User:Viatos/Hollow Nymph (3.5e Martial Discipline)

Once upon a time, there was a particularly dark wood.

On a particularly dark night in this particularly dark wood, a particularly dark man stalked a young girl - nothing particularly dark about her - deeper and deeper past ever-more-twisted trees until at last the girl's strength wore out and she collapsed on the shore of a very small, very still pond in the darkest part of the woods.

But the particularly dark man had been foolish to hunt her in this place, as he found when the ensuing struggle disturbed the glassy waters of the very small, very still pond. From the pond came an arm, and attached to the arm was a beautiful nightmare that rose up before the young girl and the dark man and spoke wicked poetry as it reached out to tear the man apart. It had waited a very long time for its chance to drink deep of mortal blood, and lit only by the dim reflection of starlight off the pond the satisfaction of its appetite must have been a rare sight indeed - the last the young girl would ever see, for as its hunger flared the beautiful nightmare's wonderful visage burnt her sight to empty blackness forever.

Perhaps that blinding buried some darkling seed of the creature's essence within the girl, shaping her soul through endless nights of haunting dreams and unspeakable urges. Perhaps it was simply the impossible aesthetics of the moment that inspired her. Perhaps it was only a story she told herself, to shift blame for her various lackings and hungers to some awful monster she could pledge to learn from, maybe even one day slay and thus restore herself.

Perhaps she never existed at all, and the Hollow Nymph style arose from the core of nothingness that its practitioners believe defines them - perhaps, just as existence is a shell to separate their souls from nonbeing, the story of the origin of the Hollow Nymph discipline is a framework to preserve the sanity of those who question too deeply the ability of common mortals to access such dark and terrible supernatural power.

The exemplar weapon of the Hollow Nymph discipline is Shameless, a scythe grown from scintillating dark crystals with a strange and terrible history of compelling wielders to live extraordinary lives dominated by secret yearning, bringing them the ecstasy of satisfaction only at the moment of death.

Maneuvers of the Hollow Nymph Discipline

 * To see the full, expanded description of every maneuver, click here.

Feats
SMW::off Hungry Glamour

Ravening Beauty