The Necromancer Crisis
The Prelude
Ketior Fulgur was an esteemed sorcerer during the times before arcane institutions. He learned the craft apprenticing under a sorcerer in central Gallica.He was praised by his fellow apprentices as the most brilliant mind of his time and greatly contributed to the research of Aether even during his education. After his education was finished, he moved to the gallican city of Norfast as an advisor to the city leadership and court mage.
Illness:
Ketior Fulgur was afflicted by disease since childhood. He was always sickly and this only got worse as he got older. By the time Fulgur had reached twenty years of age, he was gaunt, pale, had trouble moving and was always wracked with wheezing coughs. It was visible to all that his condition would only get worse.In order to cure himself Fulgur tried everything he could. He consulted priests and alchemists, healers from all over Gallica. However nothing would help. The healing magics of priests would only soothe his pains for a short while and herbal remedies were entirely ineffective.
So, Fulgur begun searching for alternatives. He spent a lot of money on discovering forms of healing magic, acquiring books of lore and hiring tutors from far-off places.
Eventually, Fulgur went on a trip into the cold north and was given a rare grimoire by a Witch. The tome was written by Jotnar on their attempts to resurrect the dead. Inspired by this, he invited a blood-mage from distant Scyjia. This individual taught him some of the traditional magic of his people, the art of extracting, storing and transferring blood as a method of healing. Fulgur learned all he could from this individual and then continued his research on his own, assisted only by his loyal apprentices.
Necromancy
After several years of experimenting and research, Fulgur discovered the mechanics behind blood magic and effectively rediscovered the largely lost art of necromancy on Haven.It started out relatively small as he discovered a method by which he could draw the life-force from livestock and use it to aid with his condition. Eventually he discovered that he could also summon the Shades of the deceased into corpses and bind them to his will using that same life energy, discovering the principles of reanimating the dead.
This gave him the idea that if he could not survive his disease, he could outlast it.
Descent into insanity:
In his desperation, Fulgur went further and further in a race against his impending mortality.Fulgur eventually started expanding his research into draining the life of humans. He began with criminals or the occasional beggar, justifying their killing with the advancements they brought to his research. The life-force of humans is of significantly greater potency than any form of livestock, he discovered. Over several months, this continued.
Discovery
Ketior's despicable actions were inevitably discovered. He was a sorcerer and researcher, not an experienced kidnapper. Some of his victims were able to escape his laboratory and alerted the city guard.At first, they were not believed. Ketior Fulgur was a well-respected sorcerer and advisor to city leadership, even if he was unpleasant to look upon due to his advanced illness. Nevertheless the wizard's tower was investigated. Fulgur refused a search and when the conversation got heated outright attacked one of the guards, gravely wounding him. Shortly after, a large troupe of guards were assembled to storm the tower. While they took a great deal of casualties from the arcane defenses, they were successful. Unfortunately the necromancer and his apprentices were able to flee in time.
What the guards found in hidden chambers beneath the tower disturbed them greatly. Fulgur had been abducting beggars and the occasional low-lives for months and had been using them for his experiments both alive and dead. In the bowels of the tower the guard found the grisly results of Fulgur's labors; Pits filled with blood and bones, free-roaming ghouls, animated by unholy life, amalgamations of beasts and people and a library's worth of books on how to best take apart a human body.
Fulgur was declared a wanted man throughout the north of Gallica, but would not be seen again for a good while.
Reign of Terror
The first sign of the dread necromancer's return was when the city of Norfast noticed that the carts of grain from several villages near the sky-road mountains were late by several weeks. Unhappy with such a late shipment and suspecting the villages of attempting to evade the tithe, a detachment of soldiers were sent to collect the overdue grain by force if necessary.However the soldiers found only burned out husks where those villages had been, the people gone and the graveyards naught but overturned dirt. This was originally assumed of being caused by Pucraele raiders, a not unreasonable suspicion this far north. However no band of raiders had been seen by the northern lookouts and the city leadership was concerned that no refugees had made it to the city.
When the troop of soldiers went to seek shelter in the nearby fortress of Northwatch the truth was revealed;
Ketior Fulgur had returned with his apprentices and gone from village to village, reanimating the corpses within the graveyards and using them to kill the peasants, only to reanimate them in turn. He did this with several villages until they had sufficient forces to overtake Northwatch in a surprise attack. The fortress had been sending regular reports as usual but these had been cleverly faked by Fulgur and his followers so as to not raise suspicion.
Now however the game was up. The detachment of soldiers did not need long to figure out what was going on and quickly started fleeing. Though they were pursued by Fulgur's abominations, some were able to make it back to Norfast in one piece.
The city of Norfast was unwilling to attack Fulgur, entrenched as he was. The forests and fields around Northwatch were essentially abandoned after what Fulgur had done, and the benefits of smoking the sorcerer out from his fortress were seen as too meager to justify the losses that would be caused by his armies and his terrible magics.
So the necromancer-lord was allowed to live for a many years more, during which the fortress of Northwatch was renamed by the people into Grimhold, vile den of darkness and evil
During this time, Fulgur created the first Vampires, introducing a scourge that would far outlive him. He also put to pen his knowledge of necromancy and spread those tomes across Haven, along with several of his apprentices leaving his service to pursue their own interests.
The War
The Necromancer crisis began in full when the necromancer declared war on the city of Norfast by sending his undead legions to besiege the city. The gates were quickly closed and the walls manned as the city prepared for a lengthy siege, but the necromancer had diseased corpses flung over the city walls to spread plague among the citizens. He then proceeded to reanimate the resulting corpses as the casualties inside the city mounted, attackign the defenders from both within and without, causing the city to fall in just a few days with minimal losses on his part.The wider Abros county responded as fast as they could, but the power of necromancy was not yet well understood. Armies were sent against the advancing legions of undeath, but the soldiers were unprepared to face enemies immune to pain and that would not die from having their limbs cut off or their organs pierced by spears or arrows. Additionally the armies sent were often wide formations of barely-trained soldiers. These were the ideal enemy of a necromancer, as every enemy that fell would only add to his forces.
Worse yet, on several occasions the forces of Gallica were victorious in battle, only to bury the casualties in mass graves. It took several times of the necromancer's lieutenants raising armies from such mass-graves that the commanding generals realized that the dead on both sides would need to be cremated to deny the enemy his reinforcements.
Though the battles were brutal and the casualties mounted, the forces of life and justice made steady progress. The city of Norfast was reclaimed and its remaining civilian population could breathe a sigh of relief. The necromancer's armies were forced to retreat back to Grimhold where a final siege was held and the necromancer Keltior Fulgur was slain for a final time, never to return.
Aftermath
Though the crisis ended in victory, its effects were profound.The Raven Knights were founded in the city of Norfast, originally to hunt down Fulgur's missing apprentices, though they later expanded their mission to hunting down users of all dark magic.
The Gallican crown passed a mandate that all bodies shall thereafter be cremated, to prevent them being reanimated by necromancers. This was a great shift in gallican culture, as wood was a valuable commodity to keep one warm during the winter and was not commonly wasted on funerals. To this day cremation remains an honor that is denied to criminals, as they are not woeth the wood it would take to burn them.
In the years after the crisis several mad sorcerers appeared across Gallica and the nearby nations, having learned from one of Fulgur's books or directly from one of his apprentices. None would ever be as devastating as he turned out to be, though soem of them made sure that the art of necromancy has firmly entrenched itself in the neighboring country of Ravil.
Grimhold now lays in ruin, but the surrounding lands remain haunted by shades and Undead. The villages in the area are very cautious about venturing outside after dark and stay far away from the cursed ruin.
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