Liber Vitae & Liber Mortis

The Liber Vitae and the Liber Mortis are two books, written by the arch-necromancer Ketior Fulgur. They form the sumtotla knowledge that he gathered during his lifetime, along with theories, research notes and more. They have both since been expanded on by his apprenticed and various other mages.
Both books are forbidden works in most nations and are burned if they are ever discovered, both due to who wrote them as well as well as their grisly and dangerous contents.
However they are also extremely coveted by various parties such as the priests of Xaaris or Cydonna.

Liber Vitae

The Liber vitae was the first book Fulgur wrote and it is a book detailing his knowledge of life and the body. It contains detailed anatomical drawings and explanations of many bodily processes.
However the book then spirals away from being a simple medicinal textbook as it delves into how to interact with the body using various kinds of magic.
The work goes over the intricacies of the effect of arcane magic upon the body, explores the methods of using and abusing blood magic and spirals off into tangents on how to create horriffic diseases as well as how to take apart a human body piece by piece while keeping it alive.
The more one reads of the book the more they become aware of just how twisted Fulgur became in his quest for eternal life.

Liber Mortis

The Liber Mortis was written second by Fulgur, once he had exhausted all means at his disposal of exploring methods of fixing his ailing body and instead had to invent an entirely new field of study; necromancy.

The Liber Mortis starts with the mundane study of death and dying; of bodily processes shutting down and ending. The way that sould seperate from their mortal bodies is studied using copious amount of riftstone and experimented upon. The book then veers off into a study of life force as indicated by the methods used in blood magic, leading fulgur to devise a method to bind captured souls of deceased victims to various bodies using blood as a binding agent.
Over the course of the book the methods are further explained and refined until the methods of creating various undead horrors are explained in painful detail. The book contains the method of enslaving Shades, creating Ghouls, Vampires and other monsters. It does this with a detatched and clinical manner with no thought spared to the victims or their souls.
At the very back of the book is outlined Fulgur's greatest work; a method of immortality with no diminishing of mental faculties or magical potential; the method of becoming a lich.

Appearance

The two tomes have no set appearance, though they are commonly richly decorated with golden inlays and enchanted cover to make them resistant to the ravages of time.