Kingstown

The first thing any traveler will notice when approaching Kingstown are the spires.

Built into the roots of the mountain they reach towards the sky, towering above the entire valley of the holy kingdom. Made from white stone and golden metal, they greet the travelers who approach the One City, White Capital of the Old Kingdom and the Holy Throne.

Beneath them stand the Seven walls, with a third of the height of the twin towers. The first wall encases the old core of the city, and from it the others spread out to the valley. Six walls, each taller than the previous, with the tallest one reaching to half the height of the Golden Towers.

Built into the largest, seventh wall are the City Gates, serving as the one and only entrance into the city; they stand indomitable, huge and imposing, with just one, wide, stone paved street which leads in and out of the city and towards the farmlands beyond.

When approaching the Capital through farms and forests surrounding it, one can only marvel at the greatness of its walls, each elevated higher than the other, with the peaks of cathedral roofs and towers peeking over the last three.

Not unlike a set of stairs, the walls climb toward the Golden towers, which stand like guardians for the throne behind them. Built under the very peak of the mountain is the royal palace, the golden throne and Crown of the empire. A place where King resides.

Truly a greatest city in the world, Kingstown stands as a capital of humanity and the heart of the empire, it is a bastion against evil and kingdom over kingdoms, a place where each ruler comes to lay his crown to the feet of One King.

It is without any doubt, a city that truly deserves its place as the center of the world.

Excerpt from "History of the Imperium" by Ser Guliver Lawson.

In the dark corners

Necromancer, a calling which inspires fear even among warlocks and wizards, it is undoubtedly the most despised and terrifying practice of magic in the entire world. A calling which very few choose and even less survive.

At its heart it is dark, filthy and revolting, and only a handful of people can stand to learn its secrets. It is, by its nature, disturbing, unnatural, wicked, and without any doubt cruelest way of bending magic.

Because to wield necromancy is to take and bend to your will the forces of life and death. To use its powers as your own is equal to twisting your soul and shrouding it in darkness and filth, in blood and guts of innocent victims. Truly, those who practice it are some of the most depraved, hated and dangerous people on the face of creation, for they hold in their hands secrets and knowledge that no sane man should know.

And all that said, it would be expected to find those kinds of men buried away, far from the sight of the honest and the holy. Hiding in places of night, in crypts and graveyards, in caves and ancient forests of the Arevinyan continent.

Or maybe on the battlefields of the old kingdom of Hashmarill, where cursed bodies still litter the ground, away from the hands of heroes and kings, and powers of clerics and priests, in the cursed lands for cursed people, far, far away in the dark corners of the world.

Which is exactly why Anhk-Harilym, the Arch Necromancer, the Revered king of the Dead also known as the Eldritch abomination and devourer of souls, was now sitting in a small filthy room, somewhere under the fifth wall of Kingstown.

It wasn't even a properly filthy room.

Necromancer in question wasn't even dressed in an outfit of skulls and bones, no ravaged bodies adored the walls, there was no crown of blood on his forehead and no undead abominations shuffled around.

All in all, it was quite a lame sight.

All of it was made worse by the fact that he, most dreaded of all, was an old man whose name was Henrick. It was the only name he responded to, and at the moment Henrick was residing in the cheapest room of a dirty little inn called "The flying Geese".

"The Gesse" was a small inn found in the fifth "ring" of Kingstown. It was filthy, cheap, and located in a poorer part of the district which, while bad and shady, still wasn't even close to the brutality and lawlessness of some other parts of the city.

It was just an inn, cheap and affordable to any who had a few coopers to spare, situated in a poor, inconspicuous part of the city, with poor inconspicuous residents.

And Henrick was one of them.

There was a reason for that, of course. One that any fool with half a brain could understand.

These days Henrick looked ninety years old, he barely stood on his feet and was a proud owner of total of eight surviving teeth, his hands were constantly shaking and he preferred soup over meat, which still caused no end of problems, as he had trouble using spoons. Henrick also had bladder issues.

But in truth, he was around four hundred years old, with few missing teeth, bladder problems and legs that failed him more often than not. His hands however, did not shake at all and were as steady as bedrock when no one was around. He could also eat soup quite proficiently.

At the moment Henrick was sitting by the table in said room, which was partly built in the inns basement and so was a bit cold, damp and dark. That made it quite inconvenient for Henrick who liked warm and cozy spaces, but it also made it cheap and affordable, and therefore, his living space.

Still, it wasn't all that bad, he mused. Compared to some places he lived in when he was younger this was as good as it gets. He had his bed, uncomfortable as it was, and also his wardrobe, empty yes, but it was still there, also a desk and a good wooden chair, which was something you would never be able to afford when living in the catacombs of Harilym. That place, dead and ancient, was full of forbidden secrets, but no wood or comfortable furniture could be found there.

Ohh gods bellow, all those nights he spent sleeping on cold floors and freezing dungeons, his back ached just at the memory of it. How stupid the young were, to chase power so carelessly, without any worry for their own wellbeing. If he could go back to those days he would've made sure to bring plenty of warm clothes and bedrolls, not to mention real food.

Surviving off the ectoplasm and power of darkness is all well and good when you do it a few nights in a row, but do it for a couple of years and it gets absolutely tiring.

Light flickered from the candle on his desk and he blinked as his steady hands stopped dissecting the rat he was working on all evening.

Ohhh he had candles here too, he just realized, and real ones that produce warmth as well as light, and not just those awful black things that burn forever and only give off some faint purple glow in return. You couldn't even read scrolls under that light, he couldn't even remember the number of people who lost their lives by reproducing rituals wrongly after reading them in that infernal half-light.

So many potential lost, but it was for the best he guessed. You had to weed out the mediocre somehow, and halfwits with the power of necromancy under their fingertips running around just wouldn't do.

That thought brought back memories of his own rise to power.

He remembered it all with perfect clarity. It all started some three hundred and fifty years back when he was still just a young boy who went by the name of Henrick and lived in a small village in the eastern plains.

To be more precise he was around fourteen when his village burned.

War of course raged at that time, and he and his fellow neighbors had the misfortune of becoming a part of the battlefield. To be perfectly honest losing those few people he knew didn't hurt him all that much, as he was orphaned from the day of his birth and didn't have many friends among the townsfolk anyway.

But the sight of all that death and powerlessness did.

Now, it is important to mention that those events of his childhood didn't actually shape him to become the man he was today.

While they were somewhat stressful and more often than not dangerous, they weren't something that scarred his psyche, or broke his will and innocence. No, it was merely war, people fought, died, and that was it. That wasn't what bothered Henrick.

What irked him was the sudden realization that he would die someday. And there was nothing, absolutely nothing that he could do to stop it.

He saw death, in those following months, wherever he turned to. It took everyone, poor and weak peasants, sick and the wounded, strong warriors, holy knights and powerful wizards.

Be it by sword, arrow, sickness or age, death took everyone, sooner or later.

And it would take him too.

And that bothered him a great deal.

Luckily for him, in such an environment full of death and despair he happened to stumble, one faithful night, on a man that would change his life forever.

His name was Arkhull-Tham, a necromancer from the southern lands, an exile who fled his homeland in search of opportunities for advancing his arts.

He was a tall, thin man, with pitch black eyes, heavily tattooed dark skin and long bony fingers.

And now that he thought of it, he was also a complete novice at the art, but no matter.

He met him that one night, while he was scouring the battlefield for anything he could use to keep himself warm and fed. In his search he stumbled upon Arkhull just as he was reanimating the body of a fallen knight.

Hiding himself behind a turned over cart he watched in fascination the process of necromancy.

He was transfixed to say the least, at the sight of a raising dead man. It was perfect, everything he was searching for, everything he wanted was just before him.

And so naturally he hurried after Arkhull who was just starting to leave.

It still made him smile when he remembered how his first teacher squeaked when he grabbed him by the sleeve of his robes.

Those were a few interesting years.

In short they became fast friends, and Arkhull relished the opportunity to teach him all he knew. Which wasn't much, truth be told, but at the time his teacher acted as if he was the god of underworld himself and he, young as he was, believed him.

Arkhull was not a bad man, he wasn't a saint either and given that he practiced necromancy a good number of people lost their lives to him. But he wasn't a bad man.

Maybe somewhat arrogant, and hot-blooded but still a good man. He liked Henrick and taught him everything he knew, not hiding anything from him. Even if they were just the basics, he still showed him all he was capable off and Henrick, even though not born with a natural talent for magic still learned quickly.

It couldn't last, of course.

Hawing fled his homeland Arkhull committed a good number of crimes, being a necromancer just one of them.

And so, sooner rather than later, authorities from his homeland came looking for him. Witch hunters and holly warriors with long curved swords, knights and mages came for the abomination that fled over the border.

Henrick and Arkhull evaded them for a time, but skirmish after skirmish tired them out and eventually Arkhull got killed.

Henrick, who that fateful night managed to flee, they left alone. Having surpassed his teacher at that time, they considered him to be too much of a trouble, and also not a responsibility of their kingdom. So they left him alone and went back home, to old Hashmarill.

That was a mistake on their part.

Being young and still hot blooded, Henrick didn't take kindly to them killing his teacher, so he followed them to the old desert kingdom of Hashmarill where he spent the next forty years learning in the deepest crypts and tombs he could find. He searched high and low, made and broke contracts with abominations and scoured all of the ancient artifacts he could find, all the while perfecting his art.

Fifty years after his teacher's death, kingdom of Hashmarill was drowning in its own dead, and five years later not a single living soul remained in the kingdom.

Even Henrick, having accomplished his vengeance, left to learn somewhere else.

It was quite an accomplishment for someone of his age. Destroying kingdoms was not something easily done, but he guessed that feelings of hatred helped him find the strength.

Having no moral constraints probably helped too.

Any way, he left the old Hashmarill stronger and wiser than ever before.

In times that followed he learned and accomplished many things. His names, well not his real name but his honor names, appeared and spread over all dark corners of the world, whispered among those who dabbled in the dark arts.

Through the course of the next two hundred years he cheated, or outright overpowered death numerous times, faked his death three times and built his reputation from the start up, each time under a new alias and each more terrifying than the last.

He also peered into core essence of the soul, and having found it unchangeable and indestructible left it alone as fool's business.

He revealed all seven of the gods, and even communicated with three of them. At the same time he had managed to visit hell for a short time and extract from it the soul of his former mentor.

Not being able to break through heaven's doors, he made deals and threats with arch demons and revered souls of the underground, finally managing to carve out for himself a small demesne in hell in case he died. There he stored his teacher's soul, and put it in an eternal sleepless rest.

And finally as his greatest accomplishment in these last fifty years, he had finally managed to cheat Fate itself, and rip himself out from the treads that she weaved.

Which brought him here, in this small dirty room, with one last inescapable fact that he stole from tapestry of destiny the moment he managed to disrupt its canvas.

He was going to die tonight at midnight, or more precisely four hours from now.