Alkilith Spores

A vial of Alkilith Spores were recovered from the battle against demons of Tinaemortum in the Greensong.

## Description

After the efforts to extinguish the demonic presence that escaped from Tinaemortum through use of the blade Toil took an adventuring party into the Greensong, they fought alongside a contingency of Atral soldiers led by the Archcleric Jacotin Emym and sent the fiends back to the Abyss. In doing so, Rinn Zelnolar collected up some of the residue that remained - amongst them spores from the Asterliths, the regional variation on the Alkilith.

## Research

### Completed by Rinn Zelnolar

As with all the demons that hail from the 207th to 211th layers of the Abyss - collectively known as Tinaemortum, while the outward appearance of the the fiend is greatly different from that of their more *conventional* appearance (if a demon could ever truly be called conventional), the change is only, quite-literally, skin deep. Beneath a vibrant exterior, the same gore and ichor spawned of whirling chaos and malice exists - and the same appears no different for the Asterliths/Alkiliths, the former so named for the small lilac aster-adjacent flowers that grow across their bark-like skin. It is therefore safe to assume that the properties of the Asterlith Spores are matched by those sometimes attainable from standard alkiliths, at least according to provisional reports obtained through research.

Like all things demonic in nature, the presence of the spores despoils their surroundings, fortunately confined to the internal surface of the thick glass vial in which they are confined. A corruption somewhere between soot and rot spreads upon the glass, making visual inspection of the pale purple particulate powder challenging - until the occurrence of their more striking property - a spark of levinous charge, likewise lilac-hued, that seems to crackle between the suspended spores with sudden, dimly-illuminating vigour, burning clear the inside of the vial. Manipulation of the vial, such as inversion, rotation, or at the risk of particular boldness, shaking the vial, seems to increase the frequency of this occurrence. When examined with *Detect Magic*, this flash of energy does not register with the School of Evocation as one might expect, but rather the School of Conjuration - as well as pulsing with a more significant fiendish presence, even for just a moment before faltering, when under scrutiny from *Detect Evil and Good.* Nonetheless, and fortunately, this surge seems insufficient in scale to achieve anything.

It seems, however, that given enough time it might well be. After a week, the number of spores in the vial has increased slightly, somewhere between a third and half. After another week, twice that, the starting number more than doubled, seemingly formed spontaneously, but after a time you suspect that instead the latent connection to the Abyss adds more to the number. The next time the purple lightning comes, it does so with a bright flash, lingering for a little longer still before fading once more. Much as every gardener knows that they must remove every trace of the root from a weed, lest it return, the spores seem particularly pernicious, and released en masse with the creatures destruction - seeding their return, or at least the creation of another such creature. This transition, from spore to demonic creature however, appears to require an organic substrate - a matter in which the spores are not picky - but when contained within an inert inorganic material, they cannot seem to progress past this point. As such, it can be speculated that the best way to manage Alkiliths is to banish them in place of destroying them, although through experimentation with the proliferating spores find that application of radiant energy seems to eradicate them definitively, without leaving a trace. It can therefore be theorised that it through this method that other demons may start the degradation of the Planes, for any one demon, if tainted in such a manner left undisturbed for a time, might be able to erode the barriers between the location and the Abyss, warping their surroundings into the twisted appearance of their native layers, both by their own presence, and that of the Alkiliths that they seed.