The Forgotten King
They had buried him alongside his army who were destroyed in the Battle of Myrd and believed to be dead. But some vestige of life clung unto him yet, some grave remnant of the Grace of Uries. Yet as he rose from the charnel ground and loomed above the rotting corpses of his deceased soldiers, that blessed light faded and a furious anger took its place. He moved amongst the bodies and began to fashion himself a staff of flesh and bone. He was an ancient and powerful wizard of legend who had been trained by the Genesis Casters themselves, and one of the most feared and respected arcanists in all of Aekor. Yet all his talent and glory in life had afforded him no succour in this place, this rough pit in which he was discarded in haste, unrecognised, amongst the rest of the men whom he led.
And yet in this ghastly, dark hole where no light dared linger, he somehow lived. And so he fashioned his staff of death, raising it high above his head as he began to chant. All around him the bones and corpses of the dead cracked and shook, and his vision began to shift with strange colours and proportions, eventually settling into a grey haziness, illuminated only by the spirits of the dead that had not yet passed into the realms of the gods. This accursed cavity, empty of life, was filled with these hazy spirits, creating a miasma of despair and dejection. His spell had bridged the gap between the worlds of life and death. He stared at each spirit and felt their utter, inconsolable despondence and he recognised he would know it soon if he remained in this doomed pit. Once again he raised his staff of cracked and pitiful bone and began a dark chant. And as quickly as he had forged the bridge between these worlds, he shattered it.
This spell was ferociously violent; a maniacal plea and a rapacious gamble. At once, the spirits of the dead formed a vortex of confusion, and the world shifted strangely and continuously between vibrant colour, darkness, and the ashen blur of the world of death, as he himself was swallowed by the extreme, uncontrollable power of the incantation, that threatened to annihilate and immortalise him all at once. In that swirling, unfathomable moment life and death were bound as one in his body, and he was reborn with bone but no flesh, and gory wings that erupted from behind his frail, skeletal frame.Â
He was now part life and death, a lingering peril of undeath that stained the world where it touched. Light now scrambled away from his bony visage for fear of being swallowed by the perdurable darkness of evil that would forever reign, unchanging, within his walking corpse. And eventually he would raise a new army, far more formidable than before, and he would be crowned its leader, The Forgotten King.