The Thing that Sat Alone in the Dark

It sat alone in the dark, awaiting that moment when something would happen. It sat alone in the dark, its thoughts raging on who would pick it up. It sat alone in the dark for centuries.

Eventually, there came a drip. The ceiling sprung a leak, but it was not a steady drip. If it were steady, it might have brought stability to the thing that sat in the dark. But no, it would drip in uneven intervals and continued to shatter the sanity the sanity of the thing that sat in the dark. But as time wore on, the thing simply sat and waited and watched.

But then, countless years, countless decades, after the light disappeared from the room, a flame appeared. The crack under the door was suddenly illuminated, and the thing that sat in the dark smiled to itself with its lack of a mouth or lips. The door opened, and the group of adventurers exploring the lost ruins of some ancient civilization was confronted by the thing that sat in the dark.

It was an axe, a battleaxe. Its shaft made of solid oak, its blade made out of some unknown metal that seemed very strong- and extremely sharp- when the warrior tested it. The wizard tested it for magic, and it came back negative. But this was soon cast under doubt when the warrior picked it up, claiming it for his own, and it spoke. The thing that sat in the dark whispered in the warrior's mind and wove tales that failed to reveal the frothing insanity that dwelt in the metal. The thing told the tales of its birth, the stories of its creation, the purpose of its forging. But most of all, it told of its power, its extreme power. The warrior listened, and grew greedy for that power, and did not tell of the mind that dwelt in the axe.

They went forth into the ruins and the group saw the power of the axe first hand. They had come seeking a dragon, a princess-stealing dragon, a kingdom-ravaging dragon, a beast of great power and infamous reputation. The axe told the warrior to challenge the dragon, its insanity begging to be shared to its new wielder. The axe told the warrior that it would help the warrior remain alive, and explained that all the warrior needed to do was to sink the axe into the beast's hide.

The warrior did so. He shouted and woke the beast, and challenged it to a duel, waving his worried allies back. The beast smiled at this impetuous challenger, agreed to the duel, and blasted an inferno at the warrior. But he rolled to the side and came up grinning. He charged up to the beast, leaped, and brought the axe down. And the axe released its power, its enormous raw power, and poured energy into the beast, and the dragon exploded in a shower of gore and scales and tiny beats of meat. The warrior and his allies and the princess, chained in the corner, were covered in the dragon's blood.

They took the princess back home, and got their reward, and went out for other adventurers and quests. The axe whispered to the warrior in his sleep, a voice that only he could hear, and drove him to insanity. Of course, during the daylight hours he helped the warrior, and was perfectly helpful. Each time the warrior sunk the axe into some target, it ripped apart the target in some new way. It was mercurial in it insanity. Some times it burst into flames, and the group watches as the enemy burned to death in unquenchable fires, others it turned its bones into air and the thing collapsed, unable to support is weight.

But it never used water, never turned things into a liquid. The axe remembered the drip that had disturbed it for so long and hated the liquid, any liquid, loathed it in its insanity. Blood it didn't mind though. To be sunk in blood was its purpose, after all.

There came another adventure, and the group came to a lake. A monstrous wolf appeared, and the wizard's spell blasted it into the water. The warrior stepped to finish it, and the axe came down and slid through the beast like it would through air, and kept going until it hit the water. Water, it screamed in rage, water. In its incalculable anger, in its all-consuming fury, it tore the energy, the life-force, the soul from the wolf and sent it screaming down its shaft into the warrior's hand. He was blasted ten, twenty, thirty feet into a tree, and, as the tree was narrow, was simply torn in half from the extraordinary forces involved.

The party, none daring to go near the axe, left it there, blade stuck in the lakebed and in water, for the next man to come across.

After a week or two, a man did. He was traveling to the nearby city, and he saw the wolf corpse split in half, the axe resting in the middle, and logic told him that this axe had power. He picked it from the lakebed, and the axe smiled.

GM Notes: The axe drives its wielder to insanity purposefully. To trigger its magical affects, it must have a solid hit on the target- to simulate, if most of the possible damage is given, then the magic is given off. The affect is completely random, except for the fact that it never involves water or a liquid. When the axe hits a liquid, then it immeadiately kills the wielder in some random way.