Invoking the Eyeless Face

Cost: 60m Target: Caster Outside Creation, Elsewhere, lies a vast, longbanished intelligence: the Eyeless Face. In the time since the Solars banished it and its race from the world, its once-raging anger has cooled and frozen into an icy, abiding hatred. The Eyeless Face cannot escape the perfect bindings placed upon it, and though its servant-limbs are bound to the will of its jailers and may be pulled from its prison at whim, the behemoth itself cannot—must not—be released by external forces. Nevertheless, by the end of the First Age, its jailers' heirs had found a use for it.
Target: 60m Target: Caster Outside Creation, Elsewhere, lies a vast, longbanished intelligence: the Eyeless Face. In the time since the Solars banished it and its race from the world, its once-raging anger has cooled and frozen into an icy, abiding hatred. The Eyeless Face cannot escape the perfect bindings placed upon it, and though its servant-limbs are bound to the will of its jailers and may be pulled from its prison at whim, the behemoth itself cannot—must not—be released by external forces. Nevertheless, by the end of the First Age, its jailers' heirs had found a use for it.

The sorcerer makes the familiar pool of oil used to call forth the lesser and greater minions of the Eyeless Face, but instead of pulling anything out, she enters it herself. An hour passes, and she emerges. changed. Though she remains recognizable as the person she was, the skin of her body darkens and grows slightly reflective, while the skin of her face pales. Her eyes become sunken orbs of white as her pupils and irises vanish. She unconsciously mutes her motions, and her posture grows unnaturally still. At the back of her mind, she hears whispered hatreds and seductive assurances of her own superiority. While under the effects of the spell, she benefits from the following:

• If her Compassion is 3 or greater, she need no longer fail Compassion checks to avoid adhering to that Virtue. If Compassion is the Virtue associated with her Virtue Flaw, however, she automatically gains a point of Limit in situations where she would have had to roll.

• Calling forth a batch of greater minions of the Eyeless Face no longer murders any lesser minions she had under her power, and vice versa, though she may still have only one batch of greater minions and one batch of lesser at any one time. Lesser minions under her power begin to heal as mortals.

• The sorcerer gains perfect knowledge of the location of each of her greater and lesser minions, as well as peripheral awareness of their muted, enslaved hopes and fears. If anyone addresses one of her minions as if it were her, she knows it instinctively.

• By spending one mote, the character may shift her senses into the body of any of the minions of the Eyeless Face under her power. While this power is in effect, if the subject is a greater minion, she may speak in her voice through its mouth.

• By spending 20 motes, she may usurp the body of any of the minions of the Eyeless Face under her power, effectively taking its place. Her old body crumbles to dust while her Exaltation and both her souls depart, traveling instantly to her new body and bonding with it as it shifts in form to match her appearance. This journey/transformation moves only the sorcerer herself and not her apparel or any of her belongings. It breaks any artifact attunements she has but otherwise has no long-lasting side effects of which the Solars of the First Age were aware.

Invoking the Eyeless Face lasts until it is subject to Adamant Countermagic. During the late First Age, rumors persisted of another spell, which allowed sorcerers to use the effects of Invoking the Eyeless Face on each others' minions. These rumors made it into at least three surviving pieces of popular fiction written by Terrestrial Exalted during the early Shogunate period, detailing the horrors of the First Age and the infighting between the Solar Anathema. No records confirm the spell's existence, however, not even The Book of Three Circles itself.