The Void Shield

Is this the face of an ancestor, or a machine? It feels like it wants to transform, to fold up and over itself. Do those teeth bite? The mouth seems deeper than it should be, ready to swallow infinite space. Do these angled edges cut?   They will perhaps if the rage of the Conclave of Cold Minds within the shield is deep enough. Cold enough; for this is no hot wrath. Cold enough to freeze hell.   The shield is imperishable, older than any culture record of it. Unmarked by age or stain. No chop or cut has cleaved it, nothing has scarred its scream. No Verdigris or rust of any kind has ever stained its surface. (it spent five decades as an object of worship to a primitive swamp cult of the Northern BlackRiver Plain). It gleams and is cold to the touch in all weather.   It is dangerous to the touch, some claim. For some, depending on the mood of the shield and the person in question, the precise angles of the Void-Cold Rage Mask will cut flesh, albeit only with a glancing touch. They can freeze meat and spark fear in the unwary.   Some say the shield will change its shape or form, folding and unfolding like a steel flower, packing and expanding from some inaccessible space.   Some who wield the steel-blade shield carry it cauled, masked in black, both to make it easier to handle, for the securement does seem to calm, or at least quiet, the Conclave of Cold Minds within its metal world, and to hide its presence from enemies, and unwitting allies alike. For the shield is not always popular with those it may protect, especially the Chimeric Druids of the Mountains of Reality, who loathe it.    

Origins

  Who made this?   The shield came with the Deoth from the deeps of time, from the Engines of the Beothoborg and the metallic minds of the Steel Keeps.   So claim the Algorithmic Priesthood of the Beothoborgs High Deoth, who constantly seek the shield and its wielder, and aim to "persuade" whoever carries it to return it to their care in the heart of that shining shard at the far east of the Mountains of Reality. The shield, itself will not willingly serve them and remains inactive and cool in their possession.   On name it carries is the 'Void Shield' and a handful of sophonts suspect this indicates its origin as some kind of device, or element of a larger system. Something attached or appending to the Steel Keeps which brought the Deoth to Blackwater and the Waste Lands. They claim the Shield was made to protect, not individual beings, but the whole of a Steel Keep, perhaps as one of many such, fixed inwardly to the workings of those vessels of the extra-real as an organ sits within the bodies flesh.   Very crude and likely untrue legends speak of the shield protecting against "Void Dragons" and "Sky Wyrms" in realities unknown to Uud. That only the use of this shield, and others like it, allowed the Steel Keeps of the Deoth to survive the journey they made to reach Uud at all, though what kind or form of danger such mythical craft might face on such an impossible journey, who can guess?    

The Conclave of Cold Minds

  The Shield is known to have within it, whispering spirits who waken only at times and only under the influence of specific types of being.   These voices and personalities speak only to the wielder of the Shield, firstly through dreams and half-real hallucinations in the moments between sleep and waking, and then, over time as their influence deepens, they may speak mind-to-mind, through waking whispers.   These Cold Minds within the Shield are truly old, and wrathful. Though their anger has no heat and passion to it, nor no pulse or unreason, only utterly cold, agonizingly relentless freezing and near-amoral logic. The logic of cold hate. These spirits seem to be Deoth, or something like Deoth at least, but they echo through a bodiless wrathful afterlife in endlessly-resounding rage. And a quiet whispering.   It is the ability to provoke the interest of, and withstand the negative attention of, these spirits which decides how much power the wielder of the shield will be able to access.   They care only for Logic. have no respect for emotional fluffery or last-ditch endeavors. Only simple attritional equations of war are their concern and they measure the worth of the shield’s wielder according to this quality.   This explains in part why this shield is almost only ever used by Deoth and in part, why even among them, it is regarded by some as a Great Treasure, and by others as a Cursed Object.   For those who have fit its icy temperament, it can be a mighty aid. For those more "human", the grit and frustrations of its quiet whispering heart make it a terrible burden to bear, dragging you deeper into its cold mission. Nothing "heroic" about it, quite the opposite.   The cold minds within the shield seem to spend most of their energy, not activating the shield, but suppressing it, stopping it from working at full strength. This lends credence to the theory that the shield is a kind of tool or element intended to work at scales, and in fields of combat, far far beyond our terrestrial realm, and that carrying it in Blackwater is like attending a chess game where one of the pieces is a grenade with the wick burning.   If this is true, then the Cold Minds seek a bearer of total and ruthless logic because only such a person can effectively make the necessary moral calculations about when and where to unleash the shield’s power. That you must be cold to not use it and that if a classic "hero" were to try wielding it, they would unleash its dangerous energy constantly, for this quest and that, with no idea of the damage they were doing to the world around them.   This may also be why the Shield falls frustratingly dormant whenever the Algorithmic Priesthood manages to bring it to the Beothoborg. Because it is currently effectively "still", and not charged with those rare and vital spirits necessary to its complete power and use, and because the minds within it want to keep it that way and do not trust the "High Deoth" of the Boethoborg to make that decision at all.    

Factions Interested In The Sheild

  As stated, "Winter" was worshipped as a God by a primitive tribe within the reaches of the Northern Blackriver Plains, before it was stolen from them by stealth. They seek it still, and perhaps their ownership would be the wisest possible, for they aim only to adore, and never use, it.   Most intelligent Deoth link the shield to the Steel Keeps and many factions of them believe it may be a guide to them, a key to enter one or have some other purpose or quality which may aid their discovery and interaction. The shield itself seems utterly indifferent to assisting with this purpose.   Radical elements within Hulfr, the Grinding City, believe the shield could be appended to their defenses and "supercharged" by their magic’s to make them invulnerable to Waste assault, and have Golem-assisted teams out searching for it.   The Great logician Quix, once battles the Cold Minds within the Shield in a game of pure and relentless logic. He was utterly and publicly defeated and, so the rumor goes, has fallen into a cycle of mania and despair based around the ultimate aim of once again facing and defeating those minds in intellectual battle.    

Its Power

  The most simple aspect of its power is that the Shield is unbreakable, even un-markable, even unalterable, by any force of physics, chemistry, thaumaturgy, or entropy in Uud.   Nothing can touch it, and it may be valued simply for that.   In battle, its surface seems to freeze. Flesh which meets it burns cold. Limbs and blades shatter into freezing splinters on its contemptuous, howling face and burst like shrapnel, lacing the attacker’s own body with shards of their former weapon.   The shield emits bursts of "freezing" dissonance when slammed into the bodies of monsters and hurls them back howling.   Here, sometimes, the shield will speak to its owner. Not a happy occasion for many, the voices in the shield hate weakness, emotion, foolishness, impulsiveness, and stupidity, which between them, describe most adventurers, but they seem to hate Monsters and the Creatures of Yggsrathaal more. Even though they might have no tolerance at all for their current wielder, (a witless, emotional, drooling sot), it’s still better being carried by them than by some damned Orc or other beast, so they may offer warnings of things the wielder has not considered or perceived, or terse and useful information, often in a most icy and condescending way, and with a fair degree of resentment that their carriers stupidity has forced them to speak at all.   If the shield comes to actually "like" (for a given value of the word "like") its wielder, or if the situation simply becomes so dire that it is necessary, its more potent abilities may manifest.   First comes a vibration, a keening, or a howl. The plates of the shield shift and re-arrange. The eyes bleed a vivid particulate energy which gusts from them like smoke but which flashes in the air and burns like sparks.   Then a thrumming, shaking pulse. The wielder must be strong   Birds fall dead from the sky.   Energy. Blotches in the air like spots of snow, or horizontal rain caught in a steel metallic light. But no snowfalls and no rain comes. Fragments of torn reality freeze and burn both flesh and thought.   It is a sensation most akin to freezing, yet it will freeze even the frozen. Cold creatures themselves fear it. It can set scabs of ice in water or blood, like cancer of ice, or a freezing virus, blotching and combining, growing, and enveloping. It feels like it should swallow souls. Bodies burst open like frozen fruit, blood snapping into white icicles which pierce the skin like barbed wire drawn through the veins.   Even the mind burns, a holocaust of thought.   The false-ice coats everything, almost building itself, as if some shape were in its mind to make. Some opal-flashing burg-palace from outside time.   Here the Void Shield can defend against anything, or attack, driving into a mass of foes as the tip of an assault force like a hot poker pressed into meat. A mighty weapon indeed.   And a dangerous one, for its strange, cold wrath works as well against nature as un-nature. The sickness sets in things can poison plants and animals, even alter the weather, ruin environments, leaving behind it a parched, brown, then desert land which can take decades to begin its regeneration. The cancer of ice it sets in things may take extraordinary effort to suppress.   This does not please the rulers, nor the dwellers of such lands, and so the shield is less beloved than it might otherwise be. A bulwark against the forces of Entropy and the Monstrous Hordes, but an Agent of Terror also.