Item Seed: Octavian Doom Candles.

Octavian Doom Candles – Google Docs

Octavian Doom Candles

This somewhat esoteric protective artifact is supposed to not really be ominous, aside from the name. Unless you’re a minor auto-scripted, semi-autonomous post-corporeal soul fragment (or, sure, ‘ghost’), of course.  Then it’s a big, heaping serving of Doom..

The Octavian Doom Candle (the origin of the name is slightly obscure) operates as a two-stage incendiary device: lighting the top causes the candle to eventually ‘unfold’ into a rotating wheel of eight large candles (and a second tier of six smaller ones).  In the mundane world, this is mostly used as a gimmick for birthday cakes.  In the esoteric world, the interaction of the flames and the movement is absolutely irresistible to minor ghosts.  They get entranced, get sucked into the center flame, and then get burned up.

And if that was all that the Doom Candles did, that would be fine. The problem? …The only thing that’s getting burned up is the ‘visible’ parts of the ghost.  Which is to say, the random memory fragments and vestiges of personality that got left behind when the original soul translated from this plane of existence to the next one.  The raw post-corporeal semi-stable energy matrix that was supporting those fragments and vestiges survives the combustion process just fine.  All of which means that places that use Octavian Doom Candles regularly are going to find that their local ectoplasm levels are trending upwards.

Which would be itself not such a big deal, except that Doom Candles are turning into a bit of a fad among the sorcerous in-crowd.  There’s a big party being planned in Geneva next month, and the centerpiece of it will be a specially-designed Octavian Doom Candle that will attract every ghost fragment in Switzerland.  And when you get that kind of raw ectoplasmic concentrations appear in such a short time, well, you’re just begging for an interdimensional entity to pop on in and use it to manifest on this plane of existence.

Good luck convincing anybody of this!