My name is Vox and I am a Necromancer. I am, in fact, one of the greatest Necromancers history has ever known. This is my story.
I was born during the golden age of Magic, after the Divine Wars that saw the deities retreat to the Ethereal realm, but before the advent of Religion, which saw the use and nature of magic regulated by aristocratic rulers and political heads of state. It was a time when wizards and sorcerers ruled the land, when magic was a way of life. A time when the magic academies which dotted the land were centres of culture and education. A time when people did not fear magic, but sought to understand and control it. A time when the strong were free to explore their strengths to their fullest potential, instilling admiration, rather than fear.
I was born in this wonderful age, but born in tragedy and death. For while humanity in general prospered behind the might of eldritch magic, people still waged war with each other. My very birth was an end, as well as a beginning. My mother, Nedra - the last surviving member of the ancient clan of Necrotius - died giving birth to me. The midwives that helped her hurried me away into the night and carried me into a poor family from the Nitris clan - a balance clan specialising in nature magic. And so they put an end to Necrotius, one of the most ancient of the clans, as well as the originators and the masters of the art of Necromancy. And while they put an end to the lineage of my clan, they could not put an end to the Mortix bloodline.
In truth, my story begins long before my birth, in a time before time, when the world was still populated by by ancient gods, before humanity ever knew of magic. In those prehistoric times, the gods themselves were still developing their own society and still lived off the land and off the then primitive people, feeding off their worship and servitude. Humanity was then at a very primitive stage of evolution, barely developing language and first starting to live in tribes and small settlements. But as is the nature of humanity, some evolved faster than others. So busy were the gods fighting their wars and vying for power, that they never noticed the rise of a very advanced ancient civilization. This was a civilized state older than Atlantis. Older even than the people of Oranbega.
These people were known as the Atrians to the tribes around them. They built large, magnificent cities, developed writing, literature, music and laws. They created a system of bureaucracy and a working government, which allowed their race to prosper. But because of circumstances, they escaped the eyes of the gods, for they were focused elsewhere. But that would not last for long, for they made a momentous discovery - the art of magic. In a time when that was the realm of the gods and the gods alone, this discovery would set the world on fire.
It wasn't anything significant at first. Natural-born psychics were able get glimpses of the minds of the great gods, and were so able to reproduce some of their arts for themselves. They began concocting simple spells at first, little more than proof that they could practice magic at all. But as the years went on, these psychics began building a significant amount of knowledge, eventually enhancing their own clairvoyance through magical means. As their knowledge and power grew, the state became involved and spread magic among the people. And so the Atrians became the first human users of magic.
But as they began applying magic to better their own society and expand their empire, the gods finally took notice. The realization that their arcane energies had somehow ended up in the hands of what they viewed as wild animals chilled them to the bone, so they sought to destroy the civilization of the Atrians. But they gravely underestimated the human wizards, who were by then drawing on several generations of practice and experience. The gods suffered a humiliating defeat at the hands of humans, and that sent shockwaves throughout their ranks. Quarrels and indecision delayed the gods in taking action against the Atrians, but the humans were not wasting their time. Following the divine attack that nearly wiped them of the face of the Earth, they mobilized the entire power of their nation and worked feverishly into gaining more and more power and strengthening their defence against the next attack.
And eventually, another attack did come, and in its fury the following war nearly split the world in half. The gods had settled their differences and united against what they perceived as a very real threat - magic in the hands of humans. The humans themselves had done the impossible and mounted an unbelievable defence. The wake of the first Divine War left the world in shambles, the landscape largely uninhabitable and most of the life on Earth lost in the battle. The gods themselves had suffered horrendous losses and lost almost all of their ability to wage war. But it was the humans who folded first, for they needed their world to survive, where the gods were immortal. So they made peace with the gods and agreed to never practice magic again in return for immunity from wanton divine intervention.
But once knowledge is learned, it cannot be unlearned. And so while the new fledgling human states banned the use of magic and hunted down all its practitioners, magic never disappeared completely. Instead, the few survivors of the Divine War scattered around the world and eventually formed their own schools where magic was taught in secret only to a select few. These survivors were the strongest, wisest of the old Wizards, and their power and knowledge remains unmatched even today. But their disciples were few and hidden, so for the most part, magic disappeared from the world of the humans and they returned to worshipping their gods.
But as the society of the gods evolved, so did their regard for the humans. Once thought of as cattle, some gods now viewed them as persons with the right to exist and thrive. A large campaign was begun by the goddess Tielekku, where she taught the people the art of magic, gave them the knowledge they needed to develop advanced technologies, and passed down divine teachings, that they may develop their own culture. This began a staggering revolution in human development, but it also fractured the society of the gods as those who believe humans to be food rather than friends became increasingly hostile towards their peers. Eventually, a fraction led by the god Lughebu would go to war against the rest and against their peers and against the humans, but that was an event that would not happen for millennia.
But once magic became legal again, the disciples of the old wizards wasted no time in re-emerging back into the world and spreading their teachings to the masses. Little by little, the disciples of each of the old grandmasters formed their own school, which eventually developed into clans. Each of those clans specialised in a different field of magic. One in particular, the clan of Grandmaster Edward Necrotus, specialised life and death magic. In a time before religions imposed the notions of good and evil, the Necrotius clan became indispensable allies to several great nations. Like most of the other clans, they were heroes of their people and one of the most desired schools of magic for young students. And though their arts involved wards and binds that tapped the very essence of the human soul, that was never something considered evil.
But powerful people breed jealousy and contempt. As the Necrotius clan became more and more powerful and gained more and more control over large parts of the world, other clans banded together and joined forces against them. By this time there were many splinter clans and new clans and rogue clans and whatnot, so there was no shortage of magic and manpower to oppose my clan. And after Hequat exiled the Oranbegans across the sea and after Tielekku banished Lughebu and his followers and left this world herself, there was nothing to keep such wars in check. So eventually, an alliance of wizards decimated my clan and killed my people to the last man. I was the last, but I was denied all knowledge of my lineage or my destiny. I was dumped into a minor clan that practised magic very different from my own.
So I grew up learning spells and skills that never felt right. Skills that I consistently did poorly with and could never hope to master. I was the laughing stock of my peers for most of my childhood. Even though I did not know it then, I could feel that I did not belong with the people who claimed to be my parents. I was set in a world where I was doomed to be a failure. I tried my very best, struggled as much as I could, and yet it was never enough. Never enough to impress my peers, never enough to please my parents. Never enough to make me feel like my existence had any meaning. But every time I got depressed, every time I felt sorry for myself, the blood in my veins boiled and I attacked life with renewed determination. And every time I was met with embarrassing failure. My parents, try as they did to hide it, were growing more and more disappointed and disillusioned.
However, all of that changed when I was accepted into the Zel Academy Wizardry. Grandmaster Ronan would later admit that my skills were terrible, but that he had seen potential inside me. It was there, while studying the history of magic, that I came across information about the art of Necromancy and first learned about the Mortix bloodline. The legend of Mortix spoke of the three sons of Jonathan Mortix, the very first of the old Grandmasters to study dark magic, and the one who developed what would later become the art of Necromancy. He had three sons who initially followed in his footsteps, but all of whom had died at a young age from an outbreak of disease. But the legend spoke of his youngest son Edward - used his fathers magic to preserve his own unlife and continue his studies as a Lich. The insinuation is that Edward Morix was Edward Necrotius, the founder of the Necrotius clan and that the Mortix bloodline had been passed down through its members over the generations.
Even though I did not know of my own history with the Necrotius clan back then, I became fascinated by the legend and fascinated with Necromancy itself. My parents would never allow me to study anything other than their own Nitris magic, but I was defiant. I studied Necromancy in secret and I progressed so quickly that I was able to impress Grandmaster Ronan into allowing me to study the art. And as soon as I started, it was as if my eyes had opened to a whole new world. No longer was I forced to study spells that felt unnatural and uninteresting. I was now studying magic that seemed so natural, so right to me. I excelled at it to such an extent that I was able to graduate from the academy within only a few years, finishing a course that was supposed to take a decade. But my joy at graduating was short-lived, spoiled by the cold reception I received back home.
Even in those early days, religion was starting to make its presence felt, and the Nitris were among the first to adopt the new beliefs. So I came home as the practitioner of what was proclaimed "unnatural" and "forbidden" magic. That was the first time I had heard of these terms used to describe disciplines of magic. Having studied its history, I know that nothing like this had existed before. Magic had always been considered a tool towards the progress of mankind, and yet here I was, the top student of the Zel Academy and a Master Necromancer, hated and reviled for the power I held. I had hoped that at least my parents would understand, that at least they would be proud of my achievement, but it was they who despised me the most. They had in their house a Necromancer, a black sorcerer practicing unholy magic. They forbade me from using any of my new-found magic and punished me severely when I they discovered me practicing it in secret. My friends stopped coming over and avoided me in the street, and the people in town looked at me with cold, hateful eyes. I could not understand why everyone hated me, but I certainly knew they did.
One night I had enough. A man attacked me in the street, I defended myself and was arrested for the use of black magic. When I was released home, my parents burned all of my books and locked me in my room. I had had enough of the wanton animosity I was having to live through, cursed my friends, my parents and my very life and simply slipped out into the night. I left town and began wondering the wilderness that still existed outside the larger inhabited areas. But all of my fear and uncertainty about living alone proved to be for naught.
My Necromantic powers had increased so much that I had no trouble surviving on my own in the wilderness. And with religion still mostly confined to the moral codes of a handful of clans, I was able to sell my services to the many villages that I came across. I did things for them that none of their people were strong enough to accomplish, and for that I received substantial rewards in money, clothes, food, as well as old books and magic artefacts. As time moved on, I realised that I had little use for material rewards, so I concentrated my efforts towards the collection of ancient magical knowledge and power. Eventually I located an old abandoned keep from the age of gods. It was hidden deep within a cursed forest where most people would never venture, but the discovery was well worth the location. Within it there was an old magical laboratory, as well as a magnificent library of ancient books of magic. The knowledge I gained from them and the practice and training I was able to commit to in a location so far outside the gaze of superstitious people transformed me completely.
My powers increased greatly during that time. Where I had started out barely able to manipulate the carcasses of dead animals, I could now animate human corpses, give them shape and form, imbue them with powers and even give them magic. The more I practiced, the more I could control for less effort, until I learned how to make my undead minions almost completely autonomous. Little by little, I populated the entire forest with the bodies of lost travellers and adventurers that had succumbed to the curse. They acted as sentries, spotting interlopers before they became a problem, as well as guards, preventing people from gaining access to what had become my domain.
As my power and knowledge grew, I began performing tasks for people less and less. It somehow felt beneath me. Instead I turned my eye towards the search for magical books and artefacts, as well as the works of other Necromancers. No longer looking for basic survival and now in the possession of my own keep, I devoted my life to perfecting my craft, to mastering it and becoming a true Grandmaster of Necromancy. That quest eventually took me to the ruins of an old city and towards a turning point in my life. I found the ancient city of Muir, capital of the Clan Necrotius, and there I found the truth behind my past. I was a descendent of Necrotius and bearer of the Mortix bloodline. This was both a staggering revelation and not much of a surprise, for I had always felt drawn to the legacy of Necrotius and felt at home following their culture and tradition.
And it was then I found my purpose. I would rebuild and re-establish my clan with my own two hands. I would take the teachings of the old Grandmasters, I would learn, I would practice, and I would be the greatest Necromancer who ever lived. I would put Necrotius back on the map with such power and fury that all the world would feel its presence. I would right an injustice that saw an entire people slaughtered and their culture destroyed just because they had power their rivals did not. I was the son of that proud and noble legacy, and by my soul I would continue that legacy and remake the clan that created it.
However, one major problem stood in my way - my own mortality. For years I had tried to ignore the signs of old age, but they were always there, constantly reminding me of my ever-approaching death. I was able to increase the length of my life significantly by preventing my body from decaying, but everything I did only delayed the inevitable. Even through all of my magic, my tissues were still deteriorating at a rapid rate. My body was beginning to fall apart and I was fast running out of means to keep it together. I tried every spell, every bind I could think of but every time the effects eventually faded, and every time I retried the effect was weaker and weaker. In the end it dawned on me that trying to preserve my body alive was a losing battle and one which was beginning to consume almost all of my time.
I shifted all of my focus towards preserving my life in other ways, such as transferring my mind into a younger body, replacing decaying body parts with new ones or even keeping my body functioning after death. None of those, or any of the others I came up with would prove to be practical, carrying unjustifiable risk, unsatisfactory results or far too extensive maintenance. The only method that provided any hope at all was simply dying and reanimating my own body as a Lich. It was a favoured technique among the more powerful Necromancers and it would give me eternal life and almost complete control over my body. But it had one major flaw - it exposed my soul. I would become an undead being, myself. That would leave me open to the control of another, living Necromancer. Necromancy, as a school of magic, is based around the binding of the soul of a dead person to your own, as a dead man's soul is free from the binds that have kept it in the body during life. I could bind my own soul to my own undead body quite easily, but that bind could never be made very strong. An able Necromancer could potentially undo it and steal my soul for his own use. And even if I could protect myself against that, a Necromancer's power is determined by the strength of the bind between his soul and that of the undead he controls. With the binds between my own soul and my body weakened by death and reliant on unstable magic, this would compromise that power unacceptably.
Every technique I tried was unsatisfactory. Every research effort I committed to ended in failure. All of my attempts proved to be little more than a waste of time. But all of my effort proved to have some merit after all. After trying almost every trick the old magical teachings could offer me, I developed a very deep understanding of the principles behind life and death. I began to understand what made a creature alive, what bound the soul and body of a living being and how these forces could be manipulated. I had learned all I could from the old books. It was time for me to take matters into my own hands and develop my own techniques, forged from the arcane knowledge I had accumulated. I experimented on animals at first, and my attempts met with utter failure, but for the first time in my efforts I actually knew what I was doing wrong. I tried a wide range of experiments, performed many tests and tried a myriad of options. And with each subsequent attempt, the quality of the results improved. I was, in fact, able to give complete and utter immortality to a small rodent, which gave it not only an infinite lifespan, but also complete immunity from bodily harm. I had expended a lot of effort and gone through just about every school of magic, but in the end, I had developed a technique which could give me the immortality I required to achieve my goal. Now all that was left was to make that work on humans.
I was no fool, so I was determined to get it working on a test subject before I attempted anything on myself. So I sent my minions forth to gather some. I did not give them any specific instructions about where to find these subjects, but they were resourceful enough to raid several villages just outside my cursed forest and kidnap some of the villagers from there. It was the first time I had faced the prospect of taking the lives of people who were, for all intents and purposes, innocent. I had exercised some notion of compassion up until then, but when it came to taking their lives through excruciatingly painful experiments, I found I had none left in me. People are hateful, vengeful creatures who only seek personal gain and destruction. They fear power, for they have none of their own, so they seek to remove those who have more. These were the people who had obliterated my old clan and who had treated me so badly because of who and what I was. These were the people who had asked me to perform tasks for them, but never to stay and live with them. It had long since become my fervent belief that any self-respecting master of magic should strive to elevate himself above the level of an ordinary human, above that sort of primal thinking. Since the dawn of time, power had ruled the world. Power, gained by the strength of those who studied and practiced it. In the quest for power, humans were merely tools, means to an end, sheep to be shepherded and fed on. I was reminded of the history of the old gods, and I was growing more and more convinced that Lughebus teachings were right.
I spent some time going over the history of the old gods, and I recognised many of the situations they were facing. I found myself agreeing with Lughebu and the pantheon he led. I had tried and tried to live with these people, these humans, and they could simply never accept me. They feared me, they hated me, they exiled me. I, Vox of the Bloodline Mortix was just too different from them. All of the Grandmasters of magic were, in fact, which is why Grandmaster Ronan had been the only one who had ever seen me for what I was a powerful practitioner of magic. All other people ever saw in me was a power to be feared. These simpleminded, short-sighted people were not my equals. They were animals of the land, to be ruled over and exploited, and only cared for so that they may exist to serve. The world was moved by the users of magic, and humans were merely the fuel. So if some of them had to be sacrificed for the progress of the movers of the world, then that was the natural course of all things.
I stopped considering myself human then. In body, I had not been human for a very long time, but rather what resembled a festering corpse, a cursed monster that dwelled within a cursed keep inside a cursed forest. In mind, I had not been human ever since I left my home and my past life behind. And in soul... Well, there is no such thing as a human soul. Theyre all the same thing, divine, human or animal.
So I sent my minions forth to gather even more subjects for my research. And they did. They brought me entire villages, even the dead that had fallen in battle. And while I had ample materials to work with, progress was slow and I was wasting a lot of lives in the process. To a Necromancer, no life is truly wasted, of course, as the failures simply served to swell the ranks of my undead legions. But the more I took from the land, them more attention I brought to myself. Neighbouring countries began to take notices of the devastation my minions were sewing in their lands, and started taking action. They sent first mercenaries, then entire armies against me. But the fools underestimated me so badly that their soldiers couldnt even traverse the cursed forest that surrounded my Necropolis. All they did was feed me more test subjects for my experiments and more corpses for my army.
Eventually I found myself pressed for space within my forest. My keep was stretching dangerously close to the edges of the wooded areas, and I needed still more and bigger power conduits, still larger storage, still bigger machines and still more structures. Fortunately, a century of dwelling within my cursed forest had allowed me to study the curse that held it quite thoroughly. It proved to be an ancient bind of almost unimaginable power, but manipulating it was incredibly easy for those with the right knowledge, as it was rather simple in nature. So, through only a little extra work, I gained almost complete control over the spirit of the forest, and I was able to force it to grow and expand. Very quickly it engulfed several nearby villages, and though most of them were already barren from my own raids, they provided much-needed space for expansion. Of course, that only served to alarm the countries I was expanding into even more. Not that it mattered, as they were powerless to do anything against me. But it also managed to draw the attention of a few magical clans, and that would prove problematic.
I was making history in my own right, as never before had a single Sorcerer controlled a domain this large and held a power so great without any form of support from anywhere. I, a single man, now controlled enough territory to rival some of the largest countries on the continent and had so much power and so many minions at my disposal that quite literally no one single establishment could challenge me. Without giving it a name, I had already managed to rebuild my old clan, the Necrotius, and far surpassed its power all by myself. And then history repeated itself. The local governments, fearing my power, unified many clans of magic against me. Many of my clans old enemies were once again rallying against me, but I had studied my history and was determined to not allow it to repeat itself.
I lay additional curses on my protective forest and expanded and extended it into a veritable death trap. I summoned countless more undead minions and perfected my enchantments on my existing ones, forming an army that struck fear into the hearts even the strongest of the clans. I built ramparts and turrets, spread poison and acid throughout the land fortified my Necropolis to be absolutely impregnable. And when the allied clans attack finally came, it was devastated. They employed powerful magic and innumerable forces, and their drive into my domain almost reached my forest. But the further in they came, the deeper they fell into my trap, for they were walking straight into the most powerful curse I had. And when they finally thought they had won, I played my final trump card and wrenched their souls straight out of their bodies, binding them into the soul nexus at the very heart of my keep. In mere moments the enemies who had come to destroy me turned into minions who answered to me and me alone. They were transformed into intact undead minions who retained all of their powers. And with the clans own Grandmasters leading my army of the undead, my forces turned around and simply overran the territory of several neighbouring countries. Without the wards that kept my power from crossing their borders, these territories were soon consumed by my cursed forest and populated with my undead minions.
However, my great victory proved to be rather short-lived. Religion had been present on the continent for over a century before, propagandised by the Clan of the Divine Light. It had long since been accepted by some of the more formal clans, the ones who still worshipped the old gods, such as my old Nitris Clan, but to most people it was just a lot of high-brow propaganda. Ever since the end of the Second Divine War and the beginning of the Golden Age of Magic, people had slowly been forgetting about the old religions enforced by the gods before they left, and they had gotten used putting their faith in magic, rather than deities. But my actions against the allied clans gave the Clan of the Divine Light the evil they needed. I had killed a great many people, stolen countless souls and defiled almost a third of the continent. That gave them a cause to rally against something all simpleminded humans feared and hated. The destruction of the clans that had fallen against me had left a large void of power on the international scene. The Clan of the Divine Light capitalised on this, rallying all the people and all the clans to their cause and taking on the self-proclaimed title of Order.
But the Order of the Divine Light were not any more righteous than I was. They exploited their followers, taking labour and resources from them and giving nothing in return. But where I extracted those through magical binds and Necromantic control, they extracted it by proclaiming it was peoples duty to help the fight against evil. Against me. However, they had the upper hand, in that they had a charismatic leader - Sir Valcor Eliot III. He was hailed as a hero of the people and saviour of nations. But in truth he was a mercenary for his clan, doing good for the people and earning prestige so that the Divine Light may more easily manipulate people into following their own version of religion. But even the Orders propaganda was not enough to mobilize the people into another frontal assault against me, for they all know full well what the consequences of that would be. Instead, the Order took a rather more cowardly approach. Valcor scoured the land, looking for the greatest fighters and sorcerers he could find. He recruited all of them and formed a special strike-force, with the only objective of destroying me once and for all.
I will admit, it was a clever strategy, as it managed to escape my gaze almost until the end, and because it targeted my undead armys one weakness individual power. While I had enough undead minions to fend off all the worlds armies, a concentrated attack by just a few powerful people negated my armys numerical advantage. And Valcor had another trump card, as well the magic the Order of the Divine Light specialised in and that he wielded was that of spell-breaking. He literally had the power to undo the binds that held my undead minions to together and break the curses that protected my forest.
And so he did. He attacked with surprise, carving a deep wedge into my territory before I even knew he was there. Backed up by a small party of some of the most powerful people on the continent, he made short work of my defences. Expert timing on his part also caught me in the middle of the most important experiment I had ever conducted, and one I firmly believed could give me the immortality I so badly desired. I had hoped I could finish my experiment before he reached my inner sanctum so I kept working, rather than join the defence, but that was exactly what Valcor had counted on. Without my full support, my guards proved no match for his preparation. Stupidly, I fell for his trap and handed Valcor an easy victory. As a result, he interrupted my experiment and confronted me without my undead to assist me.
But this was where Valcors luck ran out. He studied everything ever known about me and prepared counters for it. However, what he didnt know was that I had never actually displayed my full power at all, and that is where his failure lay. But his insolence had earned him the right to see its full extent as a final, parting gift. A Necromancer has more power than just the undead he controls, but obviously the Order of the Divine Light had not studied their magical history, as Valcor was completely unprepared for the dark powers I unleashed against him. I stole the souls of his entire party and sent his brethren against him. I couldnt quite steal his soul, as he was well-warded against my magic, but I did curse him with weakness and disease.
That should have given me an easy victory, but it didnt. Against all odds, Valcor kept on fighting through his pain, through my curses and despite the grave injuries I was inflicting upon him. He fought like a man possessed. And in truth, perhaps he was. I have spent centuries in study and contemplation since, trying to find out what allowed him to defy death and overstep his human limits like that, and it always comes down to the same thing divine intervention. I have exhausted all other explanations and nothing else is even remotely plausible. And though I have never been able to find consistent evidence to support this, I am quite convinced that some ancient god reached over the ether and assisted him, giving him strength, will and power. Perhaps it was because of his religion, or perhaps it was because he had become involved in events much bigger than he suspected, but Valcor received divine help, and that allowed him to fight through all my wards and spells and slay me.
Yes, I died. And my death released all of my curses and all of my minions. But even in death, I had one final parting gift - a curse I had been developing for decades and one that I was rather proud of. If I was to be defeated, then not only would I take Valcor with me, but I would make sure he spent an eternity paying for his insolence. So with my final breath, I cursed him to haunt my fortress forever, never aging, never dying and never resting until he found me and killed me. Ironic, considering this was what he originally came to do, and even more so because he would look forever. I was already dead by the time the curse took effect, and dead by his very hand. I found some small measure of closure in knowing I had exacted fitting punishment against Valcor for what he had done. He came to my domain to hunt evil, and now he would hunt evil for all time.
The curse was so powerful that it cast eternal darkness over my Necropolis. Eternal night set over my domain, making the dead restless and waking them from their graves even without my help. And though my cursed forest eventually retreated from the territories it had defiled, it never shrunk below its original size and never exposed my cursed Necropolis. Just as before, it became a forest of death and horrors, but now it hid a dark secret mad, undead knight, forever roaming the halls of my dilapidated fortress, forever shouting my name, forever screaming and running through the ruins, looking for that which could never be found. The Black Knight of the Necropolis, as he became known, would attack anyone who dared venture into the forest, such had become his madness. And at night, people who travelled near the forest could sometimes hear his voice, calling for me, angry, hateful and desperate.
But my story did not end with my death. I knew full well what was to happen to my soul after I died, for I had dealt with this for countless years. I was to leave my body and behind and head for one of the many worlds of the afterlife. But I didnt. Much to my surprise, I found my soul trapped in the remains of my body, still awake and still very much aware. I could still see Valcor haunting my Necropolis, hear his shouts and curses and the banging of his sword against the dead stones as he erupted into rage. I could even feel the presence of the other restless souls that had been trapped in my domain by the size of my curse. It was a surreal experience, for I was very much dead, and still not completely. It took me many years before I came to terms with my fate and worked out what had happened to confine me to a fate such as this.
As soon as I died, my body fell apart. And not just to pieces, it fell into dust. Centuries of holding it together artificially, through spells and binds that had to be constantly maintained, had caused it to lose any sort of cohesion it once had. So as soon as I died and my binds broke, my body fell apart with nothing there to keep it together. All that was left of me was a skull without a jaw that had somehow managed to hold together, and it was to that skull that my soul was now bound. Initially, I couldnt understand why I had not passed on, but eventually a realization struck me I had toyed with the binds between my soul and my body so long and had done so many things to them, that somewhere along the line I had completely perverted the natural connection that binds the soul and body of a living being. In truth, that connection had been failing me for decades until I began weaving spells to reinforce it. It is only logical that eventually it broke completely, leaving only my own binds to keep me alive. And, apparently, those binds had not been undone when I died, perhaps feeding on the power of the monstrous curse that still gripped my domain.
So I spent countless years as a rotting corpse, confined to a single spot in a fortress falling apart, restricted to only my own thoughts. While that may sound mortifyingly scary, it was more boring than anything else. I had finally managed to defy death, and yet I was now unable to carry on my work with my eternal life. Unable, that is, until I found a curious anomaly. People would occasionally wander into my forest and quickly get killed by undead, the cursed nature or even Valcor himself. And when they passed away and their bodies rose to walk the Earth in undeath, I felt an undeniable power flow through my trapped soul. At first I wrote it off to my imagination, but as it kept happening more and more, this power began to build up to a point where I could actually use it to produce some rudimentary magic. This presented me with an interesting prospect if I could gather enough energy, perhaps I could return to life. But first I would need to prepare.
The first spell I cast was basic clairvoyance, followed shortly by basic telekinesis. My soul may have been trapped in one spot, but there was no reason why my senses should be trapped in the same spot with it. Now able to roam my fortress freely, I discovered my library and laboratory had largely remained intact and resisted the ravages of time. Immediately I began researching my condition, looking for side effects I could use to return myself to life. I quickly discovered that in my present state, I could consume and store ethereal energy in any form. The life essence of souls was a good source of such, so one of the first resources I tapped was my old soul nexus. Though most of the spirits had been able to escape from it, what few remained were enough to give me the power I needed to restart my old power conduits. Once operational, they provided me with a steady stream of ethereal energy, no longer requiring me to subsist on the occasional hapless traveller. Moreover, they allowed me uninterrupted access to my fortress, as my out-of-body ability was no longer hampered by my running out of energy to sustain it.
Just as it looked like things are finally going my way, a new problem developed. Valcor noticed all of the activity taking place in my fortress. As his zeal to kill me erupted in full swing, he began sabotaging my renovations on my fortress, destroying a large part of one of my laboratories and continually taking my power conduits offline. I had gathered a lot of power, so I attempted to fight him remotely, but irony was on his side this time around. I could never hurt or dissuade him, as he had the full power of my old curse behind him, and that curse was a veritable powerhouse, supercharging his body and soul with so much dark energy I could never hope to even affect him. However, I found that I was able to misdirect him with shadows and visions. Very soon it occurred to me that if I put some more thought into my misdirection, I could actually control him. And so I tamed Valcor, the Black Knight of the Necropolis, and turned him into my servant. Of course, in his fractured mind, he was still looking to kill me, but I simply led him to believe that each command I gave him would help him reach that goal. Eventually, I developed a technique that allowed me to control his mind almost completely.
Valcor proved to be a godsend. Not only could I use him as a medium to regain some control over the undead in my forest and as a host through whom I could finally cast more powerful spells, but he was also a gateway to the massive powerhouse that was my old curse. It had been cast on Valcor directly, so all of its power flowed through him. My control over him allowed me almost complete access to that power. It took me a while to comprehend the magnitude of my old curse and to accept that I had once held so much power. By then I had begun to forget just how strong a sorcerer I had once been, but taking a glimpse into the past spurred me on to exceed my previous achievements. Now that I had an avatar and an army of the undead once again under my command, I set forth to rebuild my old Necropolis and resume my work into immortality.
However, I had learned my lesson. Gathering too much attention only spelled trouble. Even with power as extreme as mine, it was unwise to upset the nations on a whim. I did not need any more wars and I had everything I needed contained within my forest, so I simply barricaded myself in. I moved most of my undead to the outer areas of the forest to prevent wanderers from venturing too far in and to generally scare the locals away. I modified my curse of darkness, making my forest much more deadly and unforgiving and making my eternal night even darker. I was looking to obscure my presence from the outside world and keep everyone out. And it worked. The locals were too scared to go anywhere near the forest, but they quickly realised that as long as they stayed away, they would be fine. Occasionally, adventurers sought honour and glory in my cursed forest, but between the undead monsters that inhabited it and the traps with covered the land, they found only death, instead. A few were strong and resourceful enough to make it to my Necropolis, only to face Valcor and meet a swift demise. He had, by then, become my angel of death, having gone through many transformations under the power of the curse and under my supervision. His original mind was completely gone, and he had become my own personal undead avatar.
Eventually, I discovered a way to return to life. My body was useless for this purpose, consisting only of a rotting skull only good for an anchor to this world. I would require a new body, one without its own soul, but which was also functioning correctly. I considered wrenching Valcors soul out of his body and using it. After all, it was somewhat well-preserved and held some impressive power. But the bodys internal structure was so completely messed-up by the curse I had cast on him that it was unworkable, and any tampering with his soul would require me to deal with the monstrous power of the curse which had kept it in his body this entire time. But it was that same curse that gave me an idea.
I had seen my curse keep Valcors soul in his body for a thousand years without him having to do a thing to thing to maintain it. Of course, it also broke his mind and drove him insane, but this was intentional and easily avoided for a spell I would be casting on myself. Furthermore, I had seen my curse alter his body down to the bone. Valcor was no longer human by any stretch of the imagination he was a monster through and through. He had changed physically so completely that he was unrecognisable. I was confident that I could control this change, maintaining my body into the shape and appearance I wanted, perhaps even sculpting it from the ground up. Not only that, but Valcor occupied a body that had not been alive for a millennium, yet even with the great power I had amassed since my death, I was still unable to break the bind between his soul and his body. Given that a weak bind between body and soul was my only reason for not wanting to transform myself into a Lich, this certainly presented me with a unique opportunity.
I had found and answer, but somehow it had ended up being the same answer I had rejected centuries ago, except now it was perfect. I wracked my mind trying to find out why I had failed before and if I was not overlooking the same shortcomings now. What I found was a curious effect. Transforming myself into a Lich and binding Necromantic control over my body to my soul is a fairly simple spell, and one that required very little power. Pumping more power into it only serves to make it more unstable and doesnt help the strength of the bind whatsoever. Locking a soul into a body and denying it any means of escaping it is a very, very difficult curse, and one which requires not just enormous amounts of power, but extensive magical skill and knowledge. In addition, the more power you can imbue into the curse, the stronger it will hold. And this curse in particular could be strengthened, meaning that I could simply pump more power into it at a later time and make it even stronger. The answer had been right there in front of my eyes for centuries, and yet I had wasted my time trying to shoehorn conventional Necromancy into doing things that it was never intended to do. In fact, when I compared my new-found method of immortality with the one I had counted on when Valcor had interrupted me, I found that not only was my original one not very effective, but it would probably not even have worked.
Fate sometimes plays cruel jokes on us all. The punchline of mine was that I was lucky to get killed before I cast a spell on me that may not have worked and would, at the very least, have hurt my ability to practice magic and weakened my life force significantly. The punchline of Valcors joke was that all off his efforts, all of his determination, all of his pain and all of his suffering under the power of my curse, had only served to help me find the perfect way to preserve my life forever. Killing me and then suffering the effects of my curse that I may later examine that had been the best thing anyone could have done for me. I found it ironic and very amusing, but Im pretty certain that Valcor wasnt laughing at all. Then again, his fate was his own fault, so I saw no reason to feel sorry for him.
My discovery of a means to achieve immortality was monumental, but the preparations required for it were nothing short of staggering. I had gotten the technical and ritual side of my technique down to a T, but the amount of energy I had had to employ to make this work at all was incomprehensible. I studied my old curse in detail and found that it was more than just an example of my old power. It surpassed any single burst of power I had ever produced by a factor of no less than ten. Though I attributed this magnitude to my dogged determination to have my triumph even in death, I still suspect that I, like Valcor, may have had some divine assistance. Power of this scale just did not seem human.
But despite my awe of the curse I had cast, I simply set to work accumulating power. I needed a lot of it and I didnt have much of any use left for it my domain mostly took care of itself so I simply sat back and waited. Centuries passed as my power slowly built up, feeding on the souls of careless travellers and heroes who dared venture into my forest, as well as on the constant hum of the many power conduits I had built. I bided my time by pouring over my old books, looking for more and better spells that I could practice once I were alive, learning to control my powers better and generally keeping my shape as I waited.
But as my power was nearing the levels I required, disaster struck. One Baron Zoria had caught wind of my existence and had become intrigued. He sought to take my power for his own. In a world that had all but forgotten magic, Zoria proved to be a master at it. He approached my forest with an entire cabal of very powerful wizards. I could sense them talking, plotting and preparing to attack me. But I could also sense that the spirits that occupied the bodies of these wizards were somehow unnatural, somehow foreign. It soon became clear to me that these were no mere humans, but the spirits of the ancient Orabegans whom Hequat had exiled across the ocean. I had had run-ins with them quite frequently since my death as they buzzed between places of great power, of which my Necropolis was one. But for all our encounters, they remained a complete mystery to me disembodied spirits living in eternal unlife, and yet at the same time completely immune to Necromantic control. For a time I had thought their souls were simply warded against Necromantic binds, but I had been able to trap a few Oranbegans and experiment on them. They had shown no sign of wards of any sort, or in fact any protective magic whatsoever. The only thing I was able to recognise was a curse which I was completely unable to identify or understand. Whatever was making these spirits immune to my power had to originate from that curse in some way.
Apparently the ancient Oranbegans had mobilised since I was last in contact with them, however, and had developed a variant Necromancy techniques of their own. They were using soul removal to displace the soul out of a body and into a soul crystal. Then they applied simple binds to place one of their own spirits into the body. It was a method many Necromancers used to bind spirits under their control into physical bodies for a variety of effects, and it was a rather simplified version of the ritual which transformed a person into a Lich. However, the Oranbegans were somehow able to exist as disembodied spirits not anchored to anything in the physical world and still resist Necromantic control or passing on to the afterlife. As a result, getting them out of their bodies was fairly easy, but keeping them out proved impossible.
When Zoria and his cabal finally attacked my Necropolis, their command of magic caught me completely unprepared. I had been watching the land through clairvoyance and had seen the use of magic crushed by the advent of religion. I had seen all practitioners of magic killed or exiled and seen the art of magic disappear from altogether. And yet here were wizards popping virtually out of nowhere, who wielded magic that could almost rival that of the old grandmasters. Apparently, just like me, the ancient Oranbegans had not been wasting their time in unlife all these centuries. They were well prepared, well trained and very, very-well practiced. Given that they were genuine ancient sorcerers from the dawn of time, it came as no surprise that they were well-versed in magic, but the magnitude of their power was something I could not have expected.
I faced a conundrum. It had taken me a thousand years to accumulate as much power as I had and I was so very close to finally having enough to achieve eternal life. And yet I found myself having to battle arcane sorcerers who wielded incredible magic, a battle which would probably have cost me most of the power I had stored. A millennium of effort and waiting, wasted. And though the patience required to wait a millennium more was never a problem, I just found this to be a huge waste. And even if I did decide to defend myself and then wait another thousand years, I had no guarantee that something like this would not happen again in the meantime. Facing the prospect of an infinite cycle of building up power and then being forced to waste it, I chose the only other option I had to do nothing. There was precious little they could do to me, personally, at least that I couldnt prevent. My power and knowledge had increased to such a level that I was able to draw energy off the ether itself, so I didnt need my fortress to help me. Literally, I stood to lose nothing by surrendering to the Oranbegans.
Amusingly, they never quite realised my decision to not defend myself. My old curse of darkness was still in full swing, perverting my forest into a monstrous death trap and waking the dead from their graves and turning them viciously hostile toward anyone who ventured it. And Valcor, still an anchor and a conduit to the dark energies that infected my domain, kept haunting the halls of my Necropolis and attacking anyone who set foot inside. So, even without my resistance, Zoria found his push into my territory difficult and dangerous. My old minions claimed the lives of many of his companions and Valcor nearly took his. And though the Oranbegans simply left their corpses in search for more bodies, the death toll threatened to stop Zorias incursion.
At the sight of this pathetic offensive, I began to second-guess my decision to do nothing, but eventually the ancient Oranbegans resorted to a power they were obviously reluctant to use. They summoned infernal demons from the very fiery pits of the Earth. I must admit I was surprised at this sight, not least of all because there was only one source of power that could produce these monsters the Demon Prince, himself. I had dealt with him before, though only briefly, and left convinced that no sane person should ever strike deals with him, lest they doom themselves to a most gruesome fate. What could have possessed the Oranbegans to bargain with the fiend I could not even begin to imagine, but at least I finally understood where the enigmatic curse that held them suspended in eternal unlife had come from. And their fate only reinforced my conviction that one simply does not bargain with demons. Their deals are simply never favourable.
Still, with a hoard of demons from the very hellfire, Zoria was able to punch straight through my defences and enter my inner sanctum without much resistance. Then he came upon Valcor, my eternal house guest. Were I not already dead, I would probably have died laughing at Zorias expression when he was beset by that monster. The last thing he expected to find guarding my remains was a twisted, grotesque monster that bore the armour and insignia of the Order of the Divine Light. The Barons panic was amusing for a time, but eventually his demonic forces swarmed Valcor and distracted him long enough for Zoria to grab my skull and flee. Valcor, of course, made short work of the demons and chased the escaping sorcerers, but since he was bound to my Necropolis by a very powerful curse, he could not chase far. A few of the Oranbegans made it out of my cursed forest with their lives, but more importantly, they had stolen my skill, along with my soul bound to it, and would not proceed to take me back to their ancient city.
Ironically, even with me gone, little changed in my cursed forest. Valcor still haunted the halls of my Necropolis, cursing my name and looking to kill me, occasionally taking the lives of those who dared venture into my domain. My curse of darkness still gripped the land and the dead still roamed restless, praying on anyone they came across and haunting the forest in the eternal night. The forest itself was still deadly, still hostile and still malicious to anyone who thought it a good idea to enter. It became clear that my millennial stay and my corrosive power had defiled my domain so completely that it remained deeply cursed even in my absence, and may well still be, even today.
