The Trickster Death of Aldoz
The region known as the Aldoz Highlands, although almost completely uninhabited today, was once upon a time a large, fertile island that was home to a great and powerful kingdom. No one remembers what the kingdom was called, or even what kind of people it was; only the memory of their downfall survives.
Summary
Legends say the kingdom was the great military and economic power of its time, controlling a trade network spanning the Marodeen Sea, connecting the dwarven kingdoms of northern Subrosia to the human empires of central Eukatetica, even reaching to the elven enclave of Ador Palasar. As the wealth and cultures of distant lands flowed through the kingdom, it was this last that led to its doom.
There was an especially greedy and wicked king, who learned of the Radiant Necrocracy of Ador Palasar -- how the elven nobility did not die, but became a court of immortal, ruling elders. The king could not let the idea go, and soon he and all his court became obsessed with discovering how to replicate it. The riches of the kingdom, and the lives of a horrifying number of its people, were spent pursuing possible routes to immortality through any means, arcane, divine, or technological.
Eventually, they succeeded -- in a way. A priest of one of the kingdom's own gods, a god of death, approached the king with a solution: let any who wish to ascend to immortality construct a tomb at the top of a hill, and place in front of it a life-sized, hollow statue of the finest white marble. Then, they must entomb themselves, alive, and use their last, dying breath to speak the name of the god, who would then transfer their soul into the statue outside, where they could live forever.
The priest did not mention that the god would do this by transferring their bodies physically into the statues, for them to spend eternity suffocating. To this day, the Aldoz Highlands are haunted by the agonized, choked screams of the wandering animated statues.
There was an especially greedy and wicked king, who learned of the Radiant Necrocracy of Ador Palasar -- how the elven nobility did not die, but became a court of immortal, ruling elders. The king could not let the idea go, and soon he and all his court became obsessed with discovering how to replicate it. The riches of the kingdom, and the lives of a horrifying number of its people, were spent pursuing possible routes to immortality through any means, arcane, divine, or technological.
Eventually, they succeeded -- in a way. A priest of one of the kingdom's own gods, a god of death, approached the king with a solution: let any who wish to ascend to immortality construct a tomb at the top of a hill, and place in front of it a life-sized, hollow statue of the finest white marble. Then, they must entomb themselves, alive, and use their last, dying breath to speak the name of the god, who would then transfer their soul into the statue outside, where they could live forever.
The priest did not mention that the god would do this by transferring their bodies physically into the statues, for them to spend eternity suffocating. To this day, the Aldoz Highlands are haunted by the agonized, choked screams of the wandering animated statues.
Historical Basis
The kingdom had always had a strong death cult devoted to a now-forgotten god of death. It wasn't actually a single king who became obsessed with immortality, it was a society whose existing tendencies were amplified.
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