Necropolis

Lore

There was once a king whose pride and self-regard knew no bounds.

Reality could never hope to live up to the scale of his ambition.

His forces made constant incursions into other kingdoms as he strived to extend the boundaries of his modest realm. With attention focused on expansion, the king neglected domestic affairs, and his subjects grew weary of constant conflict with others.

Rebellion broke out when they could take no more.

At that time, the king's forces were on yet another expedition. The army had never been a formidable fighting force, and was no match for the rebels, and as such was quickly defeated.

And so all the ambitions of the king came to naught. A new dawn broke...

The man who had led the rebellion against the vainglorious king came to power.

The kingdom barely recovered from its period of turbulence, had new challenges looming on the horizon. Alarming reports reached the new king that a neighbouring regent was planning to take advantage of the disarray in his realm and invade.

After all it had been through, the kingdom was on its knees. There was no way it would be able to muster the forces to resist an invading army. The kingdom had a severe shortage of both men and weaponry.

After all the years of fighting futile wars, and the bloody rebellion that had come thereafter, the only thing the kingdom had a surplus of, was dead bodies.

The new king was at a total loss. How could he keep his kingdom safe from the threats it faced?

The new king had been proud to ascend to the throne. Born into a poor family, he had never been involved in politics. Indeed, he had made it to the top purely as a result of his own strength and determination.

But now, unable to come up with a plan, he sensed the dissatisfaction growing amongst his subjects. They feared him to be yet another ineffectual ruler. History was repeating itself. The new king had once mocked the old ruler, but now he was booed and jeered.

The new king was learning fast. He now knew the true weight of the crown, and how lonely the head that wears it.

He thought about the solitude the old king must have known. How ironic that it was only by overthrowing the old king and taking his place, that he could truly understand him.

The crown had become an albatross around the king's neck. As the dissatisfaction from amongst his subjects grew, the pressure pushed him to the verge.

Just when he feared he could take no more, he heard a strange voice and saw a peculiar chalice floating before him.

The king did as the voice told him. He left the castle and headed out into the streets.

His destination was a huge mound of corpses - all those who had lost their lives in the recent uprising. Among the bodies, he saw many who had once fought alongside him.

The new king took the bodies of each of his fallen comrades and buried them.

He made graves for all of them.

But these were not normal graves.

Wherever he buried the bodies, sharp blades sprouted from the ground.

The king had gained the power to forge weapons from the bodies of the dead. He tended to these weapons as someone might tend to their garden.

Now the weapons that his kingdom had lacked were available in abundance, and all were more powerful than a hundred conventional weapons.

The king's forces swept all before them. The kingdom's territory expanded rapidly until it covered the map. It flourished and grew prosperous. The overwhelming military prowess of the kingdom meant that no neighbouring force dared to attack.

But still the new king did not stop.

He continued to harvest new weapons.

Eventually, he ran out of the dead bodies from which the weapons sprang. The king decided to replenish his supply of corpses by having all the criminals in his realm summarily executed.

Even the most trifling crime was now punishable by death.

His advisors, horrified by what they were seeing, warned the king about this rashness, but he would not heed their words.

"Hmph!" the new king thought to himself.

When the kingdom had been in peril, everyone had blamed him. No one knows how much he suffered, and how lonely he had been.

His advisors' prattle showed they did not understand him. He would pay their judgement no heed.

All the solitary king had to believe in was himself, and his own authority. As time went on, the king grew steadily more despotic.

He was unaware of what was happening to him. The old king, whose reign he had brought to a bloody end, had known the same solitude, and had closed himself off from the world. This was what had led him to his fruitless pursuit of glory.

Now, just as the old king had, the new ruler neglected his own realm as he sought to subjugate others.

When a ruler no longer trusts his subjects, it's inevitable that he will seek to bolster his own authority by inspiring fear in all around him.

Once a monarch embarks on this path, he cannot be stopped.

Through all this, the king continued to bury dead bodies in order to cultivate weapons. But now he had made a discovery. He realised that when he buried strangers, the weapons that sprang forth were less powerful than when he buried people he had been close to.

The closer the bond they shared, the more powerful the weapon.

This led the king to falsely accuse his closest advisors of heinous crimes for which he had them executed. The weapons that sprang forth from their bodies were more powerful than any the king had created before.

And so it came to pass that one day...

...the king found that he was alone.

He had an abundance of weapons, but no one left who was willing to wield them.

His subjects had all risen up against him.

The king now faced the same fate as his predecessor. The rebel forces encircled him, alone in his castle.

Knowing that the end was at hand, the king decided to end his own life. But not before he wrote a final request...

He asked that his body be buried in the earth.

Some years passed...

The kingdom had long since vanished. When the king had been laid to rest, blades had burst forth from the soil with terrifying force. The blades had spread relentlessly, like giant vines that came to cover the kingdom.

But they did not stop at the kingdom's borders. They broke the boundaries of surrounding lands.

It was as if the king's futile campaign of expansion and subjugation was being continued, after his death.

Though his body was gone, the desire to conquer lived on. There were, of course, no subjects left to rule, but for the king who had never trusted people, perhaps this was a fitting end.

Quests taking place

Magusar Quests

• Only Memories Remain Ch. 6

Magusar Quests (Delta)

• Destiny Deferred Ch. 1
• The Trail of a Life Ch. 1
• The Trail of a Life Ch. 2
• The Trail of a Life Ch. 3