Heart's Scorn

Full Item Description
Heart’s Scorn is a star sapphire of impressive size, easily that same size as the thumbnail of a grown man. The jewel was cut by a master gemcutter who set it in a pendant of silver wire and hung it from a slender chain. It is a very costly piece of jewelry, and it radiates a strong aura of alteration/cold magic.

History
The Lady Givone was a powerful duchess of the Kingdom, her husband an equally applauded lord of skill and generosity. the two ruled for a while in grace and splendor, but soon it became apparent that there was something amiss in the union. Lady Givone discovered herself to be barren and unable to concieve. She sought aid from the High Priest of the clergy, but found her requests turned down, as it was known that Givone was not just a noblewoman, but was also a half-blooded Zehin sorceress. This meant that she was forbidden the aid of the faith for being tainted by heathen and corrupt blood.

Givone was devastated by this blow, but it was not the last, or the worst. Her husband approached her and told her that he had gotten one of his mistresses pregnant and she would bear him the heir that Givone could not. She was shocked that not only did he impregnate another woman, he had more than one on the side. The shock turned to revulsion as he told her that if she wished to stay as his wife, she would have to ‘wear the pillow’ to give the appearance of being pregnant.

Having never been a deceitful person, she refused. It was less than a week before the High Priest, a friend and confidant of her husband, had their marriage formally and publicly dissolved, leaving Givone bereft of titles, property, and privelages. In tears, she was carted away from her home for the last decade, the las thing she saw was her stern husband watching the carriage leave, standing with his new fat bellied whore of a wife.

Givone spent the next decade with the only companion that she had, her elderly foster aunt, a full blooded Zehini sorceress and turnip farmer. The old woman cackled about blood and vengeance, about the old ways when the church trembled and the commoners prostrated themselves before the Zehini witches and warlocks. Normally Givone would have hushed the old woman, but those betrayals had left her soul tilled for just those bitter seeds.

She had but one thing left to her, a sapphire of immaculate size and quality. Her ‘husband’ intended that she sell it to set herself up in a burgoise house and to die alone with. Instead she adopted the stone as her focus, using it to concentrate her innate powers, to grow them and develop them as she had not done before.

On the 10th anniversary of her betrayal, The Murder of her Heart as she remembered it, Givone ascended the Trunome glacier on Mt. Halvas in the north country. There, she summoned a glacied, a mammoth elemental of ice that brooded like a king upon a lonely throne. She spoke harsh words of cold betrayal and retribution, of vengeance and loss. The Glacied sat for a long while, pondering deep within its cold, crystalline mass.

It sympathized with her emotion, and granted her the service of one of its lieutenants, a mighty giant of ice 12 feet tall with glowing eyes of amethyst and a voice of the hyperborean winds. The ice giant submitted and was bound into the sapphire for a term of 100 years and 1 day. Compared to the massive and uneventful lives of the creatures of ice, such a time was short and promised to be full of interesting sights and sounds.

Hell Hath No Fury
Winter fell upon the kingdom, but nowhere more severely than her Husband’s duchy. Trees burst from the cold and the foundation stones of his castle split. The rivers froze solid, ice four feet thick. Givone stood atop Marscone Hill and chanted the words of power, the jewel around her neck shining like a brilliant star as the snows came deeper and deeper.

When spring came, two months late, 3 out of 4 people in the duchy lay perished. Famine had struck when all the game fled the cold, and the castle itself, the heart of the duchy froze so completely that in thawing the stones fell apart. Givone herself was found, still standing atop the hill, but her body transmogified into ice, with her rage spent, there was nothing left of her but cold.

Aftermath
The duchy was left in shambles, the farmers and fields were devastated and the castle was in ruins. A small cult formed around worshipping her icy image, but it ended in mid summer when no attempt made was successful at keeping her from melting into water. The necklace was placed in a shrine, but was there only a week before being filched by a poor traveling thief, the stone has since wandered away into obscurity.

Magic/Cursed Properties
Heart’s Scorn has two powers, the first and most obvious is the doubling of all cold and cryomancer based spells. The second is that it allows any elemental based spell to be converted into a cold subtype spell. Thus a lowly magic missle could become a Freezing missle, a fireball would explode in a blast of freezing cold, and an animate dead spell would give all of the zombies raised immunity to cold magics, or have the ability to deliver a freezing touch attack.

Plot Hooks
Scorned Again - Th cult of the Frozen Sorceress has popped up, the leader of the cult wearing Heart’s Scorn and preaching a gospel of hate against the male dominated society. Nothing is thought of it until a known womanizer is found dead, ice cold. The PCs have to face a scorned woman cult with a strong magical backing to recover the jewel.

Up on the Mountain - The PCs have to find the jewel and return it to the Glacied king, or the kingdom will suffer a decade of brutal winters for its theft. The only thing is that no one knows where it is…

Winter Night - Govine’s Ghost still wanders her castle home, looking for the remnants of her husband, her anger nos cold and calculating. Can she vengeful ghost be placated, exorcised, or must his surviving bastard heir be found and their blood spilt on the stones to appease the angry goddess of ice? What if said heir is a good clergyman, a young woman, or something else suitable good?