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The Staffs of Souls' Peril
The Staffs of Souls' Peril were created by Mesandroth Fiendlorn roughly a decade before his final disappearance. There were five Staffs, each made of clawed red and white gold and topped with a black peacock pearl the size of a hen's egg. Mesandroth kept the greatest of the Staffs for his own use and gave the other four to his best students. One was subsequently lost in Pafund Mal; another remains with its original owner, now said to be a lich somewhere east of Cathilcarn. What has become of the other two is a subject for speculation and bards' stories, but nothing is known for certain.
Consequently, for as long as the existence of the Staffs has been known, there has been debate within the goodly temples as to whether they should be considered acceptable tools or traps of temptation. On the one hand, they destroy beings of unmitigated evil and convert their essences to raw magic, thereby purifying the world. On the other, they were created by a wizard of extraordinary evil in order to advance his own agenda, and throughout their history have often tempted their holders into summoning fiends into Bierilon to power their staffs. Not all of those fiends were successfully captured, and some of them escaped to do great damage -- an evil that the Staffs arguably caused by fanning their wielders' lust for power.
The most infamous of these cases was that of Artabanos of Khartoli, a paladin of Ahlrigh who descended from a long line of distinguished knights in that god's service. Artabanos obtained one of the Staffs after defeating its original owner, the necromancer Khalizana Greenfang, and used it to destroy the devils that remained in her tower following her demise. The Staff's power seduced him, however, and instead of slaying all the devils immediately, he tried to keep them imprisoned in the tower to be removed and drained as needed to fuel the Staff. Many of them escaped, causing considerable damage to the surrounding lands. When Artabanos became aware of this, instead of destroying the remaining fiends at once, he demanded that they use their infernal gates to summon more of their kind for the Staff or risk destruction themselves. Although he claimed that this was necessary to give himself the power to hunt down the escaped devils, his temple superiors disagreed; he was excommunicated from the Citadel and ended his years in disgrace, impoverished and dishonored.
At present, the majority view in the Ahlrighan faith is that the Staffs are a work of evil and a spiritual trap. The Athyrians and Celestians have taken no official stance on the matter. As none of the Staffs has been sighted in Calantyr since Mesandroth's disappearance, this is not an issue of pressing importance; however, should he return or one of the Staffs resurface, that might change quite quickly.
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