Book of Sweet Pain

“Sweet Pain,” the canon of The Flaymaster, is an ice blue book with pure white pages that somehow manage to feel dirty. Its binding is electrum, and its cover is without picture, although it usually bears a raised impression of The Flaymaster’s dagger.

The book’s contents are recorded in eight thick Torments, all but one a grotesque account of torture or misery. Disturbingly, the accounts are written in the first person, and in the present tense. They also describe the thoughts of the author as he undergoes the torture. These thoughts are said to represent the ideal attitude of the cleric. When an initiate undergoes his week of torture, the senior clerics observe him to see that his mind is traveling down the same path that theirs did.

The final Torment is also an account of torture and misery, but the torture is quite different. Here the writer tells of his barefoot travel through a wind-swept ice field. As he moves along, the wind tears off his clothing, one article at a time. Just as the cold numbs him to the core, the wind gives way to a warming sun that returns feeling to his body. At that instant, the ice gives way and he submerges completely in a frozen mountain lake, shards of ice penetrating his person in every imaginable location.

Followers are required to make at least one pilgrimage to the Theocracy of Slen during their lifetime. Those who choose to return home are forbidden to support their native government if it opposes the Theocracy (which all do in one way or another).