And what is your name, little girl?
One of the most elementary lessons in a mage’s study of the occult is that names have power. Mages take shadow names for this very reason, so that others cannot harm them with sympathetic magic — but what is a name, truly, and what defines the name of a thing? At what point does the name “Jane Smith” cease to define the witch who calls herself
Branwen Boudicca? The Stone Scribes believe that a person’s name changes and grows subtly throughout his existence. Only at death, the cessation of existence, is a person’s true name fixed. The Stone Scribes call this the Final Name, and it is more than merely an identifying label that eases the working of sympathetic spells. A person’s Final Name is an echo of that person’s soul, a sublime expression of the sum total of the fate that guided the life of the name’s owner. The Stone Scribes believe that only by knowing a person’s Final Name can you truly know the person — it is the ultimate record of who that person was, stripped of all layers of deceit and subterfuge.
First and foremost, the Stone Scribes are record-keepers. The Scribes treat the collection of as many Final Names as possible as a sacred mission. Members of this Legacy lurk in hospitals, nursing homes and battlefields, places where many Final Names are set each day. The Scribes record these names using Arcane formulae and methods little-known to other mages, usually on the large stone tablets that earned the Legacy its name.
Unlike many in the Mysterium, the Stone Scribes do not merely acquire knowledge for its own sake. They collect, store and meticulously cross-reference as many Final Names as they can acquire, because their founder charged them with a sacred duty he said came from God Himself. By tracing the myriad threads of sympathetic connection back through multiple Final Names, the Namers believe they can reconstruct the Final Names of the long-deceased, up to and including the ancient lords of Atlantis. By learning those millennia-dead Names, the Scribes claim they will be able to conjure up the shades of their distant ancestors and gain firsthand knowledge of the height of Atlantis — and direct tutelage in potent, forgotten Atlantean magic.
Not all Scribes are simple record-keepers, though. When a Namer falls to Hubris, she sometimes grows impatient waiting for death to come at its own pace, and decides to take her victims’ names at the times and places of her choosing. These socalled Name Takers are assassins and killers, ritually murdering people whose names they desire and stealing their names at the moment of death. The Namers despise these apostates and accuse them of stealing souls along with Final Names, not to mention other left-handed practices — but even as the Scribes hate the Name Takers, Stone Scribes fear how easily they might slip down that path.
Orders
Almost all Stone Scribes are members of the Mysterium.
- Some Scribes gravitate to the Adamantine Arrow
- Modern-minded Namers sometimes join the Free Council and scribe Final Names with power tools and precision stonecutters
- Few Scribes join the Silver Ladder or the Guardians of the Veil, since the Legacy cares more about collecting and studying Final Names than temporal power or keeping the secrets of the Mysteries from the Sleepers
- Many Name Takers are Apostates
Attainments
- Memoriam
- Unearth the Stone
- Name-Taking
