F o r o n e w h o h a s m a s t e r e d D e a t h , i t i s n o t a n e n d , b u t a b e g i n n i n g.
It would come as a surprise to none that the consummate necromancer Dormeria had had much time to think upon the nature of death. Dormeria had lived by the teachings of Orthus for a little under half of her life, the creed that all things are temporary and must meet their end eventually chiefly among them, and that had shaped her actions for so long that she had stopped having to think about the will of her patron God before dispensing it. The relationship between Orthus and Dormeria had never been particularly close, but it had been the closest the Prince of the Void had ever gotten to a mortal. Lyr had been too hasty to seek the end, he had not valued the precious time given to him, and Sarynia sought to deny Orthus his rightful claim to the paltry souls of mortals with only her own soul as a bargaining tool. They had been tools, crafted to serve a divine purpose, but Dormeria had taken his lessons to heart and acted as an arbiter of his will, an avatar of his being.
Or so she had thought.
In the end, when the staff Ukenagasu burned the last of her inner flame, Dormeria had considered death on a more intimate level than she ever had before - it was rapidly approaching, and it would not be denied. "The shadow of the candle looms tall even as its light grows dim.", she had thought, considering the end of her life to bring her closer to the apex of her power. It had given her the strength to bind the Undying into Sarynia and force the demon's form to be tied to her own forevermore. The last sight she had seen was the look of betrayal on her companion's face as she realised the gravity of what had just happened to her. She had felt her lips curl upwards into a brief smile, accepting that her time was spent, before she had turned to ash.
For a time, the void had been her company. She had never known what to expect of the domain of Orthus, and when she arrived it was far more tolerable than she had imagined. Empty, but filled with the light of a thousand thousand stars, each burning down the path to their own demise and being reborn from the still-hot ashes they had left behind. It had been oddly poetic, that the grand cycle continued, and she had been content to be unravelled and woven together again in a new permutation for all of eternity. The time passed blissfully, without meaning, until the dying stars had stopped being reborn. Before she knew it, the comforting embrace of eternity had grown cold and distant, and eventually even Orthus himself had been extinguished as the void consumed itself.
It was oddly poetic that the Prince of the Void meet the end he so brought to the world.
Dormeria knew only that she was next, that her own cycle would crumble to ash and her immortal soul would succumb to the ravages of the mysterious force that had driven the void into its own recesses. She no longer felt the serenity of accepting her fate in the moment that she realised that the grand cycles had been destroyed - the serenity she had worked millenia to achieve was consumed in a single, terrifying instant and she begun to scream into the now-empty void.
But Fate had a different design for the Herald of Quietus.
She realised that she could hear her own screams. Her throat was hoarse, rendered raw by the intensity and duration. She did not remember how long she had been screaming for, but as she realised her voice stopped and she dared to open her eyes.
Dormeria was greeted by a veritable palace of dark, gray stone. Immense walls ensconced her by comparison tiny frame, elaborate carvings in the ceiling greeted her from far above. It took her a moment to realise that she was in a ceremonial necropolis - a tomb for the most venerated members of the Atronan dynasty if she remembered correctly, and she wondered both how she had ended up in their tomb and how it was still standing. She could not imagine exactly how much time had passed, but she knew that it was long enough that she did not belong in this world. Clambering to her feet, shakily, Dormeria looked around the ceremonial tomb for any signs of what had happened after her demise. That the structure was still standing was testament to the continued success of her divine mission - though she had known that she had succeeded on some level simply by being in Orthus' presence.
The carvings on the walls had surrendered to the passage of time, smoothed down and filed and broken, and she could not make out any meaningful information. She had expected vibrant colours from the royal tombs, but was surrounded only by dark, gray stone. At the other end of the room, deep within the shadows, a flame of unnatural intensity and colour burned. Dark purple in colour, and very faint, Dormeria regained her bearings slowly as she shambled across her needlessly vast resting place. She made a mental note to track down the architect's family, kill them, and have their reanimated corpses kill the architect. It seemed fitting in that one moment of frustration.
As she got closer, Dormeria realised that she recognised the sultry hues of the flame she was inching towards - she had never seen it from afar before because it had always been in her hands. Ukenagasu, Caller of the Dead, and in that moment her salvation. After ten minutes of slow walking, of growing accustomed to her mortal form once more, Dormeria's spindly fingers touched the smooth wood of her beloved staff for the first time in almost fifty thousand years and she felt herself immediately reinvigorated. Her innate magic would take weeks - perhaps months - to return to her body, but Ukenagasu had held onto a spark of what she had once had.
It would be enough to start with.
Raising the staff skyward, Dormeria brought it down onto the concrete with an immense cracking noise and the walls of her container peeled themselves apart, splintering into cracks and then into dust as they exploded outwards and Dormeria laid her eyes upon her beloved homeland once more.
"Dormeria's tits, what was that?!" Atroa shouted, darting upright out of his chair as he was woken by the sound of a thunderous crash somewhere in the distance. Strange things had been happening lately, that much was true, but nothing like
that had happened in the massive cemetery since it had been unveiled when a fissure in the ground had opened up one day out of the blue. Many of the remnants of his order had flocked to the geological feature, eager to explore the history contained within, and had happened across an undisturbed fragment of the Imperial Catacombs of the Atronanian Empire. It had been the source of much excitement from those that had managed to complete the exodus from the Ivory Towers of Callixus to the decidedly more humble town of Riverside.
The dig had been underway for a number of months, and while very few of the epitaphs had survived the passage of time they had spent a copious amount of time researching the dusty fragments. They had not explored any of the royal complexes where the monarchy were supposedly entombed for both a lack of resources and as there was no visible entrance to any of the tombs. If he had to guess, Atroa imagined that the sudden ruckus had been created by one of the tombs' foundations failing and having the structure collapse. If it were safe, it would be the perfect time to explore the inner catacombs.
Atroa quickly grabbed what he could from the shack he had decided to rest in, ending up with a cloak and little else except the clothes on his back and he rushed from the flimsy wooden structure and set out into the desolate wastes. As soon as he stepped outside he could see exactly what had happened - the second biggest of the necropolises had been completely and utterly pulverised. Shaking his head, partly in loss and partly in excitement, he clambered down the roughshod ladders into the canyon where the cemetery was and rushed towards the center.
Dormeria stood impassively, looking out towards the crack in the ground above her that signalled Ansus proper. She would leave in due time, but for now she was searching for the corpses buried below her with subtle waves of powerful magic - an army of the dead had heralded her depature from the mortal coil, and she thought it only fitting that it heralded her return. Suddenly, she felt something that she had almost forgotten - the life force of another living creature. She had not extended her senses far, so this single individual was coming towards her. Good. She needed information as to the state of the world.
It took the pair a little over five minutes to eventually meet, and upon laying his eyes upon the figure before him Atroa let out a gasp of such intensity that Dormeria was concerned for the old man's wellbeing.
"Tell me your name." Dormeria spoke, hoarsely and with great difficulty. The sound of words leaving her lips was almost impossible to describe after so long - hearing herself talk shocked her almost as much as it shocked the old man.
"I... M-My name is Atroa Posayre, Grand Exemplar of the Order of the Skyward Eye... Might I ask for your-" The old man began, before noticing the artefact that Dormeria was wielding and recoiling in shock. Thinking on it, the weapon looked fairly similar to what scraps of portraiture had been archived within the Ivory Towers of Callixus prior to their sacking.
"I am Dormeria."
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