Ambrosia
The immortality elixir at the heart of the under-prison beneath the Grey Vale Cave — finally given a name in Session 30. Manufactured (or refined) by the vanished Elder race in a strictly limited supply, it grants ageless life: a drinker no longer dies of time, though they can still be killed. It also appears to have an expiration date — the raiders who drank it 400,000 years too late kept living but rotted, which is why Malifax persists as bare bone.
To the people who once ran the world, drinking unauthorised Ambrosia was nearly murder: the elixir was rationed to those judged worthy, and to steal and drink a portion meant the person it was meant for would die of old age instead — "you stole someone else's life." Every prisoner of the under-prison is jailed for that one crime and nothing else.
Its purity matters (the GM's "Breaking Bad" analogy): source-grade Ambrosia leaves the drinker intact (the Nice One is normal), while spoiled or watered-down batches twist them — the worm-like Ruined One, the perishing Sad One, the skeletal Malifax, the tentacled janitor Gerald. The worthy who drink it are then placed in the ice to outlast a coming meteor/extinction, to be thawed when the world is safe.
(Name a best-guess rendering — heard as "Aevum Ambrosia" and (colliding with Aethelric) "Aethelric ambrosia," alongside the table's "live long forever juice" / "forever life juice." See Canon Questions. This is the same lost "ability to live forever" the Live Long council and Malifax drank, and that the Nice One was jailed for stealing.)
Session 30
- Named and explained. Gerald (via Valmora's Tongues) and the Nice One (via Silithane) lay out its nature: the one crime of the prison, the stolen-life logic, and the varying purity that deforms some immortals and spares others.
- The ice. The worthy who drink it are frozen to survive a coming meteor; Gerald's wife Alice is among the sleepers, and Gerald himself drank a stolen, spoiled bottle during the raid — accidentally outliving his own mortality.