Pullus



Pullus studied under his master Klin the Elder with his brother Luxus. The main focus of his studies was on what he called the "darkness" of people's hearts. He devised methods to extract darkness from people's hearts, cultivate darkness in lighter hearts and suppress the darkness within a dark heart.

Pullus defined darkness as "the propensity for the heart to desire that which it cannot have and the pride which it has for what it controls." His studies showed that darkness is not totally a moral or personality matter. He found darkness to be a physical substance that could "fill" hearts with power and desire. It had a tendency to cause change in bodily appearance and emotion.

A large theme of Pullus's work was the study of how hearts became full or overcome with darkness and how to resist such a transformation.



Pullus also did many experiments on extracted darkness. Contact with a weak concentration of darkness could cause corruption including graying of the skin, black eyes, aching, delusions of grandeur and mental instability. Direct contact with purified darkness was deadly unless an immunity was first built up. Purified darkness steals warm from the body and infects the heart. Pullus built up his immunity with regular injections of dilluted darkness.

Darkness absorbed electromagnetic radiation and thermal and stored it up to certain energy density. Once the energy density threshold was breached the stored energy was released as an explosion of energy.

Pullus was approached by many for psychotherapy. He conducted interviews and rated each on what became known as the Pullus Scale. A 0 on the scale was a totally light heart. A 6 was a totally dark heart. Either pole was seen as dangerous to mental and physical health. A balanced rating of 3 was seen as healthy. Those rated with 0's were given injections of darkness and those with 6's had darkness extracted and were told to stay in the light of the Sola for longer.

Extraction
Pullus received many fresh hearts donated by the people of Winterden and students of the Academy as all students and instructers were required to donate their remains to science and research. He damaged very few and released all that he could to the Fae after he was done with them. The hearts were stored in jars in a solution to preserve them and resist their pull to the Etherworld. The Fae were used to the lack of hearts from the Academy and were glad that Pullus took as much care as he did with them.

His first hurdle was how to extract darkness from a heart and store it. Any attempts to cut open the hearts failed. A heated heart became more reactive to any stimulus but still yielded no opening for the darkness or even the light to be extracted. Experiments with Soul Gems were completely fruitless at pulling darkness out of the heart although the heart storage solution was improved.

The final process was discovered by accident by Pullus's apprentice Frack. He had forgotten to remove a set of hearts from over the heating flames. When he went to replace the hearts on the storage racks he feared they would be too hot so he placed them in the Academy's cold storage room to chill. When he returned to the cold storage room the hearts appeared to be sweating dark and light droplets.

Pullus, Frack and his other apprentice Henris eventually replicated the procedure and realized it was the shock from the intense light of the fire to the complete darkness of the cold storage room that opened up the hearts. Pullus refined the process and eventually was able to extract the darkness and light from the hearts.

The darkness and light flowed out together from the heart and destroyed one another until only one remained. If the heart held mostly light, what remained of the solution was a bright glowing wispy material that quickly dissolved into the air. If the heart held a majority of darkness, the remains of the solution would be a dark sticky purplish black substance that would disappear if not stored in a dark place quickly.

Storage
The best way to store darkness was in seal ceramic jars. They were air tight so the substance couldn't dissolve into the air and opaque so no light could reach inside and wear away at the darkness.

Publications

 * A Treatise on Beings