Score: 141 | 8/20/22 |
Embers are Sparks who have not yet died and discovered themselves to be Sparks. Very, very rarely, an Ember may become aware of their nature, and, depending on their skills, may figure out how to take advantage of Spark abilities while still alive. To do this, they require people to worship them, or they need to acquire a Mantle, to build up their stores of refined psychic energy.
Dark Embers are Sparks whose souls have been tainted through contact with certain nasty critters, or through necromancy. Dark Embers who discover how to exercise their abilities while alive face a very special danger: They're spending their Soul Energy, a non-renewable resource, and they need to replenish it.
Those with experience in arcane magic may take a different path, researching the techniques of liches to learn how to manipulate their own soul energy through arcane techniques. While their techniques will be less potent for the same level of skill as compared to divine Embers, they can be more flexible, and may be more readily augmented through artifacts that enable modulating, supplementing or transforming one kind of energy with another.
Those with martial experience, if not found and trained, will often discover themselves weakened after amazing feats, and unable to to recover their strength no matter how much they eat and rest. On the other hand, if they're regularly involved in lethal combat, they may inadvertently replenish themselves with the souls of those they kill. Because of the fear, rage and violence involved in these deaths, martial Embers will often go mad as they absorb more and more of these experiences, and will frequently spend restless nights dreaming of their opponents' deaths in the first person.
(image by midourney)