Brand of Sacrifice

The Brand of Sacrifice is set upon those consecrated for the Invocation of Doom, a ceremony where a person selected by the laws of causality rises above their humanity to be remade as an apostle or a God Hand member, and which also cuts an apostle's final bond to the human world. The lives fed into the rite belong to someone the summoner holds close, offered to the creatures of darkness and slaughtered in ritual fashion. In the case of the God Hand, that stolen life force finishes the summoner's transformation. So far, Void is the only figure ever shown branding a victim.

Those who live through the ceremony are trapped in the Interstice between the physical and astral planes, left to defend themselves against dark creatures and the flesh-hungry dead that assail them each night. In the presence of evil the mark bleeds and inflicts pain. Around common spirits or apostles the blood merely seeps and the ache stays mild, but near a God Hand member it erupts in thick spurts and the agony becomes crushing; a strong enough evil can supposedly kill the branded outright. The mark also stirs faintly around figures like Flora and Daiba, and flares during events such as Griffith's Incarnation Ceremony or the emergence of Shiva. Apostles can smell the brand as a scent of evil and hunt down whoever carries it.

Guts and Casca stand as the only known survivors to bear the mark, and while they journeyed together they drew swarms of evil spirits that brought ruin to every settlement they crossed; the witches Flora and Schierke can blunt the effect by inscribing temporary seals over the brands. The sacrifice demanded need not be someone loved nor even a specific person: Griffith gave up the entire Band of the Falcon to become Femto, and the Egg of the Perfect World offered his "world." An intended victim can be rejected, as Guts was for the Count, both because his worth to the God Hand was irrelevant and because a person already branded cannot be sacrificed twice. Across the story the mark has appeared in many places, from Guts' neck and Casca's chest to Judeau's palm, Corkus' forehead, and Pippin's arm.