They look like ruins, or a monument, or the remnants of some ancient civilization. They are none of these. The Agony Stones are the still-dying body of something that has been dying for millennia.
Spanning roughly forty miles east to west and twenty miles north to south, the Agony Stones dominate the southern reaches of Tythikerys. The formations are massive. Individual "stones" can reach a mile across, and they take the shape of strange, contorted, branching tubes, like the circulatory system of something impossibly vast, frozen mid-pulse and turned to rock.
Physical Properties
The Stones exhibit properties that should be impossible for rock:
Temperature: The stone is warm to the touch. Not hot, but noticeably warmer than the surrounding air. Something inside is still metabolizing, impossibly slowly.
Heartbeat: Press your ear to the rock and wait. After three or four hours, you will hear it: a single, massive pulse. Then silence. Then another, hours later. The Dying One's heart still beats.
Movement: The tubes creep. The movement is imperceptible to the eye, inches per year at most, but they are not static. They are reaching. Toward what, no one knows.
The Weeping: Dark fluid seeps from cracks and fissures throughout the Stones, something between blood and oil. The Tytheri call it Thryg-Myr, the Agony Ichor.
The Agony Ichor
The fluid that weeps from the Stones is the blood of the Dying One, and it has properties that make it priceless to those who understand it.
When processed and consumed, the Ichor grants resistance to pain, heightened aggression, and a reddish tinge to the eyes. Extended use bleaches the skin pale white. The Tytheri blood orcs have built their entire culture around harvesting and consuming it.
But the Ichor is addictive. Long-term users find their emotions deadening: everything becomes muted except the sensation of violence. They need to inflict pain to feel anything at all. Withdrawal is worse: the Dying One's suffering hits directly, phantom agony with no physical source, lasting until the user consumes more Ichor or dies.
Alchemists prize the Ichor for other applications: potent painkillers, flesh-hardening agents, and more esoteric preparations that scholars don't discuss openly.
Why Everyone Avoids It
Both Kadrokans and Tytheri give the Stones a wide berth. The orcs approach only in small, carefully-timed harvesting parties. No one lives in the Stones. The reasons are visceral:
Sympathy Pain: Proximity to the Stones causes your body to feel what the Dying One feels. At the edges, it's discomfort: an ache in the joints, a headache that won't fade. Hours of exposure becomes screaming agony with no visible cause. Your body is sympathizing with something that has been in torment for millennia.
Petrification Risk: Extended contact, days rather than hours, and your flesh begins to harden. The stone spreads from the point of contact, slowly, inexorably. The dragon Melekas learned this eight hundred years ago and has been fused to the bedrock of Ponoigari ever since. Melekas is the most famous victim, but not the only one.
Dream Invasion: Sleep within five miles of the Stones and you will dream its suffering, not your own. You will experience moments of the Dying One's endless death, stretched across eons, compressed into a single night's sleep. People wake exhausted, weeping, sometimes screaming. Repeated exposure has driven people mad.
Animal Madness: Horses won't approach. Dogs howl and flee. Birds avoid the airspace above the Stones entirely. Only creatures too simple to feel the sympathy effect can exist there without distress: insects, worms, certain reptiles.
Consciousness
The Dying One is aware.
Its thoughts move at geological speed, and a single coherent thought might take years to form, but it is conscious. It feels pain. It knows it is dying. Scholars who have attempted magical communication report fragmentary impressions: confusion, agony, and something that might be a plea for help. Or might be a plea for death. The distinction is unclear.
Some theorize that the Dying One's consciousness is why the sympathy effect exists: it is reaching out, trying to share its burden, trying to make others understand what it has endured for so long.
What's Inside
The petrified tissue of the Dying One contains things. Artifacts, creatures, even people, preserved from the moment of the original wound, trapped in stone that was once living flesh. Explorers who have penetrated the outer formations and returned (there are very few) report finding:
- Weapons of unknown design, fused into the stone
- Skeletal remains that don't match any known species
- Chambers that might once have been organs, now hollow and echoing
- Crystalline structures that pulse with the same slow heartbeat as the surrounding stone
What treasure or knowledge might be found deeper in, closer to whatever passes for the Dying One's core, is unknown. No one has gone that far and returned sane.
The Cycle
The Agony Stones have created a cycle that traps everyone around them:
The Dying One bleeds Ichor. The Tytheri harvest it and become addicted. The addiction requires violence to feel anything. The violence is directed at Kadroka. Kadroka cannot retaliate effectively because their dragon-king was crippled by the same Stones that sustain the orcs. The dragon schemes for a way to destroy the Stones. But destroying the Stones might kill the Dying One entirely, and no one knows what happens when something that big finally dies.
Does it release energy? Does something trapped inside escape? Does the sympathy effect amplify into a psychic scream that kills everyone within a hundred miles?
Melekas wants to know. Melekas is not sure anyone should find out.
Approaching the Stones
For those foolish or desperate enough to approach:
From the North (Kadrokan territory): The land transitions from savanna to rocky scrubland before reaching the Stones. The sympathy effect begins at roughly ten miles distance, subtle at first, then intensifying. Kadrokan patrols turn back at the five-mile mark.
From the West (Tythikerys): Orc harvesting parties know paths that minimize exposure time. They move fast, collect what they need from the outer formations, and retreat. They do not go deep. They do not linger. Even addicted to the Ichor, they fear the Stones themselves.
From the South: The Fury Hills and Deadjack Forest provide some buffer. The forest, in particular, seems to dampen the sympathy effect slightly, whether due to distance, the trees themselves, or some other factor is unknown.
There is no safe approach. There is only "less immediately fatal."