Heart of the Fosterer

How to Obtain
  • Clerk’s Ward (Curiosity Shoppe) – Purchased from Vrischika

This strange object is said to be the “Heart of the Fosterer.” According to legend, the Fosterer was a sorcerer who built his empire upon the Plane of Shale many centuries ago. He was rumored to have 3,333 hearts, and each of them carried in it a different evil he had committed in his lifetime. One of the evils he committed was the discovery of how to summon the Sohmien and bind them to his will. It is said that the Fosterer was carried away by these beasts after he invoked them against some ancient foe, leaving only his hearts behind.

According to planar scholars, the Sohmien are fiendish horses, said to have been born from the blood of the last of the nightmare lords. They’re not so much flesh and blood as an abstract given substance. They come to anyone who seeks revenge and bind themselves to them.

They were born from a great treachery at the Gloom Meet, the time when the fiends gather to speak to the others of their kind. The nightmares ride the skies to gather the fiends to this meeting, acting as messengers. While the fiends saw the nightmares are helpful, convenient allies, they had grown tired of bartering with the last of the nightmare lords for his consent to use them.

So the fiends called a Gloom Meet only for the purpose of killing. They lured the nightmare lord there to kill him, and when he arrived, the fiends set upon him. He beseeched the other nightmares for aid, but they only watched, their eyes aflame as their lord was attacked.

The fiends tried to put him in the dead-book — they scattered the earth with caltrops covered with the foulest poisons in the hells, hurled barbed cold-iron spears a league wide into him, and when he tried to take to the air to escape, they turned the sky alight with magick, blinding his eyes white. They struck at him with everything in their hateful arsenal — but no matter what they struck him with, he was too proud to die. They hounded him to the edge of the Outlands, firing their cruel arrows and spears into him until he staggered into the Hinterland mists and died there… or so it is said.

It’s said that as the nightmare lord stumbled into the mists of the Hinterlands, his dark blood left a steaming trail across the landscape. Wherever his blood fell, the Outland itself cried out, wailing like a banshee, uttering the cries the nightmare lord would not.

Less than a year later, the Sohmien rode from the Hinterlands, seeking out any nightmares and fiends where they could find them. Their cries were the same as had risen from the blood wounds on the Outlands, and their minds were focused solely on revenge.

It is said that gripping the heart of the Sohmien and wishing harm upon another will cause them to appear. The Sohmien will answer the user’s call, then fade into the mists from which they came.