Drum Murti
The Drum Murti are a haunting and enigmatic presence in Dust. These twelve statues, wild-eyed and pot-bellied, stand near the ruins of what once might have been a grand city, and they pulse with a rhythm that seems to echo the very heartbeat of entropy.
Each statue, carved in meticulous detail by a vanished civilization and with a meaning lost to time, resonates with a deep, booming thrum. The sound is not just heard but felt, vibrating through the bones of any cutter who comes near. It’s a hypnotic, primal, discordant beat that somehow hints that all things are in a perpetual state of unravelling.
The air around these statues is thick with the dust of ages, and light warps strangely, casting a ghastly radiance upon the statues. Their otherworldly luminescence lends them an unsettling semblance of life, as if they are not mere stone but something more.
The Drum Murti attract dust quasi-elementals, who seem drawn by the entrancing beat. They engage in a dance that is both beautiful and tragic. These spirits, normally elusive and wary, become completely absorbed in their dancing, oblivious to the world around them. This makes them easy targets for ambushes, a fact that has not gone unnoticed by the predators and scavengers of this plane.
The Dark: The true purpose of the Drum Murti is dark. Some believe that its simply a trap, designed to lure vulnerable quasi-elementals. Others speculate that they are relics of a bygone elemental civilization, imbued with an arcane purpose long forgotten.
A more ominous theory is that the Drum Murti are biding their time, accumulating the quintessence of Dust with each death in their shadow, and they are just waiting for the moment when they have absorbed enough vitality to spring to life. Perhaps they wish to deft the very nature of their plane and rebuild an empire, in a realm where such ambitions are typically futile.
Source: Rip van Wormer, Jon Winter-Holt
