…#1: Remember that murder is still a crime
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The Doclopedia #1,878
Seven Bad Axes: Alifa’s Bloodletter
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Now we come to the axe of Alifa Al Saakor, one of the more tragic cases we have. As you can see, it is a simple woodcutter’s axe, plain and unadorned by either artwork or magic. Despite being a very common axe, it still took the lives of 15 men.
Alifa Al Saakor was sold into marriage by her farther when she was 14 years old. Her husband was 20 years her senior and wealthy. He was also a cruel man who constantly abused her both physically and mentally. Alifa was kept a prisoner in their home. Her only friend was her maid, Tarin. It was this maid that provided the story to the authorities once Alifa began her killing spree.
As her third anniversary drew near, Alifa grew desperate to escape from her husband. According to Tarin, Alifa began begging to the gods, starting with the God of Life and working her way on down. No god answered her pleas. No god, that is, until she got to the God of Death. He answered her prayers by telling her that she would become an instrument of death. She would be able to escape her husband, but her debt would not be satisfied until 15 men had died a bloody death at her hands. Then he told her to go to the kitchen, where she would find what she needed.
Going to the kitchen, she looked at all the knives, but that is not what she needed. Then she saw the axe the cook used to split wood for the oven. She picked it up and immediately began to change.
Tarin said that the change made Alifa several inches taller, much more muscular and her eyes blood red. Despite her fear, Tarin followed her mistress into the husband’s study, where Alifa chopped at him until he was unrecognizable. Then she jumped from the 3rd floor window and ran off into the night, axe in hand.
That night, Alifa killed 14 more men, including her father, both her brothers and the youngest son of the Caliph. She killed her final victim on the Great Eastern Bridge, then dropped the axe and, seeing what she had done as she transformed back to normal, threw herself off the bridge.
Despite a week long search ordered by the Caliph, her body was never found. Perhaps she was eaten by crocodiles, but I prefer to think that the poor tortured girl survived and went somewhere to live out her life in peace.
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The Doclopedia #1,879
Seven Bad Axes: DeeGak’s Icebringer
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As you can see by the ripples, our next axe is surrounded by a sphere of extremely hot air. That is because left alone, this axe would lower the temperature for several yards around it until it was just above freezing. This is one of the most powerful enchanted weapons in the whole museum, and that’s saying something.
Far to the north, in the Frozen White, live the ice demons, terrible creatures made of living ice. Their very touch can chill a person until they suffer frostbite or worse. They hate not only the warm blooded, but each other. Their icy homeland is a constant battlefield.
One ice demon, DeeGak, was bigger and more skilled than any of the others, and he conquered vast areas of the Frozen White, subduing those he did not kill outright. But DeeGak wanted more. He wanted to leave the ice and head south to where the warmbloods lived. With this desire burning in his mind, he summoned forth all of the shamans under his rule, telling them to find both a way for him to survive in the warmer south and a great weapon for him to use.
After a month of rituals, spells and incantations, the shamans presented DeeGak with his axe. They told him that it would not only keep a area around it freezing cold, but that it would kill warmbloods with even the slightest cut. They also told him that the area of cold given off by the axe would strengthen and heal all icebloods within it.
Armed with this mighty weapon, DeeGak took his six fiercest warriors and headed south. After many days travel, they came to first the barren tundra, then the Great Norther Forest. Here, they killed any creature they could that was bigger than a rabbit. Eventually, the came to the frontier of the Barbarian Lands.
DeeGak and his warriors ravaged the land, killing hundreds. Even the slightest nick from his axe would cause freezing to spread rapidly, killing a man within a minute. Even when the warmbloods managed to wound an ice demon, the wound would heal quickly. DeeGak felt invincible.
But as often happens with magic, greater magic was soon found. When DeeGak attacked a walled barbarian town, he and his men felt first the pain of hot pitch poured upon then, and then the incredible heat of a Rain of Fire spell. The ice demons melted into a great pool of cold water. Even then, the pool soon began to form into a giant ice demon, and may well have succeeded, had not the barbarians dragged the axe far away from it.
Eventually, they brought the axe to civilized lands, where many attempts were made to destroy it, all in vain. So now it resides here, thousands of miles and a heat bubble away from any ice demon.
