The statue of the Madonna has started weeping blood at the Church of St Mary. The church is a local landmark, brooding on the hill as it does. Made of a dark stone turned darker by pollution it has a strangely intimidating quality about it. Inside, the beautiful stained-glass images provide a stark contrast to the grey stone and dull brown woodwork. The Madonna itself is a vibrantly coloured statue with rich gilt detail rumoured to have been smuggled in from Hungary in the last century.
Possibilities
1 Local occultists have magically placed a body inside the statue as a kind of sick joke. The spell keeps the body fresh, but the wounds inflicted upon it during the ritual killing continue to leak blood into the remains of the cavity inside the statue. The blood level has reached the only apertures in the statue and so the statue cries blood.
2 The statue is a medieval artefact, originally made in the shape of a tall man with the face of a squid, created by heretical wizard Jan Zykar from the town of Stregoicavar. Just before the Muslim destruction of the town in 1526 Zykar left the town and took his statue with him. Zykar remodelled the exterior of the statue prior to reaching Budapest. There he died in 1576 in unknown circumstances. The Madonna was transferred to The Church of Our Lady in Budapest where it remained until 1856 when it was sold to the present church owners by an unscrupulous and thoroughly scared priest whose research into the history of the church had revealed his imminent doom.
Every 70 years it requires a sacrifice. Its method of obtaining the sacrifice is to magically drain blood from its owner; the priest of the church. The priest gets weaker and weaker until he dies. However, Zykar’s remodelling resulted in a deficiency in the statue’s ability to drain blood and some appears around the Madonna’s eyes. Any detailed examination of the statue reveals the remodelling work that hides the original horror beneath the mask.
3 The statue itself is not weeping blood. The blood that appears on the face of the statue has been dripping from a dead body up in the rafters of the church. If investigations do not reveal this to be the case then after a couple more days the blood stops. The next ‘miracle’ is a smell of rotting that permeates the church.
Eventually somebody realises the true cause and the corpse is discovered. The body is that of a local dignitary thought to have been on business abroad. His wrists are cut.
© Ric Norton
Possibilities
1 Local occultists have magically placed a body inside the statue as a kind of sick joke. The spell keeps the body fresh, but the wounds inflicted upon it during the ritual killing continue to leak blood into the remains of the cavity inside the statue. The blood level has reached the only apertures in the statue and so the statue cries blood.
2 The statue is a medieval artefact, originally made in the shape of a tall man with the face of a squid, created by heretical wizard Jan Zykar from the town of Stregoicavar. Just before the Muslim destruction of the town in 1526 Zykar left the town and took his statue with him. Zykar remodelled the exterior of the statue prior to reaching Budapest. There he died in 1576 in unknown circumstances. The Madonna was transferred to The Church of Our Lady in Budapest where it remained until 1856 when it was sold to the present church owners by an unscrupulous and thoroughly scared priest whose research into the history of the church had revealed his imminent doom.
Every 70 years it requires a sacrifice. Its method of obtaining the sacrifice is to magically drain blood from its owner; the priest of the church. The priest gets weaker and weaker until he dies. However, Zykar’s remodelling resulted in a deficiency in the statue’s ability to drain blood and some appears around the Madonna’s eyes. Any detailed examination of the statue reveals the remodelling work that hides the original horror beneath the mask.
3 The statue itself is not weeping blood. The blood that appears on the face of the statue has been dripping from a dead body up in the rafters of the church. If investigations do not reveal this to be the case then after a couple more days the blood stops. The next ‘miracle’ is a smell of rotting that permeates the church.
Eventually somebody realises the true cause and the corpse is discovered. The body is that of a local dignitary thought to have been on business abroad. His wrists are cut.
© Ric Norton
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