Gradhacr, First Necromancer of Urb

Humble trees below brooding mountains and cloudstorm sky.

Carapaced wagons, improbable biped insects, black dots filtering through green forest. Particles of soot rising from the furnace of civilisation, the flame of consciousness dulled, bruised and blackened by disappointment. Human sludge seeping its way to my gates, filling the cesspit of unliving.

This was not the plan. Exiled from my brethren, the mathematical procedure of intentional unrooting deemed unethical, or at least politically dangerous. When were the concerns of the royals of more prominance than garsu research? The fools! I’ve had to work in isolation, deprived of fine bright young minds which are exclusively drawn to their monasteries, while I have this human ditritus to pick through, like a monkey picking through excrement for seeds, searching for that rare core consciousness which has survived the enquickened rot induced by the gut of civilisation. Bah!

And not only that, I assign too much of my collective mental processing to the building up of my army. They are spiteful, the meherim. They are not content with leaving me be. On more than one occasion their agents have come close to taking my life. Assassins with garsu-studded blades, gigantic rax warriors, and now they turn to poisoned minds. For every hundred who take the black pilgrimage, there is one set to kill me. And so I must build my army, the legion of atarax which protect my halls. Such a waste of resources, I once thought. This needless waste of unliving. But now that their ranks have increased, I see now they may serve another purpose. Not of defence, but of attack.

A quaint term, the Black Pilgrimage. They leave their underappreciated lives, the destitute, failed merchants, mutilated soldiers, the terminally sick, the aged, and seek an ending here with me, their Dark Lord. Now that the Black Pilgrimage has been taken up by the aged, the draw has spread beyond Bizapul. Tired of life, desolate widows, and those long steeped in loneliness, think this journey on the dark road their last. Most come with the thought of ending, but there are some who believe they come to be immortalised, and still others believe they end this life to be transformed into another life. They are all correct, in their own way, for their belief influences their derooting. Those seeking ending make the best troops, as mentally solid as any stone keep. Those seeking immortality generate a more pliable servant, edged with invective they make diligent soldiers, those of placid manner useful daily minions. Those seeking transformation are the most promising for they possess the greatest potential for third stage atarax, far in advance the atarax the best of meherim are capable of producing.

Such fools for ignoring my method! What is the loss to the world of a few high born princes? Such an antiquated sociology anyway, its days are surely numbered. Princes have been unrooted throughout the development of fourth and fifth stage rax. Arrived by accident, they did not see what they had witlessly achieved: the separation of mind from body. Even when I pointed out that the mind could survive the death of the original host. An undeniable route to atarax! A legitimate path to Machus. And retaining the atarax within the very same body, unrooted but locked to the same body, such is the generation of my rax, half atarax half golem — the unliving!

But what I miss is young, fresh mind, open and receptive, in the bloom of growth, low conditionality of acceptance, naive, the processing of awareness raw and close to the surface. Especially those who are particularly bright, capable of implementing the mathematics required. These are my luitenants, my shadow meherim, my order of litchen. But they are rare, so rare. They do not come to me out of their own volition. I must seek them out. I must send out my emissaries and seek them in their native lands, and before they are caught by the sparkle and tricks of the meherim. I offer them lordship, a rank of mastery over mathematics which puts them in charge of a building army. The procedure is painful, no doubt, and the fatality risk remains too high. Of the handful of hopefuls — a handful in the last decade! — only one has survived the procedure, and I have been lucky. Barely one in fifty can stomach the pain. Only the fiercest spirits can transcend the pain. It is unfortunate that the condition of sensitivity I seek is rarely matched by fierceness of spirit. Sensitive and puny, worthless. I am better off with the clods of meat manning the walls, dulled by life, they can endure fathomless levels of pain. Even a division of the Pharohim’s Imperial Guard could not break my defences. But a standing army is insufficient. I need wayfairing troops, and liuetentants capable of leading them. I need bright young minds!

I curse the meherim, their noses pressed to the dirt, they can not look above the base nature of consciousness to the sun that is Machus! They hold up their achievements, their pathetic golem, play with their puppets of living clay like children. It will take years before golem reach the operational functionality of the unliving I have now. I shall show them! I shall manifest Machus, and Machus shall adorn me with all the gifts of humanity, honour me as his herald, his gateway into being.