Scarab-of-Night-Turned-Day

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The wicked ruler, Prince Ulcanov of the Shattered Waters, employed a weapon of horrible power called the Scarab-of-Night-Turned-Day. The provenance of the device is much disputed and the whereabouts are equally unknown. Despite the many accounts from the Fifth Isbajath, the eventual fate of the Scarab remains unknown to this day. A common account is that it was shattered by Gidhoniel kab S'ephah with the Sword Wanewake, but this is not well attested.

The Scarab is described as a carved lapis lazuli of exquisite lapidary quality shaped into the form of a scarab beetle common in the Shadevan Delta. The stone is placed in a setting of pure or nearly pure gold worked into the appearance of winged divinities and ancient glyphs, with one winged divinity on either side of the scarab. The obverse of the gold setting depicts the face of an unknown god, probably male, and clean-shaven. The workmanship is of the utmost excellence and the device was observed never to soil, fade, or show the marks of age or wear.

Prince Ulcanov had the Scarab set atop a wooden rod, plated with gilt bronze, also of extraordinary craftsmanship. In some accounts, Prince Ulcanov wore the Scarab dangling from a chain of steel links around his neck.

The cause of the device's peculiar name, the 'Scarab-of-Night-Turned-Day' is attributed to its stupendous power to change affairs as if from night to day. When employed in Prince Ulcanov's chaos magic, the Scarab was said to vibrate with such energy that its appearance blurred. The Dark Prince would dip the Scarab into the waters surrounding Aurice and cause the waters to have the morphological quality of ice while retaining the quality of liquid water. Chunks of liquid water would move atop the sea and the Prince would cause cracks and fissures to break along the surface, revealing empty caverns beneath the enchanted waves. By this means, the Prince readily foiled all attempts at invasion, until the Fifth Isbajath.

Replicas

During the time of Prince Ulcanov's rule and reign, numerous replicas of varying degrees of quality and fidelity were made of the Scarab and held by their owners as talismans to draw and both avert the wondrous and horrible power of the true Scarab which their wicked ruler wielded. These replicas survive in caches, hordes, and private collections throughout Lucacia and the greater world. The ownership of these objects is usually not illegal, but can fall into a gray area of the law as they may be deemed contraband, potentially used in chaos cult worship or worse for chaos magic. These replica scarabs are called Ulcanovite Scarabs.

See Also