The Disciples of the Worm

The Disciples of the Worm are a cult founded by Ibrahim ibn Ali 1014 in a lamasery in Khotan. The cult's goal is to achieve immortality by researching the worm spawn of The Limbo Stalker.

Journey to the Lamasery
In the year 983, Ibrahim ibn Ali was sent east along the Silk Road towards China to investigate stories of an order of Buddhist monks in the city of Khotan on the edge of the Taklaman Desert in Chinese, Turkestan. The lamasery was run by an order of Buddhist monks who purported to have discovered the secret to immortality. Their current lama was reputed to have been born in 617 A.D., despite his physical age of 75. When Ibrahim attempted to become the lama’s student he was told that the lama was not available to take on new students because he was traveling on the Higher Plane. No one could say when the lama would return. Sometimes he left only for a few months, sometimes he was gone for decades. Exhausted from his year-long journey from Baghdad, Ibrahim was not about to turn around and return home empty handed. He sought quarters with the monks to study while he awaited the lama’s return.

Ibrahim quickly learned that the Lama was not the only monk to regularly travel on the Higher Plane. Such journeys were common among the initiated. Despite being told this, he strongly suspected that there was no lama and that the story of his immortality was just that: a story. However, through stealth, guile and a suitably large bribe, Ibrahim was able to observe an initiated monk enter the Higher Plane. The man’s disappearance into thin air startled Ibrahim, but not as much as the realization that the disappearance was not a conjurer’s trick. More inquiries revealed that many of the monks did transcend the plane seeking knowledge and enlightenment, but that the Higher Plane was not without its dangers. There were demons who moved in the Higher Plane, preying upon each other and all those who intrude on their realm. The monks warned that no one entered the Higher Plane without the protection of powerful spells, charms, wards or an especially strong “karma.” Most novices who enteredthe Higher Plane did not return. However, Ibrahim also learned that the Higher Plane was the key to great longevity.

Regardless, Ibrahim was determined to unravel the mystery of the lama’s apparent immortality. Through a prolonged campaign of careful and systematic corruption, Ibrahim gained the confidence of one of the initiated monks, one Pi Sung. Pi Sung accepted gifts and monies from Ibrahim until he was so compromised that he found that Ibrahim no longer offered him bribes, but instead controlled him with the ever-present threat of revealing the monk’s less-than-pious double dealing. Through this leverage Ibrahim forced Pi Sung to allow him access to the monastery’s library, and to observe many of the monks’ rituals in secret. In this way Ibrahim learned how the Monks created “portals” through which they passed into the Higher Plane. Ibrahim was determined to see this Higher Plane for himself

The Higher Plane
Such a plan was not without its flaws, for the monk Pi Sung was desperate to free himself from Ibrahim, so he too conceived a plan. He would show Ibrahim how to enter the “Higher Plane,” but ensure that the wards and talismans he took with him for protection did not work. The result was that Ibrahim’s first journey into the Higher Plane lasted for 12 years in the material world.

When Ibrahim entered the Higher Plane his movements in the first few minutes were enough to attract the attention of one of that plane’s natives. Hideously, this creature was not looking to feed; it was looking to breed. The shock of seeing the creature rendered Ibrahim temporarily catatonic and he was unable to escape to the safety of our plane. Instead the creature carried Ibrahim far away to its lair and there forced one of its larval young into his intestine. Regaining his senses, he managed to escape, but found himself lost on the Higher Plane. By sheer luck he discovered that by holding perfectly still he could avoid the notice of the Higher Plane’s natives. It therefore took him three days on the Higher Plane to return to his starting point coterminous with the lamasery in Khotan. Half-mad, starving, dehydrated, and close to death, he returned to our world, three days older, but twelve years into the future.

Back to the Lamasery
Ibrahim’s first thought was to find and kill the man who had done this to him. However, the treacherous monk Pi Sung was long since dead, having been expelled from the monastery a few years after Ibrahim’s disappearance for unrelated matters of personal dishonesty. The monks were shocked by Ibrahim’s reappearance. He had been thought dead and his Arab companions had long since attempted to return to Baghdad (although there is no record of whether they made it home). Nevertheless, the monks tended his injuries and attempted to mend his broken body.

Ibrahim, however, had not returned alone. His guts boiled with the wriggling spawn of the thing that seized and violated him. The agony reduced him to a screaming animal. Subdued and tied to a cot, it became obvious to the monks that Ibrahim had returned with a passenger. The worm inside him had begun to reproduce, and much to the horror of the monks, Ibrahim birthed out several dozen of its offspring, which the monks promptly killed. The most experienced Higher Plane travelers of the lamasery consulted their scrolls and were able to find a combination of magical and narcotic elixirs that brought the demonic possession under control. The pain was limited and the reproductive cycle was slowed, but could not be stopped. Ibrahim would live, but was crippled by both the pain and the narcotics used to control it.

Despite being able to create a kind of equilibrium, the monks were unable to force the ‘demons’ from inside Ibrahim. They were unaware of the effect that the worms were having on his recuperative powers, and so were unwilling to try to remove them using the primitive surgery of the day. For several weeks the monks fought to expel the demons possessing Ibrahim, using drugs, rituals and prayers. Although Ibrahim expelled dozens and dozens of worms, there were always more, no matter how many were removed. Eventually the humiliation and self-loathing of his condition became too much for Ibrahim. He became determined to kill himself and end his mental and physical suffering. When he slashed his wrists, his wounds closed themselves too quickly for him to bleed to death. His attempt to cut his throat ended with his blood clotting too fast and his injuries healing completely within days, leaving no scars. Leaping from the roof of the lamasery resulted in dozens of broken bones and damaged internal organs, all of which healed within a week. It was then that Ibrahim began to suspect that his demons were preserving his life.

At first the monks of the lamasery treated Ibrahim as an unfortunate that needed their care. Then they regarded him as an interesting specimen to be studied. But ultimately they came to see him as a prisoner to be contained. He was locked in a cell, warded with sigils and spells to prevent him from re-entering the Higher Plane and escaping. Meanwhile a debate raged among the monks as to what to do with their ‘guest.’ Some believed that if they could not expel the demons, then they should kill Ibrahim. Others believed that if the demons could not be exorcised, then Ibrahim should remain incarcerated until he died of old age. A smaller minority thought that Ibrahim should remain incarcerated and studied in the hope that the mystery of his unnatural healing might be discovered.

As time passed, Ibrahim found himself the focus of a growing rift between the monks. After his first decade in captivity, it became apparent to both Ibrahim and his captors that he was no longer aging. Once again the debate raged, and again the decision was made to spare his life. Ibrahim’s demonic possession could be the key to life eternal and near-invulnerability to disease and injury. The majority of the monks were simply unwilling to turn their backs on this fountain of youth. Combined with their ability to move through the Higher Plane, this fountain of youth could multiply the monks’ power a thousand-fold. Even so, there were dissenters.

Ibrahim’s sanity eroded away under the constant battle between the pain of successive worms, the numbing of the drugs, and the intensely foul experience of expelling worms from his digestive tract. Despite these horrors, or perhaps because of it, Ibrahim’s mind reached a kind of insane balance. He did not rant. He did not rave. But somehow in his madness he came to understand something about his “passengers,” as he had taken to thinking of the worms inside him. So long as the drugs and incantations interrupted the worms’ reproductive cycle, they would not be able to mature and grow into the thing that had raped Ibrahim on the Higher Plane. Nevertheless, these embryonic worms could also breed, reproducing at will and ensuring a constant supply of ‘replacements.’ He knew instinctively that the worms were the source of his immortality and near invulnerability. And he knew that his immortality was a treasure that men would kill anyone and sacrifice anything for.

Ibrahim was also well aware of his precarious situation at the lamasery. Even though greed ruled the majority of the monks’ judgment, Ibrahim knew that the dissenters might decide to take it upon themselves to kill him at any time. It then fell to him to begin to make allies among some of the monks who were most desirous of obtaining this fountain of youth. The old, “wiser,” and higher-ranking monks were facing their mortality more immediately than the younger, lower-ranking monks. Ibrahim did his best to play up the fears of the older monks, implying that the younger monks were questioning the wisdom of the older monks’ decision to keep Ibrahim alive. Ibrahim even convinced several monks that he could assist them if they would just share with him the information they had gathered on his situation. Through these contacts Ibrahim was able to tap into the lamasery’s library of occult and mythos knowledge. He learned much.

Desperate to justify their decision to preserve Ibrahim, the lamasery’s leadership sent monks around the world through the Higher Plane in search of sources of knowledge that could unravel Ibrahim’s peculiar situation. Fear of dissent among the ranks began to isolate the lamasery’s leadership from the rank and file. Ibrahim did his best to agitate the situation, not quite knowing where it would lead, but he was sure that if the situation became chaotic, his opportunity for escape would be greater.

The situation came to a head in the year 1014 A.D. when a revolt broke out at the lamasery. The younger monks were tired of braving the Higher Plane and scouring the earth for knowledge to unlock the secret of eternal life locked away inside Ibrahim. Taken by surprise, the lamasery’s leadership was thrown back on its heels. In the chaos of blood and fire that engulfed the lamasery, Ibrahim was nearly killed, but his demon-born powers of recovery saved him from the assassins’ blades. Nevertheless, the damage was done. The lamasery was in ruins. Nearly all the monks had died in the conflict, and the wards holding Ibrahim from slipping into the Higher Plane were broken. However, he did not make good his escape immediately. Picking his way through the lamasery, Ibrahim found mortally injured monks and introduced fresh worms into them. Men wounded unto death miraculously recovered. Men who had previously been his jailers now shared his burden of pain and immortality. These men became the core of what would be the Disciples of the Worm.

Damascus
Ibrahim and his newly formed Disciples of the Worm used the Higher Plane to remove themselves from Khotan back across Asia to the Syrian city of Damascus. Their physical condition required that they stay close to a convenient source of narcotics. Proximity to Beqaa Valley meant that the Disciples were always close to a supply of opium and hashish, but Damascus was simply too well policed by devout Muslims for a cabal of sorcerers like the Disciples of the Worm to survive for long without being discovered. Instead, the Disciples took up residence in an abandoned Byzantine-era fortress outside Damascus in the Anti-Lebanon Mountains west of the city, owning and cultivating their own poppy fields in the Beqaa Valley. What refined opium they didn’t smoke themselves, they sold in the markets of Damascus.

It was during their time in Syria that the infamous Flemish sorcerer Ludvig Prinn came to study at their citadel between the years 1271 and 1286 A.D. Prinn was interested in the Disciples’ occult knowledge, not their method of unnaturally prolonging their lives. Prinn had already found his own “Philosopher’s Stone” before coming east. After collecting the material he would later use to write his Saracenic Rituals chapter of De Vermis Mysteriis, Prinn returned to Europe. He did not share what he knew of immortality with the Disciples. Perhaps if he had shared that secret they would have freed themselves from their “demons” and adopted his method. The Disciples were not slaves to their worms and would have expelled them if only they could discern their mechanism for extending lives and healing wounds.

Jumping Around Southwest Asia
The Disciples stayed in the Beqaa Valley for the better part of four centuries, until the second Mongol invasion of Syria under Timur, also known as Tamerlane. In 1400, Damascus was besieged and subjected to a sack that rivaled the Mongols’ earlier sack of Baghdad in 1258. In order to avoid having their skulls join the “tower of heads” the Mongol invaders built, the Disciples fled their citadel via their mastery of the Higher Plane gate.

The Disciples fled east to Afghanistan, moving into the mountains of the Hindu Kush, west of Kabul. There, a new citadel had been prepared to ensure that they would have a safe place to escape to in the event of discovery by the local civilreligious authorities. It served just as well for getting them out of the way of the Mongols. From this new citadel the Disciples again cultivated their own opium and studied the black arts. It didn’t take them long to realize that their opium fields were a lot farther from their markets, unlike the Beqaa Valley and Damascus.

It was at this time that the Disciples chose to expand their use of the Higher Plane. Originally the gates into the Higher Plane were used only in dire circumstances. After all, the Higher Plane is filled with hostile life forms that are inimical to life from our dimension. Moving through the Higher Plane is always dangerous, even with the appropriate charms and wards. While the Disciples had some idea of the trans-dimensional geography linking our dimension and the other plane, their knowledge was far from complete. Much of the lamasery’s collected knowledge had been lost in the rebellion and fire, so the Disciples took it upon themselves to begin an exploration of the Higher Plane, intent on mapping the dimension and its correlating points in our world.

The Disciples Follow The Opium East
Over the next four hundred years the Disciples survived the fall of the Timurid Empire and the rise and decline of the Mughal and Durrani (or Afghan) Empires. As the Durrani Empire began to fragment in the late 18th century, the political situation around the Disciples’ citadel became unstable. Once again, the Disciples had planned ahead. They moved themselves to the state of the Trinh Lords through a gate into the Higher Plane.

The Trinh Lords’ state corresponds to the northernmost areas of Tonkin, the modern state of Vietnam. The Trinh Lords’ state was chosen because its fortunes were on the rise and they were close to the Federation of Lan Xang, which corresponds to modern day Laos. Once again the Disciples insinuated themselves close to the source of opium, but not inside the state of Lan Xang, which was struggling under waves of Siamese, Burmese and even Trinh invaders. It turned out that the Disciples chose well. The Trinh Lords continued their military, economic and political successes until the late 18th century when the Trinh were rocked by an internal power struggle and an invasion by the Manchu Empire. The Disciples were unwilling to move away from their opium supply, so they relocated to the ancient Vietnamese city of Hue. When the dust settled in 1802, the Nguyen Dynasty was in control of the country, but had achieved this victory with French military assistance. This was the thin edge of the wedge of European imperialism in the region.

During this time, the Disciples bought a number of young girls from their parents to create Queen Mothers out of them. Among these was Phuong Tien, who attracted the attention of Ibrahim himself by taking control of the worms within her body. The Disciples groomed Tien to be one of the most prolific Queen Mothers in history and studied her abilities in hopes of finding a way to become immortal without having the worms take over their body. It was also during this time that Reverend Friedrich von Junzt visited Vietnam to secretly study The Disciples. Taking pity on Tien, he convinced her to flee with him back to Germany. In 1853, Von Junzt traveled with Tien back to Germany, where she joined Zweihander.

Singapore
As the British East India Company tightened its control over the opium trade in South-East Asia, the Disciples began to feel the pressure. By 1862, the Vietnamese Emperor Tu Đuc was forced by treaty to cede three provinces to the French. By 1863, the French had established a Protectorate over the state of Cambodia. As the French began pressing to directly annex areas of Vietnam, the Disciples decided to make another move. Using the Higher Plane gates, they began scouting for a new home, eventually settling on the British colony of Singapore. Much of the decision to move there was influenced by the Disciples’ leader Ibrahim, who still viewed the French as their medieval ancestors, the Franks. He thought of the British as less of a threat compared to the French, who were a continuous irritant to Islam during the era of the Crusades. This misperception would lead to the Disciples finding a comfortable home in the British colony for the next eight decades.

Founded in 1819 by Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles, Singapore grew to be an extremely valuable trading port, dominating the sea traffic between the Indian and Pacific Ocean through the Straits of Malacca. Singapore quickly grew to be the crossroads of all of maritime Asia. With the massive amounts of East India Company opium flowing from Burma through Singapore to China, all perfectly legally, there was no shortage of the drug for the Disciples.

The Disciples arrived in Singapore in 1866. When the Can Vuang rebellion against French colonial rule erupted in Vietnam in 1886, there were some that hoped they could return to the mainland. However, the rebellion lasted until 1895 and ended in total defeat for the Royalist cause. After three decades of insinuating themselves into the Singapore opium trade, the Disciples were too well established to return to Vietnam.

Worm Research
In between their dimensional explorations and opium smoking, the Disciples of the Worm spent their time engaged in esoteric occult research. The central focus of this research was the same thing that the monks in the lamasery in Khotan were interested in: finding a way to live forever without having to become the host of the worms. To that end the Disciples engaged in long, complex and expensive alchemical experiments in order to isolate the worm’s anagathic properties and improve the narcotics and fertility suppressing drugs that kept the worms from reproducing until the host is turned into a “Worm Mother.”

In order to finance this occult research the Disciples first engaged in opium cultivation, production, refinement and distribution. The move to Singapore meant that the Disciples were no longer directly in control of the poppy fields that had been the source of their wealth and their own supply of narcotics. The relocation meant having to change the way they operated. Instead of being rural opium warlords, they would have to become urban opium merchants. They adapted well, financing trading companies to act as fronts and provide sources of income. Commerce, like all other activities for the Disciples, moved at a snail’s pace. Their opium intake and days spent in the Higher Plane simply did not allow them sufficient time or energy in the mundane world to devote to business activities. When they owned and cultivated poppies for opium, time moved with the speed of the changing seasons. In the fast paced wheeling and dealing along the Singapore docks, the Disciples would have been at a terrible disadvantage. However, they more than made up for these deficiencies through their use of magic.

Drug Trade
By the 1890s, under pressure from British missionaries, the British Parliament was beginning to turn against the opium trade. The United Kingdom ultimately outlawed the opium trade inside the British Empire in 1913. The Disciples could see the change coming. The Disciples’ front companies were dissolved and reincorporated as legitimate trading houses, but behind the façade, the smuggling continued, and not just the smuggling of opium.

The Disciples found Singapore to be ideally located for their purposes, even beyond their expectations. Singapore was a crossroads of the world, a cosmopolitan city of Europeans, Chinese, Indians, Malays, and even Arabs. As such, the Disciples found themselves easily able to communicate with other occult societies that hugged the shores of the Indian and Pacific oceans. Few secret societies dedicated to the acquisition of occult knowledge freely correspond with each other, but the Disciples found themselves well-positioned to do so when the opportunity presented itself. Contacts were made among the hybrid Deep One colonies of the Pacific Rim. Ambassadors were received from the Cult of Cthulhu in China and the Priests of Ghatanothoa from Micronesia. Information was exchanged, items of occult power bargained for; one cult’s garbage is another cult’s treasure after all. The Disciples had to spend some time dodging the British colonial constabulary during Sir Cecil Clementi Smith’s 1889 crackdown on Chinese secret societies, the Tongs and Triads, but the Disciples kept a low profile.

All of this trade was conducted using the Disciples’ command of the gates into and out of the Higher Plane. While not terribly fast by the standards of the new century, the gates through the Higher Plane were incredibly secure against interception by the conventional authorities. Anything could be smuggled anywhere in the world, and it was impossible to intercept. Only after the smugglers left the Higher Plane could the authorities affect the operations, and since the gates could be easily created, the disciples never had to use the same gate twice.

Continued Rebasing
The Disciples pursued their esoteric studies in relative peace until December 8, 1941 when the Japanese invaded British Malaya. The Disciples fled Singapore before the city fell to the Japanese in February of 1942. The Japanese fleet blockading the city proved to be no barrier to their Higher Plane travel. They made their way to Australia, settling in Sydney. In early 1942, a Japanese invasion of Australia still seemed likely, so the Disciples made plans to remove themselves from the Pacific theater entirely. During the next year, the Disciples managed to keep themselves stocked with narcotics by buying and stealing military grade medical opiates on the black market. However, the Australian constabulary took thefts of military stores extremely seriously and the Disciples knew that thieving was a sure way to end up in the hands of the authorities. So by 1943, the Disciples made their way to Mexico, the one source of opium cultivation that was securely outside the Asian or European theatres of World War Two.

The Federal Bureau of Narcotics began as the Narcotics Unit of the Treasury Department’s Prohibition Unit. It was tiny compared to the Alcohol Enforcement Unit. Nevertheless, this Narcotics Unit did not suffer from the corruption or lack of public support that was endemic with the Alcohol Unit. The Federal Bureau of Narcotics eventually became the most professional and successful federal law enforcement organ in the U.S. prior to the reorganization of the FBI by director J. Edgar Hoover. FBN agents had long heard rumors about a group of mystical Asian smugglers, mostly Arab and Chinese, operating out of Mexico, but they were never able to confirm the group’s existence. By the time that the FBN became the Drug Enforcement Administration, those rumors were considered little more than legends that the old-timers told to spook new agents.

Throughout the post-war years the Disciples were able to lie low and cultivate contacts among Mexico’s criminal organizations. There were never more than a few score Disciples, so their heroin needs were not so enormous that they would need a massive organization to keep them supplied and flush with cash. However, with the cocaine boom of the 1980s, the Disciples soon found themselves operating in a field of endeavor awash with cash and blood.

North American Drug Trade
In the early 1980s the North American drug trade boomed to undreamed-of levels, and the Disciples found their talents or smuggling in great demand. Total drug seizures by US law enforcement grew to 1,343,702 pounds of illegal drugs in 1989 alone. The most charitable estimates figured that seizures only accounted for between ten and fifteen percent of the total drug imports. While the Colombian drug traffickers fought it out with the Cuban gangs of Florida for control of the cocaine trade, the Mexican cartels never lost control of their territory. Mexican cartels may have risen and fallen, but they were always Mexican.

The Disciples found themselves employed by several competing Mexican cartels, but managed to maintain their neutrality and their security. It was well understood by the Mexican cartels that the Disciples would brook no attempt to monopolize their services, nor would they countenance any attempt by a cartel to control them. While the Disciples certainly had powerful and secret magics with which to punish transgressors, their real power came from how valued they were by the cartels. Few of the cartel leaders wanted to take a chance that they might kill the golden goose by fighting over it. Any cartel that tried to control the Disciples soon found themselves under attack by every other cartel, plus the Disciples. The cartels were also quick to take ghastly revenge on anyone foolish enough to bother the Disciples. While the Disciples might not be able to take their revenge directly on any gang of upstarts who took it upon themselves to cause trouble, the Disciples could easily take their revenge against the heads of the cartels who failed to protect them. This has only happened a few times. Nevertheless, such incidents were utterly sufficient to make the point that if anyone bothered the Disciples, they would make it everyone’s problem.

Los Brujos
Despite these business connections, no one inside the Mexican cartels knew the Disciples as anything other than Los Brujos, or The Warlocks. The name was first applied because of the way the Disciples could make cocaine shipments cross borders “as if by magic.” Later, when the Disciples made people that annoyed them disappear, the name took on a darker meaning. Even as their legend grew Los Brujos were usually thought to be little more than a scary story that Mexican people-smugglers told each other over cervezas and cocaine, after they’d worked up enough courage to even broach the subject. Certainly that’s what the DEA and the Mexican Federal Judicial Police (the ‘Federales’) believed. The stories of sorcerers who could walk through walls and summon demons was simply too incredible to be believed, at least until the 1989 incident in Matamoros, Mexico. There a self-deluded con man and occult poser named Adolfo Constanzo was discovered to be running a cult practicing a bastardized form of Mexican folk magic, incorporating elements of Santeria, Palo Mayombe and Aztec ritual. The cult of wannabe sorcerers was kidnapping and killing people in acts of human sacrifice in order to magically protect their drug trafficking operations. When the Federales uncovered this cult, they arrested or killed all its members, including Constanzo. At that point, most law enforcement on both sides of the border believed that they had uncovered the source of the rumors about Los Brujos. Rumors picked up after 1989 were simply seen as recycled stories about Constanzo and his gang.

The Disciples Today
The main headquarters of the Disciples of the Worm is a massive antique hacienda in the Sierra Madre Occidental Mountains in the state of Sinaloa, just a few kilometers from the Sea of Cortez. The Hacienda is surrounded by a perimeter of heavily armed security provided by Los Negros, a paramilitary security force created by the Sinaloa Cartel. Radios, SUVs, body armor, and a plethora of small arms are in evidence. Light support weapons can even be brought to bear, ranging from light machine guns and grenade launchers to mortars and anti-tank missiles. The security perimeter never comes within 500 meters of the Hacienda. They are under strict orders not to approach the compound, no matter what they see or hear. Considering the strange things these men have seen and heard, particularly on the nights of the solstice and equinox, there is little chance that they would ever violate those orders. It is not uncommon for the Disciples’ experiments in medieval metaphysics and hypergeometry to result in terrifying and unnatural lights and unidentifiable sounds.

In the twenty years since the Disciples of the Worm fled the Pacific Northwest, the cult has not changed much. They remain smugglers who transport only the most valuable of cargos. They can move anything or anyone anywhere. When moving narcotic drugs they charge their clients a small percentage of the loads for their own use. When they move other kinds of contraband, they work for cash. Their services are slightly slower than air and sea transport, and they move much smaller loads than many other smuggling operations, but they never lose a load, are never intercepted by law enforcement, and always fulfill their contracts. The key to their success has been their mastery of the use of gates and traveling in the Higher Plane. And while they still smuggle drugs, as they did in the 1980s, today there are other, even more profitable forms of contraband that can be moved around the world. Everything from human cargo to prohibited weapon technologies can be moved around the world by the Disciples of the Worm.

Important Members

 * Ibrahim ibn Ali
 * Phuong Tien (Former)