, watching straight forward without any kind of emotion, was now fully at his master's mercy. Carnevorus then asked him the question 'who took my stone?' and when he got the answer, he was so angered that he ordered Frean to take his own life. And, without voice, nor hesitation, Frean, or Frean's body leaped out of a window, smashing against the rocks waiting down below.

It was easy for Carnevorus to lie to the boy's family that he had died during his training in an experiment which should have been harmless, but being the poor student he was, he obviously had done something horribly wrong.


Magical Properties:

The stone is so beautiful that all creatures want to look at it (Willpower -roll to resist, hard for dwarves). If someone looks at it and touches it at the same time, someone just has to say 'capture', so that the stone's power activates. The one who then holds the crystal is the master of the soulless body and can issua commands of any kind to the captured, who must obey to the best he can. The captured soul's body can stil function fully and it can speak spontaniously, but he will never be able to feel again unless his soul is freed. He is capable of remembering and thinking, but he is completely bonded to the owner of the stone. It could be called a perverted version of love, without the 'love' part.

The soul can be freed by holding the stone on the forehead of the imprisioned and saying 'release'. At this moment the soul flows from the stone to the soulless body. The victim immediately gains conciousness, but he doesn't remember anything of the time when his soul was imprioned in the stone. If the body dies while the soul is imprisioned, the soul disappears from the stone.