Quoted By:
<span class="mu-s"><span class="mu-b">Winning Vote:</span></span> The Litany of Blackthorn / Rose Cutter Combo
<span class="mu-s"><span class="mu-r">39 Combat vs. DC 40 (Narrow Defeat)</span></span>
The weapon in your hands looks like it grew from the branches of an ironwood tree. Gnarled, twisted, and bent, the polished and obsidian black wooden haft splits into four branches that curl about one another in loving embrace. Cradled by the branches, an elegantly crafted goldsteel barrel blossoms from the head like a flower's bud in spring. Half again as thick as your fist, with a one inch bore drilled into the center, a wicked curved thorn sprouts between the roots that woven around the cannon's end. The blade of a scythe some forty inches long, as broad as your hand at its roots and as sharp as a razor along its edge.
Where the gnarled, knotted haft bends to give it the shape of a scythe's snath, the weapon's sole nib sprouts from the haft like a short, squat branch. To hold that much mass, even perfectly balanced as the weapon seems to be, the handle must hook about some metallic core that runs the length of the weapon. A goldsteel button sits on the head of the nib, which you somehow <span class="mu-i">know</span> is there to let you fire the cannon with a squeeze of your thumb, without shifting your grip upon the scythe.
On the butt of the haft sits a goldsteel cap, from which emerges a leaf-like blade as broad as your hand. To keep the balance with the scythe blade and cannon, it must be weighed down with something strong and heavy. If not lead, then the foolishness of your childhood, the hopes and dreams accumulated from a dark history that you put a lid on long ago.
Green fire blazes along the runes etched into the barrel and the blade. In the tongue of the Gardeners, known these days only to scholars and priests, it reads a passage from the Green Tome, the Book of Faith. A passage you fell in love with as a child, one that remains your favorite prayer in battle.
<span class="mu-s"><span class="mu-g">[Chloé 17:9-13] I have seen the lightless depths and the terror of the endless night. And as I walked that lightless path, I had no fear of evil. For the LORD of Light did guide me through the shadows dark, and held the fiends at bay. Greatest throughout heaven are his miracles, worthy of the praise:</span></span>
"<span class="mu-i">Holy...</span>"
The weapon feels <span class="mu-i">right</span> in your hands. Absurdity that it is, forged in the image of childhood flights of fancy that you left behind long ago, it feels more comfortable in your grip than even loyal Tephres. You cannot help but compare it to the weapon the Arbiter put down before your duel, her lance that was at the same time a field cannon. A small part of you wonders if you are not playing into the Witch of Depravity's hands in using this weapon, if it is not the first in a series of dominoes to fall. A path that invariably leads to you serving Anahita, living through all of those depraved and twisted fantasies she described.
