You've made many personas since adding the Summa Libra Personae to your occult collection. You've made many a mens. You stirred up more than one pot of gluten and more than one pot of membrana. You have several golems out and about, serving you.
But there is one spell that you have performed only once.
It is very similar to the spell that makes a pedisequos, requiring almost all the same ingredients: Saltpeter, charcoal, sulfur, resin, gasoline, nitric acid, camphor. Human hair.
There are only two differences.
The first is that it calls for only twenty pounds of earth, though still from a graveyard.
The other is that it calls for a corpus humanum.
A human body.
It's not very particular, too, about what kind of human body. The first time you saw the spell, you blanched, called over your golem, and with its help you stole a corpse from a funeral home. That worked out okay, and was better than the alternative, which you've since learned (from those more expert than you) would have also worked: a living person. Not that they would have been living after the spell is performed.
The process is otherwise almost the same as preparing a golem. Add each ingredient, including the hair, to a bowl set on the sigil, running your fingertip around the sigil once after each addition. Pour the resulting mixture (black and stinky) over the body, which has been sprinkled with the earth. Throw on a match.
Boom. Purple fire engulfs it. Noiseless and without heat.
But this fire only burns a very short time, and will not relight. What is left is another statue, like a golem.
This one, however, is much more detailed in appearance. All the way down to the pores and the tiniest hairs, it is a stony, grayish-white imitation of the body that you used in the spell. It is stiff and unmoving, though, just like a golem.
Will Prescott tells you that if you use a living person, it looks like they're breathing, though you have to get up really close to check. However, if you test it closely, you will discover that it is just an illusion. There is no breath, and the chest (despite appearances) doesn't really move. The person is completely imprisoned beneath, which is probably why the book refers to this thing as a vinctus.
Like a golem, you can set a persona on it, and as with a golem it will instantly transform and instantly wake in the form of the person copied into the mask, and will act like them. It will obey the person whose hair was used in the construction. The mask can be removed in the same way.
In other words, it is a golem in every way that counts. The only difference is that you need less dirt from the graveyard.
But you will need a human body.
View Portfolio
Visit Notebook
Send Gift Points
Awards
Badges
Send Email
Community Newsfeed
General Discussion
Sponsored Items
Book of Trinkets
Static Items
Books
Groups
Interactive Stories
Audio
Campfire Creatives
Community Notes
Crossword Puzzles
Documents
Folders
Images
In & Outs
Madlibs
Photo Albums
Polls
Product Reviews
Quizzes
Survey Forms
Web Pages
Word Searches
More by this author