The Blackened
Sentient undead who hide away from the rest of the Continent of Keskad, remnants of the Shattering War that created them. They range from fire blackened animated bone to brittle, withered corpses with the remnants of their flesh clinging parchment like to stringy muscle and tendon.
They are tentatively ruled by 53 powerful wizards. These are the survivors, as much as that word applies, of the group of Solavi wizards who enacted a great ritual at the end of the Shattering War in an attempt to stop the conflict. This ritual is part of the reason for their current state, as the ritual ended just as the final blow was struck that killed the god Solag so while the Ritual was originally meant to place the Giants into stasis, the aftershock of Solags death and the destruction of Solavin disrupted and morphed the ritual into an ever expanding chain of events that ended with the Giants in stasis, the continent surrounded by an eternal storm and the Solavi not destroyed outright by the cataclysm rising from the wreckage as fire blackened skeletal undead or frayed, tattered wights.
The survivors slowly clambered out of the storm tossed seas, clinging to the shattered rocks thrusting from the crashing waves that was all that remained on the edges of what was once their home. It is on these scattered rocky islands that the Blackened make their homes today. Keeps, castles and cobbled together fortresses looming above the ocean crafted from ruins half melted into the rocks themselves or scavenged from the waves below.
With no need for food, the motivations of each Blackened are varied and scattered. The 53 Wizards, loosely called "The Senate", have a singular focus of trying to undo certain aspects of the ritual without unweaving others. They all have slowly but surely deviated from each other as the centuries have passed, gathering their own power bases of The Blackened and vying for what little resources are available. Instead of a singular government, the Blackened are barely 53 uniquely motivated feifdoms and realistically are more like hundreds as there are many, many Blackened who hold no allegiance to any of the Senate. There are just as many as well who have zero motivations at all, sitting on patches of rock or under the ocean while the wind and waves slowly wear their bones down. These are called the "Lost" at their most charitable, the "Forgotten" by many Blackened who see them as a waste of space. Even with animosity however, they are almost unanimously left alone and purposefully destroying another Blackened is the only crime of any real note among the scattered population.
Nearly ten thousand Blackened in various states exist, perched on their rocky islands deep in the Maelstrom and mostly cut off from the rest of the world, at least from the rest of the world reaching them. Due to the Senates unique understanding of the Veil Maelstrom, the ships of the Blackened are able to navigate the endless storm though they rarely make any contact with the outside world due to the state of their forms.
Whenever a Blackened does make its way into the wider world, they tend to find themselves around less discerning folk or hiding their true nature. Solavi and Blackened avoid each other outright though they are rarely violent. The best way to describe the relationship between the living Solavi and the undead is the word Uncomfortable.
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