The Dark World

"We have searched everywhere we can think of for them, that is true, but what if they are hiding somewhere we can't think of? Perhaps they have found a place where no one would dare to even enter, for only the truly desperate or mad would enter..."

— Charles Ignum, leader of the ANS task force assigned to searching for Society for Alternate Lifestyles stragglers.

After the end of The Necromancers War, a great effort was undertaken to ensure that every last necromancer was tried for their actions. Despite the large number of them brought to justice, there were still some that believed that there might still be more out there. After all, if they were crafty enough to have an army hidden away in a city before attacking it, surely they'd have a backup plan in case they fell? While there is little evidence suggesting where they could have gone, this belief has clung onto a small part of society for generations. Some believed that they had access to another dimension, where they could hide until they were ready to strike. Some believed they traveled into the future, to strike once again. The most recent rumor, with the advent of space travel, is that they went of to form their own planet, where they could plot and practice their vile ways in secret.
This has been the most dismissed theory of them all; surely if the Society colonized their own planet, they'd first need to Terraform it first, and such a large and resource-consuming task would not go unnoticed by the ANS or The Global Confederation. And yet, the myth persists, possibly due to the writings of author and poet Emerald Pearlstone, who claimed to have seen a vision from Coraga, which is transcribed below:

At first, I saw only blackness, the empty void between the stars. But then, I was flying towards the blackness, and saw that it was more than just emptiness, it was a world painted pitch-black to match the void behind it, something disguised as nothing. As I approached the surface, I pierced the black clouds in the sky, and as I descended, I tasted the air, and it tasted of flesh and blood; it was all i could do to keep from vomiting. I landed in a vast desert, stretching as far as the eye could see. The only light was coming from a strange, green-white glow from the sky, and it barely illuminated anything. All I could tell was that the sand beneath my feet were a sickly black; when I reached down to touch it, it felt unnaturally smooth, like glass made of silk. All round me, there were stone formations that looked unnatural, almost like they were built or distorted by magic. Some of them looked like fallen creatures or bones. I looked around, but the only building I could find was a massive castle, cloaked in a red glow that revealed jagged spires that twisted in painful angles one would not think possible. The entire world, was death. Everything about it, from the sky to the air, from the ground to that dread castle, everything was in vile harmony, and I felt sick to even stand there.

It is widely believed that this vision, if it was indeed received and not fabricated, was not from Coraga, but Bayu, as it is very detailed, but omits the crucial, arguably most important detail: where the planet is.

Cultural Reception

The idea of a hidden Haven for Necromancers does not bode well with the ANS. While they have yet to find evidence of such a thing, they have not given up the search on the off-chance that they simply haven't been looking in the right place. Some rational people might argue that these reports are entirely impossible, but most rational people do not live in a world where you can wake up in a different shape than you were the night before and gods debating atheists is a regular occurrence.

Related Organizations

• Society for Alternate Lifestyles