The Necrothane Part 1

Deep within the heart of Vostin’s Fang lies the Maze of Bone. At the center of the ever shifting maze, shrouded in the distilled essence of death, there is a stark white fortress, home to one of the more elusive powers of the Na Essad. Born Mortimer Winthelthrop, it was inevitable that he would turn the rage and pain of his early life to the study of death in all its forms. As these things go, his story is pretty standard, undead horde, a few towns razed and then raised to form an unstoppable army, the forces of light gathering against him, plans in disarray, a final escape route surprisingly used before one of the stalwart champions managed to split him down the middle with a gargantuan steel pokey thing.
Unfortunately for him, his escape did not lead him to the hidden stronghold it was supposed to. Instead he found himself in the main gate chamber of the unescapable demiplane of Na Essad. When confronted by the gathered factions of the Fang, he declined to choose an allegiance and instead went wandering the world for a while. The first thing he did was lose his name. He shed his past like his past had shed its respective flesh when he began his reign of terror. He found a world that was teeming with lost spirits and wandering undead, and over a century or so, he came up with an idea. He was still twisted and evil, but murdering and then reanimating all of the people who he had a childhood grudge against took the edge off of his particular mania.
He started harvesting the local undead, gathering them up and locking them away from the people of his new home. Over decades, he searched out a place to build a stronghold, the better to protect himself from meddling wanderers and to provide an isolated holding facility for the captured undead. As time went on, he left his fortress less and less often, becoming more involved in his research.
During one of his infrequent outings, he stumbled upon one of the great secrets of Na Essad. He found one of the Grottos containing the Soulstones of trapped deities. His first instinct was to bend even those powers to his whim, but he triggered Na Essad’s defenses when he started to absorb the trapped powers of a god. He escaped, but barely. The danger presented by his new home caused him to search for an escape, for he no longer felt safe. So concerned was he that he made peace with the Ice Lich of the Great Glacier, one of the undead he had most hoped to capture and bend to his will. The Ice Lich instructed him in the secrets of the great binding. It is the lore of the Giants that, combined with his necromantic mastery, has set him on his current path.
He went forth from the great frozen tower of the Ice Lich and recruited those who would best serve him. His gathered corpse takers travel up and down the Fang, retrieving the bodies of the dead before they can be raised and capturing or dispersing those undead whose creation they were incapable of stopping. His Ossifers or Bone Men provide a public service which is not always welcome, but none deny that the realms they walk are safer now than ever before.
The corpses his servants bring to him are used in the creation of skeletons and zombies that he stores in the Maze of Bones and in crypts hewn from the walls of Vostin’s Fang. The thousands of minor undead he has created as well as all of the greater undead he has captured and bound have in his mind but one purpose. Each one of them is little more than a battery of necromantic energies that he is setting aside for the day his plans reach fruition. His plans are two-fold. First he intends to ascend to godhood by absorbing the necrotic energy bound up in his collected undead, and then he intends to sacrifice himself to power a ritual that he believes will let him pierce the boundaries of Na Essad and return to the greater multiverse as a living mortal. He believes that the death of a god will unleash so much power into the realm of the dead that he’ll be able to bring his mortal self across through the barrier without triggering any of na essad’s defenses.
If the first servators ever find out about his plans, they would certainly oppose him, either sending parties of adventurers in to destroy him, or raising a force of Giants to confront him in his lair. If they fail, the twin pulses of necrotic energy released by his ascension and his subsequent death would be likely to be sufficient to kill almost every living thing on or in Vostin’s Fang. It is also probable that the damage to the intricate bindings that keep the thing at the center of the world both dormant and trapped inside Na Essad will lead to the ultimate destruction of Na Essad and from there the multiverse.

Posted by roninkakuhito on April 3, 2012

https://worldmakers.wordpress.com/2012/04/03/the-necrothane-part-1/