Flashes of green lightning shone through a thousand multicolored facets of a grand rose window of stained glass, casting momentary beams of green light onto a sprawling desk covered in a thick layer of parchments and vellum. Cracks of thunder - loud and close - resounded through the vast and cavernous space, echoing off the vaulted ceilings and buttresses. The solitary occupant of the desk situated before the rose window was unperturbed by the powerful lightning that rattled the very stones of this mammoth edifice. Yuniz had long ago learned how to ignore the perpetual lightningstorm; such an ability was wholly necessary here, less than a mile from the foot of the Spire of Rutile. The being standing at the desk hovered over the scrolls and parchments splayed out before him. His right eye was remarkably-preserved, among the most life-like eyes left in all of Leria, magnified to almost-comical size by a wide, thick magnifying lens held in place against his head with a copper armature. The magnified eye flitted here and there across the text and diagrams of the scrolls before him, illuminated by the orange glow of a half-dozen oil lamps scattered across the desk when not cast in brilliant flashes of lightning from the rose window. With his left eye - a milky white eye like those possessed by the majority of the living dead - Yuniz looked upon the grand window. The great, circular window above him was a massive and spectacular structure in its own right. Some thirty feet in diameter, a golden-yellow oculus in the very center radiated out with meticulously-carved tracery, framing intricate mosaics of multicolored glass. Many of the glass pieces were now cracked and broken out after years of utter neglect, and a film of greenish-black filth had accumulated on the glass that remained from the condensed vapors of the disgusting work now carried out in this place. On the outer tracery-rimmed edges of the window, the likenesses of sixteen saints had been illustrated with stained glass mosaics like spokes of giant wheel. Some of the saints sported long beards and flowing robes, others were glad in golden armor, but all were adorned with burning halos above their stoic visages. Yuniz knew little about the saints whose likenesses looked down upon his study. Even in life, he had been an agnostic fellow and never paid any faith much heed. Eagoth's conquest of Leria had completely disproven the existence of gods or goddesses, or at least any deity that cared for the suffering of Man. Desperate prayers from Leria's devout had done absolutely nothing to stop the Necromancer, and the holy men were butchered and raised in undeath the same as the godless. Paying any mind to the old religions or their saints and gods was wasted effort as far as Yuniz was concerned. Useless though the old rites may have been, they had inspired the construction of monumental places of worship that sometimes found new uses in the empire of the unliving. Massive cathedrals and basilicas had been the cornerstones of many a great city in the time before the Necromancer. Flying buttresses held high towering steeples that reached for the heavens themselves; the tallest structures in virtually every Lerian city before the Conquest. Stained glass windows illuminated vast naves in which multitudes of the faithful once gathered to offer up their prayers to the divine. Such large, enclosed spaces could sometimes be repurposed, and such was the case with the space that Yuniz now occupied. This place had once been called the Cathedral of Saint Olms if memory served the revenant correctly. Before the Conquest, it had been of middling size as cathedrals went. Now, after much of its competition had been ruined, razed, or cannibalized for building materials, the cathedral of Necron was now among the largest such structures left in all of Leria. It was certainly among the best-preserved of the great Lerian houses of worship: rather fitting, given that this place was now devoted to the art of preservation and embalming. For the cathedral now served as the Meatworks of Necron, and Yuniz was its charnel cardinal. In life, he had been the physician of the Rhanean court, and was counted among the most talented surgeons in Leria and beyond. Critical of then-court warlock Eagoth, Yuniz had quickly earned the wrath of the wizard that would one day become the Great Necromancer. And so when Eagoth's very first undead warriors put the court of Rhanea to the sword; the Necromancer sought to punish Yuniz in undeath. However, Eagoth could not afford to simply torment the physician for eternity; Yuniz's knowledge was too precious to waste, especially in the earliest days of the Conquest when the living could have easily crushed Eagoth - only had they moved decisively against the nascent undead host. Enslaving Yuniz in the service of the undead horde while retaining all the memories of his life and his disdain for his new master in undeath: that would have to suffice. And serve Yuniz did. He had pioneered the craft of meatworking - at first crudely stitching up battle-worn warrior ghouls. As the techniques were perfected, he progressed to the improvement of ghouls by scavenging useful limbs from otherwise-broken cadavers and sewing them onto the more useful combatants: the forerunners of the patchwork monstrosities built in modern times in the pits of Comiriom. Yuniz had even practiced this craft on his own body, attaching an additional two pairs of arms onto his torso. These augmentations were not performed for the sake of improving combat prowess; he had not affixed to himself bladed fists cut from some muscled warrior. Instead, four slender, delicate arms reached out from the folds of his stain-mottled robe, thumbing through the texts and unraveling scrolls before him with a quickness and precision seldom seen in undead digits. Supple, nimble fingers; too soft and unblemished to have been harvested from the corpse of any turnip-farming rube. These were the arms of children, picked by hand from the innumerable young slain at Ludire. Yuniz heard the jingling of chains behind him, and felt the building shift ever so slightly under his feet. A deep, almost-inaudible groan emanated from somewhere below him. Though far quieter and more subtle than the cacophony of thunder outside, it was enough to give the revenant pause and cease his study. Galvanized by this muted sensation, Yuniz turned from the desk and drew his cloak taught around his nearly-skeletal frame with each of his six arms as he made his way to the edge of the mezzanine upon which his study was situated to survey the work going on beneath him. The study mezzanine had been built over what had once been the narthex of the cathedral - clearly a post-Conquest addition suggested by the characteristically-amateurish workmanship of most ghoul carpentry. Mismatched floorboards were held up by creaking joists braced against the walls of the cathedral at odd angles; the unapologetically lousy mezzanine contrasted jarringly against the masterfully-constructed masonry of the cathedral supporting it. From the mezzanine went two narrow catwalks of equally-dubious quality that went around the entire interior perimeter of the cathedral's walls just below where the walls curved into a vaulted ceiling. While they certainly offered a commanding view of the floor of the meatworks below, their purpose was to provide access to the great number of pulley-mounted ropes and chains that draped from the ceiling as densely as cobwebs. Cords of rope hung down from the ceiling to supply dumbwaiters and lifthooks, all powered by the dozens of ghouls going about their work on the floor below. Yuniz took a moment to oversee the meatworkers toiling below him. A dozen torsos hung from chain-mounted meathooks just above the meatworks floor; liberally-applied embalming fluid dripping off of the musculature of the bodies into pink-tinged puddles on the checkerboard tiling beneath them. Several ghouls were at work on each hanging cadaver, one of the more mindful ones scooping lumps of flesh from blood-encrusted barrels, holding them up against the chest or thigh of the hanging body like a tailor might regard strips of cloth to use in constructing a duchess' dress. One or two of the mindless ghouls carried out the tedious work of stitching slabs of muscle onto the body with threads of nerve and sinew wound onto bobbins like string. The bodies they assembled rippled with muscle, but were devoid of skin, as if they had been flayed. But sitting atop each hulking cadaver were fleshless skulls. Below Yuniz, the newest batch of skeleton guards was taking shape. [i]Skeleton[/i], as one could see from Yuniz's vantage, was quite the misnomer for the beings taking shape below him. Muscle and flesh recycled from other corpses covered their bones such that the only part of the skeleton exposed was the skull. Seeing that they would soon be clad entirely in platemail armor from the head down, it was easy enough to see how an uninformed observer might think that the bodies under so much armor were as skeletal as the fleshless skulls peering out from under their helm. Skeleton guards were purpose-built ghouls, like more compact versions of the patchwork monsters of Comiriom. And that purpose was to crush any opposition - living or dead - to those they were charged with protecting. Crucially, their skulls were empty - completely incapable of free will and utterly bound to servitude under Eagoth. Ghouls could wander off and desert their masters, revenants both major and minor could disobey orders and serve their own interests. But skeletons? They would serve the Necromancer without question or hesitation until their bones were ground to dust. Impressive as the skeleton guards taking shape below him may have been, they were but a sideshow - quite literally - for Yuniz's most ambitious project of all. The skeleton guards were hung toward the exterior wall of the cathedral, in what had once been the side aisle of the nave. Taking up the vast majority of the floor space in the center of the meatworks was an enormous trench, cut through the tiling and dug into the earth upon which the old cathedral had been built. It was filled with thousands upon thousands of gallons of a viscous black liquid, wafting with noxious vapors that rose off its iridescent surface. Heavy chains hung down from the vaulted ceiling down into the shimmering blackness of the pool. The chains shifted again, jingling softly as something under the surface stirred the great black pool. "Master," a ghoul called out to Yuniz, approaching from the catwalk and disturbing the revenant: some errand-runner tasked with fetching reagents and supplies from the city. "The sentries at the eastern gate say there is a wagon on its way here carrying a high-priority delivery to the meatworks." "There is nothing due to be delivered today," Yuniz said with complete certainty. "They are mistaken. Certainly nothing that would arrive here from the eastern road." "Sentries said it was on its way 'ere now. Said they might have been some gravediggers." "Then they are definitely mistaken. They must be passing through on their way to Comiriom. Rotten offal and old bones are of no use or interest to me; that sort of trash belongs to Ghural, talentless brute that he is." "They did seem rather clear, Master," the ghoul insisted, "that they were on their way [i]here[/i]." Yuniz gave a snort of disdain. "I have neither the time nor the patience for these things. If some gravedigger means to come here and interrupt our work here, I'll have them cut apart and their choice pieces sewn into the guards. Pax Mortis be damned... this had better be good."