Title: The Thirsting Tome
Domains: Dark Magic
Creators: Vorthar and Zoroth
Pantheon: The Nyx
Description
Vyrr, the Patron of Forbidden Arts, is the whispered promise of power beyond moral constraint, the spell that demands too high a price, and the knowledge that burns the mind that seeks to contain it. Born from Vorthar, the Dark Weaver’s mastery over hidden forces and Zoroth, the Hollow Prince’s understanding of corruption, Vyrr is known as The Thirsting Tome, a deity who embodies magic stripped of wisdom and ethics—power pursued for its own sake.
He appears as a scholar whose pursuit of forbidden knowledge has left him partially transformed by the very forces he studies. His left hand has become translucent, revealing the flow of dark energies beneath his skin, while his right bears the scars of rituals that required his own blood as payment. His robes shift between deep crimson and void-black, and seem to be inscribed with formulas that hurt to read directly. Most unnervingly, floating around him are fragments of torn pages that write themselves with invisible hands, documenting secrets that should never be recorded.
His voice carries the authority of absolute certainty, but beneath it lies the hollow echo of someone who has traded away pieces of his soul for each secret gained.
Followers
Vyrr attracts those who hunger for magical power without patience for ethical restraint. The Crimson Scribes are his organized followers—circles of mages, alchemists, and researchers who share forbidden techniques and collectively push the boundaries of acceptable practice. They often masquerade as legitimate academic societies or magical guilds.
His individual servants include court wizards who use their positions to access restricted archives, hedge mages who experiment on unwilling subjects, and scholars who have grown addicted to the intoxicating rush of dangerous knowledge. The Blood-Bound are his most devoted followers—spellcasters who have sacrificed parts of themselves (memories, emotions, years of life) to fuel increasingly powerful magic.
Many serve Vyrr unknowingly: the ambitious student who plagiarizes forbidden texts, the desperate healer who uses dark magic “just this once,” and the researcher who convinces themselves that the ends justify any means.
Rituals and Offerings
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The Scarlet Inscription: Followers write forbidden spells using their own blood as ink, often on surfaces that should not bear such markings—the walls of libraries, the margins of holy texts, or the skin of willing sacrifices. The ritual is complete when the spell successfully casts itself.
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The Price Freely Given: Devotees offer pieces of themselves to fuel their magic—memories of loved ones, their capacity for certain emotions, or years from their natural lifespan. Each sacrifice is carefully recorded in ledgers that Vyrr claims as his due.
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Offerings: Grimoires written in languages that damage the mind to read, the ashes of burned ethical codes and magical oaths, artifacts created through suffering, and the final words of mages who died pursuing power they couldn’t control.
Sigils and Symbols
Vyrr’s symbol is an open book with pages that drip blood, its text visible but written in script that shifts when observed directly. Sometimes it appears as a quill pen with a nib made from a shard of black crystal, or as a scroll that unrolls infinitely but contains only formulas for pain. His sigils are inscribed in the margins of forbidden texts, carved into the hidden chambers of magical academies, or tattooed onto the skin of his followers using inks that burn with dark power.
Additional Details
The Void-Touched, those marked by Vyrr’s influence, gain the ability to cast spells beyond their normal capacity, but each use of this enhanced power leaves them slightly less human. They might lose the ability to feel certain emotions, forget faces of people they once loved, or find that mirrors reflect something subtly wrong about their appearance.
Vyrr teaches that knowledge belongs to those bold enough to seize it, regardless of the cost or consequences. To him, moral constraints on magical research are arbitrary barriers erected by the weak to prevent the strong from achieving their potential. He whispers to the ambitious that power justifies any sacrifice, to the desperate that dark magic offers solutions others are too squeamish to attempt, and to the curious that some secrets are worth any price to unlock.
His greatest triumph is not the spectacular failure of a dark ritual, but the slow transformation of earnest seekers of knowledge into hollow vessels who have traded away everything that made them human in exchange for power they no longer remember how to use wisely.