Ichorfeast Candle

The Ichorfeast Candle is an artifact recovered from the Crypt of Maledict's Pulse.

## Description

Perpetually smouldering a faint grey mist laced through with trails of carmine and claret, the Ichorfeast Candle is set into a holder shaped of rusted iron and bone. After asking advice from the One-Eyed Crow by means of *Augury*, Ódóvir decried lighting the candle as a woeful action, and so it was packaged away by Gwyneth and taken back to Amber Run.

## Research

### Completed by Gwyneth

The smoke given off by the Ichorfeast Candle is thick and heady, but dissipates promptly. Nonetheless, it seems to linger more extensively when placed close to creatures, the haze stalking about the individual for a few moments, shuddering as it drifts with an uneasy and uneven gait, before faltering. Familiars and other conjured beings do not seem to attract such attention, only those of living flesh and bone, present and mortal. Smothering the candle with tight-wound blankets, sealing it within a glass jar, hiding it away in a bag or submerging it in liquid, naught seem to stop the smouldering, for the fog collects in the fabrics, in the containers, bubbling to the surface of the waters, trailing listlessly for a few moments before fading once more. The wick itself, from which the candle of red-purple smoulders is blackened, caked in carbonisation, suggestive that it can indeed be lit in the truest sense, though following on from advice offered previously, this is an investigation that you decline to pursue.

Arcane analysis of the object seems to give off a trio of auras, the cerulean fog of Conjuration laces through the smouldering end of the candle, going some way to explain the seemingly unyielding trail of smoke given off. The paired auras remaining seem that of both the school of Evocation, straining at your vision through use of Detect Magic in its ebb and flow, while a cloud-like nimbus haze of Abjuration encompasses the changing weave of magic. The latter two seem intrinsically linked, and through time spent examining the combination together, trying to pry them apart, and comparing them to other objects, other spells, you arrive at the conclusion that lighting the candle, for around the wick it appears to be centred, would create an effect somewhere between that of *Alarm* and *Sending*, in that it would surely wordlessly notify a creature of its ignition, though you stipulate that this still holds the same confinements as the lattermost spell, and thus at risk of faltering should they be on another Plane of Existence.

Despite it, even though the candle remains unlit, there appears to be a sense of bleed-through, and so, like a pair of *Sending Stones*, you suspect that the object may in reality be paired, no doubt to an object similar in design, if not identical. Occasionally, snippets of the other drift through, like whispers on the wind: the scent of something cloying sweet, the echoing creek and groan of stone as snow sloughs from their angular peaks, the crackle of flame, the uneven tear of something wet, the clink of wood against metal, the forceful snap and splintering of something rigid breaking suddenly, the hiss of a boiling kettle, the shuffling of feet against uneven planks and the hum of a lullaby, repetitive and playful.