Origins of Flaming Venom Palm Kung Fu
The mastery of suffering lies in endurance. Accustom yourself to pain, and you will hurt others without thought. Endure great anguish, and your heart will become indestructible. Reduce yourself to ash, and you cannot be burned."
- Precepts of Self-Annihilation, Book 4:23
Flaming Venom Palm is part of a diverse family of martial arts that trace themselves back to the teachings of Iqbal Marduk-Durrandon, the Saint of Agony. Iqbal, who is purported to have lived for over four hundred years and whose words have found themselves into the hearts of millions through the proselytizing of the Marabakian Church of Strife that grew to prominence in his wake, began life as a rich dilettante who was doted on by his father, a merchant-lord who traded in oils and paints. By his own admission, he possessed a frail body and indolent mind, and was incapable of accomplishing much of anything. He spent his days lounging in idyllic gardens, feasting upon grapes and discussing passing matters of fashion and art with the company of equally useless fellow heirs to wealth. Life seemed to Iqbal like an endless stream of increasingly dull pleasantries and trivialities, and a part of him longed for something to challenge him to force him to grow.
Tragedy is a harsh teacher, and it arrived quite suddenly in the young fop's life, imparting its lessons with brutal clarity. His father was exposed as an embezzler who had been selling sub-standard paints with false dyes, and many important customers had died or been crippled by desert fey after using his products in warding rituals. Iqbal's father was brought before his sheik and forced to sell off many of his assets in compensation, but was dismissive of such a paltry punishment, boasting that he would earn that and more back in but a year. The sheik, in response, knowing of the father's love for his son, had Iqbal bound to a stake, coated in the same paints his father had been selling, and set aflame. Witnessing his son writhing in unspeakable agony, Iqbal's father died on the spot, the sight too much for his weak heart.
Iqbal, miraculously, survived, and was released into the care of an uncle, where he remained bedridden for a year. He was a charred, withered remnant of himself, his smooth, supple skin rendered into ash and blisters, but he still drew breath. He received no visitors, those who had called themselves devoted friends soon forgetting him entirely.
Where Iqbal's father had doted on him to a fatal degree, his uncle was a businessman through and through, with an enamel-plated heart and blood colder than ice. He saw Iqbal as the inconvenient reminder of a foolish brother, and took him in only for the sake of fulfilling the obligations of kin. As soon as he was assured that Iqbal was no longer on the brink of death, he cast his nephew out of his house with nothing but a shift to cover his frail body and a small metal pendant around his neck, and took grim satisfaction in erasing the cost of the boy's medical care from his ongoing expenses.
Iqbal subsisted as a beggar for some time, where he was given scant charity by those who had also been touched by misfortune. When he spoke, it was with a raspy, wheezing voice, for the fire and paint fumes had damaged his lungs, and his limbs were shriveled and weak, for he could not often eat. Most people who saw him either remembered his punishment or assumed him to be a leper, and spat upon him as they passed. Over time he slowly learned to attract less attention to himself, intuiting the posture needed to make himself seem so pathetic that the mind refused to acknowledge his presence as any kind of a threat.
Marabak was graced by an exceedingly harsh winter that year, and its citizens huddled inside their sandstone halls and lit great fires to keep themselves warm. Iqbal nearly froze to death many times on the streets, and spent many days huddling in archways to keep out of the biting wind. Seeking warmth, he found his way to a paint processing facility, one that had been owned by his father, and sought employment in exchange for shelter. He was fitted with an iron collar and branded upon his face as was the custom for slaves in Marabak, and made to carry pots of boiling dye to and fro and stoke the flames underneath gargantuan cauldrons. He soon became a burned husk of skin, stained a patchwork of colors by the dye. His voice rattled and croaked even more than before, and his breath came in wet, hacking gasps.
Iqbal suffered thusly for seven years, and when he had been broken in full by the labor, he was carried out of the city and left on a nearby mountainside for the scavengers to have him. However, the toxins infused into his body made his flesh so repugnant that not even the vultures would touch him, and he laid untouched for a further seven days. There the elements had their way with him - he was doused with sheets of cold rain, which froze upon his skin and hair. The wind dried him back out and cracked his skin like old parchment. The sun dried his carcass out until it was nearly desiccated, and the rock he lay upon dug sharply into his naked flesh, leeching whatever heat remained out of him.
On the seventh day, on the brink of death, Iqbal had a revelation on the nature of life. Since the day he was birthed, he had done everything he could to avoid suffering - he had dined on fine foods, swathed himself in luxurious clothing, ensconced himself in artfully-built mansions. Even when his wealth had been taken away, it was his drive to avoid suffering that had commanded him - each moment as a beggar had been one that he had bemoaned and gnashed his teeth over, wondering why so much suffering was meted out to him, and not those more deserving. Was the point of this world not to experience as much joy as possible? Why, then, did misery make up so much of existence?
As death began to slip its quiet fingers over him at last, a thought crossed Iqbal's mind -
I have suffered so much that even the prospect of a quiet death seems to me like an incandescent radiance. He realized something in that moment - he had lived his life in a backwards manner, not recognizing what was in front of him. Joy was not to be found in the absence of suffering; rather, joy was only recognized through suffering itself. The more one suffered, the more that life's pleasures would make themselves apparent. The two were, in truth, one and the same.
Iqbal was seized by a feverish strength upon having this realization, and sprang up at once from the ground, moving lightly and with ease despite having not eaten or drank for close to a month. He ran up the mountainside, eyes fixed upon its snow-capped peak, where a mighty storm was brewing, and did not halt or slow his pace until he stood upon the summit with blackened, frost-bitten feet. There he held his metal pendant, the one keepsake he had of his old life, aloft, presenting it to the heavens in invitation. He was struck by lightning, and it is said that he screamed in joy as the bolt ran through him.
Iqbal stayed on the mountaintop for a further year, contemplating his new perspective, and came down from the frozen peak an untouchable master of great spiritual power. He returned to Marabak, which had churned on largely unchanged in his absence, and preached of the virtue of suffering to anyone who would listen. His words found fertile ground in the slaves and undesirables of the city, for Marabak was a shining altar built upon uncounted cruelties, and there soon came a revolution as those who cringed away from the whip of their masters began to find such indignities eminently tolerable. The underclass rose up and devoured the painted lords of the city, and the revelations Iqbal granted to the laborers granted them the ability to fight back against the cruel pikes of the city guards without fear. Iqbal himself was functionally invincible, his withered hide able to turn aside sharpened axes with nary a scratch, and the lightest of touches from the mystic could cripple a man with paroxysms of pain.
In the end, Marabak fell but was not destroyed. Iqbal's aim was not to wreak destruction upon the unenlightened, but to show them the error of their ways and bring unto them the means to seize true happiness. To that end, he and his followers tore down every building in the city, save for the paint factory in which he had been made to labor. There he spent the next decade educating every last dilettante and noble fop and greedy, unsatisfied businessman on the virtue of suffering, and charged them with spreading these teachings as far and wide as they could. His uncle, ironically enough, was the most fervent of his converts, becoming entirely transformed from the efficiency-obsessed, perpetually unsatisfied man he had been before.
Iqbal preached out of the factory in Marabak for the next three centuries, staying largely unchanged even as what had been an improvised altar of pain in a ruined city grew into an elaborate temple with thousands of acolytes living and working within. The Church of Strife, as it came to be called, grew up around him like a vine growing over and around a wall, and Iqbal involved himself little in the menial affairs of the organization.
One day, however, Iqbal awoke from his daily meditations and found himself displeased with what he saw. In the pursuit of spreading his gospel as far as possible, a bureaucracy had sprung up around him, filled with men and women who professed to follow the path of suffering but whose flesh remained scrupulously unmarked. Their spirits had become soft and pale things, and there was no fire in their eyes. Then and there, Iqbal knew that he had strayed off of his destined path once more, and savored the squirming eels of discontent that coiled inside of his spirit. "Perhaps I have put too much trust that those who require suffering will come to it willingly," he is reported to have mused.
"I will bring it to them, and remove peace from the world where I walk."
It is said that he shattered the great temple with a single blow, bringing it crumbling down around him, and that he said nothing to anyone as he walked unharmed out of the ruins. He walked out of Marabak, and proceeded to wander for the next seventy years, teaching all he came across how best to rend and maim the flesh of others. The arts of agony he had accumulated were manifold, and each of the methods he passed on exhibited a single quality of suffering, making it the strength of its practitioners. Flaming Venom Palm descends from one such method, and requires its practitioners to accustom themselves intimately with the searing touch of flame.
No one knows what came of Iqbal Marduk-Durrandon, for he simply stopped being seen some time after he began his wanderings. The Church of Strife holds steadfastly that he is still alive, and has devoted considerable resources to the search for their founder. Most historians consider him to be dead and gone, while folk tales in the region command the unwary traveler to be wary of decrepit hermits they come across on the side of the road.
A/N: I've had this sitting partially completed for several months now, and I never actually got to describing the martial art itself somehow. The work got away from me, I guess. I just like meaningless worldbuilding too damn much.
