Difference between revisions of "Haunting Memory"

Latest revision as of 15:01, 17 April 2022

Haunting Memory is a suit of magitech Dragon Armour, dating from the time of the Usurpation. It consists of smooth-polished plates of smooth black jade, many of which are streaked or inlaid with plates of red jade carved in patterns of flame, the two connecting seamlessly together as if they had flowed into shape. The nature and appearance of the suit’s helm is unknown, as it has been lost, if it had ever existed at all.

In design, Memory incorporates a number of the basic features of Dragon Armour, though it lacks the specialized elemental systems seen in Fire Dragon Armour or Water Dragon Armour. In their place, the armour includes a system which draws upon the life force in the blood its wearer spills, reinvigorating their injured body.

In Immaculate telling, Memory is the work of one of Pasiap’s followers, who rushed to emulate the Great Maker before his spiritual understanding had caught up with his material knowledge. The result of this rushed effort was a flawed suit of armour, far inferior to the Dragon Armours forged at the hand of the Immaculate of Earth. But Pasiap touched the armour and its craftsman, and stopped the two from perishing for their failings, instead securing life and artifact to stand as a lesson in the price of improper behavior. The name Haunting Memory speaks to this legacy.

In the Kinetropic School libraries of the Heptagram, a different history can be found: Haunting Memory was not one suit of Dragon armour but two, one of Fire and one of Water, worn by brave Dragonblooded champions who fought against an ancient and potent Anathema when those dark masters of Creation were cast down. The Dragonblooded fought bravely, but the Anathema unleashed a weapon of terrifying and transformative power upon them, crashing them together: in place of two heroes and two armours, there was only one, fused together seamlessly but standing empty, the two souls once there melted into soulsteel to chain the two together. Indeed, the Heptagram folio on the armour shows that the Orichalc wires normally present on Magitech essence circuits in Dragon Armour are, within Haunting Memory, replaced with Soulsteel, the green Adamantine Glass plates bleached pale and smoky. For most students at the Seven-Sided School the lesson taught is one of horror at the power of the Anathema and the strange dangers of their artifice... though occasionally a student, most recently Ledaal Dzuchi, takes a different lesson: before his expulsion from the Heptagram, Dzuchi had cited the armour and the powers which shaped it as the key to unlocking new avenues of artifice, applying the principles of the Silurian School rather than the standard Kinetropic or Devonian School approaches.

At the end of the Great Contagion, Memory was held in the armouries of Gens Kurosa, not depoyed against the Fair Folk due to concerns over its use. With magitech in increasingly short supply, the armour was brought into active service amongst House Kurosa’s scions, the last to bear it Kurosa Noroshikawa. On her death, with her House already fallen and absorbed by the rising House Tepet, the armour too passed to that House. Despite requests from the Heptagram and the Palace Sublime, the Tepets declined to donate the artifact to the sorcerous school or the Immaculate Order.

Its last bearer was Tepet Nessan. When she was lost in battle during the War with the Bull, the armour was lost with her.