Item
Psychic Whip Rapier
Esprit — it does not wound the mind. It opens it, and lets everything else in.
The second of the two rapiers Bolin forged for Gyllyn at Vlad — kept in a bag for years, unenchanted and unused, until the Minotaur destroyed the pair that had replaced them — and the one that should not exist.
| Quality | M5 — Masterpiece (+8 damage) |
| Enchantment level | 7 (+32 fundamental bonus) |
| Caster level | Unknown |
| On a hit | the target takes a 25% penalty to every saving throw for one turn |
| Save | none |
There is no save. Not a hard one, not a contested one — the blade lands and the penalty applies. An effect that bypasses a saving throw entirely is the province of epic magic, and this is a level 7 enchantment on a duelist's sword.
What it means in a fight is that Gyllyn is not the one who kills with it. He touches something, and for one turn every spell his companions throw at that thing is a quarter more likely to land. Against a creature that has spent the whole battle shrugging off Frolix's mind and Aldor's fire, one scratch changes the arithmetic of the entire party.
In Sobiesansky's last battle, Esprit opened the alchemist's mind long enough for the three Psychics grafted into his torso to break his domination. They turned on him from within and stopped him from taking Charlie Stoneheart.
Its caster level was never established. Nobody wrote it down, and the man who would know does not discuss the ritual.
Gyllyn calls this one Esprit and its pair Feu. Neither name is his own.
The Ritual
Charlie Stoneheart bound Frolix's Psychic power into it, the way he had bound Aldor's fire into the Fire Rapier — but a mind is not an element, and the working ran past what he had planned for. The ritual carried a 10% chance of failure, announced before it began, as the rules require (see 15). He rolled it and it held.
He has never repeated either enchantment. Neither has anyone else — and the accounts that credit him tend to forget that the ritual only reached this far because the blade was not a blank. Bolin had forged this one as half of a pair, for a man who fights with two hands, and what it does is exactly that: it does not kill, it opens the target so that the other hand, and everyone else in the room, can. See its pair for what mana does with a maker's intention when it finds one waiting.