My apprentice, enclosed within these texts you will find much that will aid you in your mission for our Lady and the Lord of Silence. Several of the rituals you have practiced before, while others you must teach yourself. You will find that the best way to learn in our line of work is experience, and as long as you stay close to the shadows you will have ample opportunities to train.
The knives you have fashioned for yourself will be your greatest friends in the time to come as the tools of your trade. You will notice that some of the rituals I have described require the use of athames, the ritual blades of the ancient Edrys priests. These have tasted the blood of thousands of innocents and are so in tune with the Abyss that they seem to bleed darkness, carved as they were with death, blood, tears and devotion of many faithful. These are able to rend the skin of reality and empower the grandest of rituals.
Now turn the pages of this book and be enlightened, son.
Rituals
Shadowmancy
The Abyss is darkness, shadow made manifest. Thus we have power over darkness, as its harbingers. It is possible to direct a person's shadow with lethal intent, drawing out their life force as fuel for your designs. This art is called shadowmancy, and it is an ancient one, one that has its origin before even the birth of the cthonic gods from the primordial darkness.
Manipulating the shadows will allow you to create lethal apparations of cold and smoke, and then use these apparations as powersources in the rituals of daemon-summoning.
Shadowmancy requires that you carve ancient runes into the flesh of your chosen sacrifices and invest some of your own energy into it, and then when night falls their shadow will rise up and consume them, before coming under your dominion.
Daemon summoning
The summoning of daemons is an essential ritual in our work, and one you will have to learn. You can use your ritual daggers to carve the true name of daemons into fulgurites, the crystals of magical power so abundant in this city. You have been given a few of my fulgurites, that our Lady of Sin bestowed upon me when we made our covenant.
The fulgurite, once it has been consecrated with the name of a daemon, must be placed within a circle of tar. Depending on the alignment of the daemon you wish to summon, different offering must be made to charge the fulgurite with the right occult power. A daemon of
Graz'zt will require sensations, overindulgence and hedonism, a daemon of Yeenoghu will require mindless savagery, butchery and blood spilt in anger while daemons of Zuggtmoy are not so much summoned as they are grown, and the rituals to create them are far more intricate. The daemons of our Lord of Silence,
Orcus, require simply death. They require something becoming nothing. However, the release of the darkness within mortals is pleasing to all daemons, and trying to summon daemons during times of war, famine and strife is much easier than summoning daemons during times of peace and plenty.
Once a daemon has been summoned, you must bind it to your will. Daemons obey strange nightmare laws, but they all have a desire to experience reality, to experience the material plane rather than the nothing-realm they sprung from. Bargains can be made with them, but only make such bargains if you know you have a way to control the daemon and keep it cowed. Knowing the true name of a daemon is an easy way of achieving such a feat, as knowing their true names give you power over them. I have taught you the names of the daemons you are to summon, these are all part of the covenant and know their part in the plan of our Lady of Sin.
Binding a daemon to your will without knowledge of their true name or some way of permanently destroying them is virtually impossible, unless you can promise them something that makes them prefer to leave you alive or at least ignore you.
Daemons, like other elementals, cannot exist in our world without continually receiving abyssal energy to sustain them. The fulgurite you summoned them with will give them energy for a time, but it will eventually run out. When it runs out, the daemon will have to find another way to sustain itself. A daemon of Orcus may flee to a graveyard and draw its sustenance from the dead there, while a daemon of Graz'zt may seek out a brothel, a daemon of Yeenoghu a battlefield and a daemon of Zuggtmoy a place of rot and decay. If a daemon can not find enough ambient abyssal energy, it will create its own, normally through intensely violent means.
There are three alternatives to this however. The above apply to daemons who have crossed our world without a specific goal, but daemons that are bound to a pact or daemons that possess a mortal or an item can stay on the material plane until their pact is completed or until their mortal shell is destroyed. A lot of energy and control is required to form such a pact, but a daemon so bound will pursue its prey until it is destroyed or the pact is finished. Possession will allow a daemon to maintain its physical form, until the physical form is destroyed, either by the roaring abyssal energies within the daemon itself or by an enemy.
Summoning a daemon thus requires that you carve a circle of power, carve its true name in a fulgurite and perform a ritual that provides it with ample abyssal energy.
Necromancy
Our necromancy is not that of wizards, who reanimate corpses with arcane energy, ours is more pure than that. Flesh and bones, having relinquished their souls and identities, belong to Orcus. Ancient words of power will allow you to spread primordial shadows into corpses and skeletons, reanimating them to fight by your side. The process of creating these Orcusian legions is less intensive than summoning daemons, but these undead warriors will be less powerful than daemons.
The advantage to our way of necromancy is that it is more permanent and gives you more control over your reanimated corpses. While the necromancy of those "necromancers" in the Thundertower allows them to maintain only a dozen at a time, you can control scores and scores, though it takes you longer time to finish your rituals.
The ritual must be conducted at midnight, when the shadows are longest and the abyss has most power, and you must cut the marks of Orcus into their graves. Go into a trance and call on the power of our dark lord, and the shadows will rise up with flesh and bone.
Taking someone's face
Orcus is a god of death in al its forms, including the death of the self. Killing someone's identity and taking their face for yourself is worship of our god of silence, and leaves your victim as a faceless puppet of flesh and bone to bend as you please. This ritual requires the use of an athame, as it is a powerful ritual. Once you have taken their face you can don and doff it as you please, as well as speak in your victim's voice and steal their memories when it is needed. Your victim will be made into a ghoul, an undead creature that has lost its identity and is only a slathering, furious creature that has forgotten its own name and purpose. Such a creature can be easily directed by one of superior will.
The ritual requires that you incapacitate your victim and cut off their face with an athame will chanting words of power. Once the face has been cut off it must be consecrated with abyssal runes, and a small hole in reality must be cut to allow the darkness to infect both the face and the victim, so the face may become a powerful tool to you and the victim a ghoul under your command.
Force answers from the dead
It is possible to speak with the remnants of souls bound to corpses with divine magic, but our cthonic magic is stronger because it allows us to force answers from the dead. Using an athame you can cut into the skin of reality and summon forth an apparition born from the old memories and personality of the dead. This apparition can be cut up with an athame, forcing it to relinquish its memories and answers.
This ritual requires the corpse of the one you wish to question and an athame.
Separate a soul from a dead body
Souls have a tether to their mortal body immediately following death that grows fainter and fainter in the minutes after death but does not fully dissappear until centuries later. This tether allows the soul and the body to be linked together again in resurrection. The tether is abhorrent to Orcus, a way for that which is dead to return to life, and so our Lord of Silence bids it to be cut.
The tether belongs to the realm of the divine, which means it is weaker than our abyssal power. You can, with a powerful surge of magic, charge the anathame with the power of the grave and cut the tether.
This will prevent the ressurection of the corpse, unless a god intervenes directly.
Cutting a portal to the Shadowfell
Now my son, you know the Shadowfell even better than I do. You know that it is a domain of death and dread, and a dimension that is pleasing to our lord. The Shadowfell is parallell to our own world, and it can be very useful both as a source of power for great rituals and a place to escape to or circumvent defences in the material world.
Using an athame, one can cut a temporary rift in reality to step into the Shadowfell. This requires a burst of magical energy to charge the athame.
Cutting a hole into a dream
Dreams belong to the world of thought and memory, and darkness hold sway over some of these dreams. You can cut a hole into someone's dream and fill it with darkness, tormenting the person in a terrible nightmare. If you can fill their dreams with enough darkness and shadow, and use their own abyss against them, you can kill their personhood from inside their sleep, rendering them as little more than empty chalices filled with poison
But be careful. Dreams are realms of metaphor, and if the person whose dream you are in regains control it will be very painful for you, as they will throw you out again. And when you open up someone's mind, there is no telling what might follow you. You might bring your own daemons with you, but there are many things that can follow you and take charge of the dream.
This ritual requires an athame, prodigious abyssal energy and some mark from your victim, a lock of hair or an important artefact connected to them.
Teleport
With an athame, it is possible to rend the skin of reality between to points, and instantaneously walk between the two. Doing this one moves through the formlessness of the Abyss, which forms itself to give one a path to walk between to places in the material plane.
Teleportation requires that one charges the athame with abyssal energy, and then one simply has to visualize where one wishes to travel and speak words of cthonic power.
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