Asher 'Lauer' Atrocitas

[Greg]

Name: The Shadowmancer Asher Atrocitas (ăsh'er ă-trō'sĭt'as)

Age: Indeterminate

Race: Undead/human

Class: Shadowmancer, Necromancer

Element: Life, Death

Alignment: Evil

Powers:

• Undead
  Following any of his ressurrections, Asher's body is undead, like a zombie. The mind retains Asher's unusual intelligence, but the body is decomposed, broken, and not overly capable. In this form Asher cannot be conventionally killed, though his spirit can be forced out via an exorcism. While in this form Asher has his drain ability, but is cut off from his Necromancy.
  
  
• Drain
  While in his undead form, Asher can drain life-force from the living to replenish his own body. He does this in the form of an invisible tendril of life he can draw from a nearby living being, the larger the being, the more life Asher can draw. This ability can kill Non-player characters, but not player characters. When Asher has filled himself with life-energy, he goes from being undead to living, and is susceptible to pain and fatal wounds, which would force his spirit out of his body and into the nearest dead one. He also loses his drain ability until his next ressurrection into undead form.
  
  
• Necromancy
  Asher can bind souls to dead bodies, making them 'undead' and making them extensions of his will. These are slow-moving, not capable of making independant decisions, and not especially coordinated. He uses these mostly in numbers when in combat, as Asher knows no form of physical fighting himself.

Clothes:
The young prince dressed in trim, well-tailored dark coats ornately sewn with black sequin pearls, disregarding the frills fashionable at the time for stately brass buttons on the cuffs of his sleeves which clinked lightly when he slid his hand across banisters. He had many rings and pieces of jewelry dating from the dawn of his ancient family line, which he would wear for a time and then remove absent-mindedly, leaving them forgotten on window-ledges and mantles for his embarrased wife to discover and return to him.

Background:
As a boy he was buried beneath the responsibilties of his future role as the ruler of the Atrocitas house, but he met the tasks with a grim determination and grew into a confident man, jovial and warm when it pleased him, but not a man to ever be crossed. Asher, who ruled the family estate at the age of twenty, could be colder than a killing frost and utterly unforgiving. He lived a remarkably peaceful life during the social strife of the war-torn nation of Horta, removed, by virtue of noble blood, from the rigors of battle. And all was well.

But it wasn't, not at all. When the handsome young Asher began venturing for entire nights into the series of crypts to the west of the Atrocitas manse, the rumors began. It was said jokingly that Asher had learned to 'commune with the dead spirits' and spent his days now in their counsel, which wasn't completely wrong. What he'd discovered was a forgotten family vault that had been last kept by his grandfather, filled with volume after volume of old, rotting texts. The documents went on at length with the journals and writings of the ancient Atrocitas line. His curiosity was in particular piqued by the ledger of great-grandfather Ashland Atrocitas, who, from what Asher gathered from hours of reading the other biographies and litanies, had been disowned by the Atrocitas family. The man had been referred to mockingly, as a 'token sorceror' and a 'performer of cheap tricks', and Asher found himself interested to see what the long-dead man had written in his defense.

To his vague dissappointment, he instead found uncountable pages of nearly incomprehensible gibberish, which he leafed through in annoyance for several minutes before discovering a note from his great-grandfather. The dusty pages he held in his hands were incantations Ashland had copied for many years, letter for letter, from his great-grand father Asran Sidas. Likewise, Asran Sidas had rewritten them from the progenitor of the Atrocitas line, the ancient Asidias of Ord. Asidias had translated the incantations directly from a book called the Al Azif, which would, many centuries afterward, become widely known as the 'Necronomicon'.

Fascinated, Asher gathered Ashland's manuscripts to his study at the estate, where he tried in vain to discover what purpose the incantations served. While it was clearly pagan nonsense, there was a certain value and a small amount of pride he could take in the preservation of such ancient lore, carried down in a nearly forgotten tradition of the Atrocitas family. Asher felt a poignant sadness as well that his great-grandfather had been laughed at for steady faith in the rubbish, especially after the painstaking task of copying the thousands of lines of script. But as the distant civil war spread and riots began breaking out among the peasants in outlying fiefs, the prince Asher left the past where it belonged and decided eventually to return the bizarre writing to the Atrocitas vault.

Returning to the crypts, however found them unmistakably changed to him. The edges of his vision crept and the whispers of dying breaths uttered on the faint breeze issuing from the tomb's opening as Asher returned the writings. Disturbed, he shook the feelings off and filed the texts neatly.

The undeniable feeling returned over the next few days, however, only growing in strength. Asher perceived movement just out of his sight, though as he turned to catch view of it the apparition would vanish like a heat wave. Imagined whispers tugged at his conscience at every scattering of the leaves and scuffling of feet, and the normally infatigueable Asher seemed now haggard, dead on his feet. His greyish-blue eyes were perpetually narrowed in concentration, even when he was staring at nothing, as though he were listening for things he couldn't quite hear. His wife, Leona Atrocitas was the first to notice his insomnia and weariness, and she began to fear he was growing ill.

Asher hadn't fallen sick, however. Instead, he speculated, rather superstitiously, that the incantations he had read somehow had expanded his perceptions, giving life to dormant senses. Inexorably he found himself drawn again to the crypts, seemingly haunted now by more than just his idle imagination. The texts, each page of incantations filled now with a meaning and depth he could almost grasp, Asher spoke aloud for the first time, reciting the rotes his ancestors had bequeathed to him.

The young prince was filled with the ancient power described in the Al Azif, and the Necromancer Atrocitas came to be. In that moment his presence echoed out like a distant scream, and the other Necromancers scattered across the world turned their attention to him, which would later cause the War of Plight.

Asher was borne into a power greater than his experience and knowledge of Necromancy would merit, and so as a fledgeling novice in the arts of death he was incredibly dangerous to himself and everyone around him. Long before he attempted to affix a soul to a corpse he floundered through his powers, speaking with the dead spirits lingering on the Earth and bending them to his will. Bits of missing jewelry he had thoughtlessly left about were mysteriously returned before his wife Leona would find them, strange coins would appear upon Asher's pillow that looked as if they'd been lost and retrieved from the earth, and the young Atrocitas prince seemed to have innate knowledge of where every member of his fief was at any given moment.

For a time Asher would catch glimpses of an old man's rotting face in the looking glass, and in the reflection on water. In time he came to learn it was a father who had been murdered by one of his sons for inheritance of the land, land that was a part of Asher's fief. As his powers grew, however, he came into the impression that they were limitless, and he was filled with a scornful arrogance.

It was a hot day in the court, the fading rays of evening warming the glass of the stained-glass windows as the Atrocitas gathered for a feast. Prince Asher dined as he did always, surrounded by his family and the nobles of his land. No one else was aware of the changes he'd gone through, especially not his close family. His father sat at the end of the table, attended by some of his advisors and his wife the queen nearby. Asher's brother Berin talked with him, laughing about the threat of war that hung like a storm over their country, smiling and joking as he always had. Asher's wife, the Princess Leona, leaned over, her beautiful green eyes shimmering and her rich brown hair flowing down her shoulders. Her laugh melted Asher's heart as easily as it had the first time they'd met.

Asher's clear blue eyes were glancing about the various speakers and conversations crowding the room, when he saw his brother's gaze. Berin had been speaking to Leona, and although Asher had missed his words, she looked down and laughed in her soft voice. But Berin's eyes stayed on Leona, a heartbeat longer then felt normal, and the air was split with an unseen tension. Asher felt a coldness creep into him despite the warmth of the evening, and although no one else, doubtfully even Berin, had any idea of what had happened, Asher didn't laugh again that night.

That same night Asher and his wife laid together in bed, having made love and enjoying the hold of each other's arms. Leona gazed into Asher's eyes, and her love shone through as clearly and openly as it always had. Still the moment of his brother's eyes haunted his mind, and in an instant Asher wondered if Berin would ever take Leona from him. Berin himself probably hadn't recognized his feelings for Leona yet, but Asher couldn't bear the thought of hating his brother for it, or Leona.

He whipped off the covers and rolled over on top of Leona, who blinked up at him in surprise. Asher closed his large hands over her neck and began crushing her throat. By the time she thought to scream, she hadn't the breath to utter a sound. For a fleeting moment Asher was stricken with the horror of that he had just done, but the moment slipped away, buffered by his confidence in the prowess of his black magics. At sunrise they both rose and went about their day as if everything was normal, though Asher clouded and moody, and Leona with vacant, unblinking eyes. A dark and swollen bruise was only now appearing across her dead neck.

Strange things filled the weeks that followed, just as the Atrocitas estate was on the cusp of war with the outlying fiefs and the peasants threatening a revolution. During this time Asher lost himself in the texts copied down from the Al Azif by his astute ancestors. The fear hanging over the Atrocitas family was almost palpable, their rule held in ill favor ever since Prince Asher was led to a pair of conspiring sons by the spirit of their father, whom they'd murdered. The tales of Asher's long nights in the crypts were again under scrutiny, and the peasants began to whisper that the young Atrocitas prince was in league with Satan.

The increasing pressure of war intensified Asher's desire and his searches through the ancient texts for the secret to immortality became more frantic. Asher could be seen attended at times by silent men swathed in black clothes, whom he would introduce simply as 'relatives' that had come for a visit. His father refused the idea, finding the emaciated figures distasteful, and shunned them from his presence. Berin and the other members of the family bore the visitors with distant courtesy for Asher's sake, whom they worried about constantly. Still the young prince scorned the idea of impending war, dismissing it as beneath his concern, even as peasants began dissappearing and tales of corpses wandering the paths at night began to spread.

In time, the transgressions into black magic could not be overlooked. It was his brother Berin who went to their father the king, stammering madly that he had seen his dead grandfather walk through the courtyard, one of many increasing tales of dark deeds that had come to him. The serfs and peasants of their fief, already affected by the revolutionary war sweeping throughout the country, were terrified, and, as the Queen came and exclaimed to him a few moments after Berin left him, were gathering outside the walls in an ugly mob. And so Asher's father the king resolved to kill his wayward son.

When the haggard old man arrived at the armory to retrieve the Atrocitas family armor, however, he found it already resting snugly on the shoulders of his waiting son, Asher. The family sigil, engraved into the chestplate of the white armor, was splattered with blood, as were the walls and ceiling of the armory. Across the floor a pentagram was drawn within a circle of power, dotted with candles of human fat which burned acridly. The rite of eternal ressurection had been completed, and the eyes of his son swirled an unholy blue as he met his father's gaze. Morality fled Asher then, if it had so existed, no longer kept in check by the fearful consequences of death, pain, and suffering.

The king and his bastard son drew blades upon each other, and for several grueling minutes parried and crossed one another in the morbid armory. Surprisingly, Asher's father, though worn and wearied by long years and aching from too many cold winters, had a definitive edge over Asher. Losing the fear of death dulled his son's fighting spirit, his technique lacked the intensity and adrenaline the mortal are instilled with, and before he realized his folly, the incredulous Asher was cut down.

(Continued in the following post, the post limit cuts me off.)

[Greg]

(The continued backstory, personality, and appearance)

Before the prince was again resurrected into a new body, the revolution struck, peasants and serfs sweeping in and massacring their feudal lords. Berin, cursing Asher and the evils he had brought down upon them, slipped away in the tumult of battle, leaving the Atrocitas' guard leaderless. The grief-stricken, exhausted king was put down in a hallway corner by a frenzied pig farmer with a pike. The Atrocitas estate was burned to the ground, the ancient family lineage aborted, and within a century, forgotten completely.

Had Asher been a little less overconfident, or a touch more thorough in his perusal of the copy of the Al Azif, he would have as well performed the ritual which would lock his memories and personality to his ressurecting body, but as it was, the detail was overlooked. The unwitting Asher awoke only a month after his death, in the body of a peasant who'd been slaughtered in a nearby nation, a grisly product of the quelled peasant rebellion. Freeing himself from an exceptionally shallow mass grave, it could be seen, should anyone have been present to witness, that his features had twisted into that of his former body, his frame heightened, his hair dyed to Asher's dark shades. He had been reborn; but without clue or recollection, the would-be necromancer prince was nothing more than a graveyard lurker.

So he was for six years, his body beginning to decay more rapidly and his faculties deteriorating, reduced to a fiend who traversed the wilderness, preying on hapless travellers. It was as this that the German necromancy adept Vint discovered him, an emaciated corpse, which though ruled by a lust for flesh and life as all idiot undead are, was also rooted with a deep-seated intelligence that was visible in the cadaverous Asher's calculating gaze. Vint took Asher into his care, naming him 'Lauer', and using him as a servant and assistant for his experiments as the man traveled towards what he described as 'the gathering', which was incidentally the point where Asher had first read aloud incantations from the texts of his ancestors, where over the ten years that followed that moment the necromancers of the world would gather for the War of Plight, Necromancer dominancy.

To Vint, Lauer was a mystery, a vagabond undead whose existence he could not justify. The servant Lauer was impressively capable, far more like a living man than one of the undead, marked by an innate cunning that no other risen corpse Vint had seen possessed. Given complex instructions, Lauer could fulfill them beyond Vint's expectations; when Vint ordered him to bring back the corpse of a noble, of which he needed a component for his incantation, Lauer would instead return with the exact vertebrae of the noble needed for the spell, and do so discreetly, reburying the corpse and eliminating all traces of the disturbance. When filled with the power of Vint's Necromancy, Lauer took nearly six times longer to decay than other undead, and quickly became the German necromancer's most valued asset and trusted servant.

Vint, known by his opponents in the War of Plight simply as 'The German', had only a bare fraction of the knowledge Asher had possessed from the Necronomicon, but what he knew he practiced methodically and perfected to a science. He was one of the smaller players in the game the War of Plight had become, with only the power to raise a dozen undead he could control at a time, the 'game pieces', though he held the enigmatic Lauer as a wildcard. Still, entering the game with so weak a force was exceptionally dangerous, and Vint eventually sent his servant Lauer to try to make an alliance with the nearby vampire coven, who had been watching the Necromancer war with amusement for the past several years.

The coven leader, Alice, tactfully refused, vampires having survived for countless centuries by existing to the populace as only myth, never vying for so blatant a war as the Necromancers, which could lead to the discovery of their kind. Still Alice was intrigued by the presence Lauer made, the way it seemed his essence was only clinging to his body in the barest of ways, and partly out of her own curiosity, partly out of a desire to insult Vint, she drew the full force of the Atrocitas prince's memories and personality back into his being.

When his servant Lauer didn't return that night, Vint despaired, fearing the pact had insulted the coven and they had destroyed his most loyal tool. In truth Asher had embarked on a search for his devastated home manse, where the full secrets of Necromancy still lay buried safely beneath the ashes of his home, in the Atrocitas crypts. It was several long months before 'Lauer' returned, immediately slaying Vint and taking his place in the War of Plight. The baron 'Lauer' Atrocitas immediately became a major player in the game, which had just been coming to a close. The dominant necromancer had been Borstoff, the tyranical leader of a village in the North, whose peasants feared and followed in death just as they had in life. Asher had at his disposal the full knowledge of the Al Azif, which his opponents had only portions of, pieces and spells being lost over time as the incantations were carried down. The undead of the opposing armies would fall under Asher's sway, and his undead were faster, stronger, and more clever than any others'. One day he even led them in a battle hymn as they marched, as the other Necromancers and their armies looked on in horror, for such a thing hadn't been considered possible.

Intending to deliver a brilliant finishing stroke to the war, Asher returned to the coven of Vampires, now as a Necromancer in his own right, promising Alice seven days of pure night in return for their alliance, an incantation he held within his transcript of the Al Azif. Unable to refuse, Alice and her child Felix Falora, along with several other vampires, joined his army of the undead and together decimated the armies of the other necromancers, battling for several sunless days of night as a demonstration for the coven. The spell was the 'Requiem of Eternal Night', more oft called 'the nightcloak', allowing the vampires to operate continuously, with no need for rest, sleep, or fear of the light of day.

Before the final conclusion of the War of Plight, however, Asher's armies began to falter. The arrogant Atrocitas prince had overstepped his own limitations and spent his Necromancer powers, burning himself out and leaving him unable to even stay life within his own undead body. Nearly powerless and fearing retribution from the vampire coven for not carrying out his side of the bargain, Asher dissappeared with the texts of his ancestors, withdrawing from the war and allowing Borstoff to claim final victory of the battles. Running out of time in his decaying body, Asher withdrew to the Atrocitas crypts in his old abandoned lands, performing a ritual of desperation which removed his eye for sacrificial power in the stead of his depleted Necromancer power. With this last ritual he managed to instill a fraction of his memories and personality to his eternally resurrecting body, which was as much as he could do at the time.

The great War of Plight, for all its intensity, was never known or remembered by civilization. Every living soul who happened upon one of the battles was immediately killed and summarily 'drafted' into service, and the last human accounts of the war died with Borstoff, who as he grew old accidentally raised more dead than he could manage and was eaten alive.

When Asher next rose in a new body (though with only one eye), at the dawn of the renaissance, he knew himself as Lauer Atrocitas. His memory was dotted with vacancies and blank periods, but he vaguely knew what he was and acted accordingly, working towards uncovering the past he knew, the important detail he was supposed to remember. Asher managed to sustain his new body from deterioration from decay, though he didn't know how he did so, and found his way to the former Atrocitas lands, which had become Wilhelm family lands in the years since. What hadn't been plowed for farmland had been left to the wild, becoming hunting ranges for the active Lord Wilhelm.

That same Lord Wilhelm didn't take well to finding a suspicious miscreant idly wandering around his land during a hunt, and Lauer Atrocitas was warned not to be seen there again. The trees and lay of the land were familiar to Asher, however, and he knew that somewhere nearby lay the answers to the hundreds of questions that had plagued him since his rebirth. Though he somehow knew he could not die as others did, he feared losing what knowledge and memories he had accumulated, and so he snuck about the estate as best he could to be unseen. He was noticed, but fortunately only by Lord Wilhelm's daughter, Chelsena, who was very taken with the handsome, apparently young man she caught glimses of.

In time, he began to take notice of her as well, and a rather eerie courtship of sorts began. Chelsena and Lauer first kissed where they first met, in the ruin of the Atrocitas house, which was now a barely discernable foundation filled with weeds. The sheltered Chelsena Wilhelm, as eager to secretly disobey her boisterous father as she was to enter a romance with Lauer, would often walk with him, intrigued by how mysterious he seemed and the way he would glance about as if seeing things she could not. She became convinced their love was more than what the novels and literature she read described, that it had a magical element, and she was not so wrong. Asher could caress her from a distance without physically touching her, he could make her hair shift and blow as though in a breeze when he stood nearby, and she was enraptured with him. It was a simple matter on his part to make the dead cells on the surface of her skin resonate, or tug on the dead particles of her hair without seeming to actually touch her, and he delighted in her innocent wonder and surprise. With the help of his young companion he discovered the Atrocitas crypts within only a few months, and together with the fascinated girl they completed the ritual which restored his memories and personality to him.

Seeing how his eldest daughter was taken with the young man, Lord Wilhelm grudgingly allowed the man to live on their estate, provided he work the fields by season and stay in a separate room from Chelsena. In this Asher was content for a time, with the love of a woman and watching over the same lands he had owned two generations prior. He had outlived friends and foes alike and was left in a world that had changed dramatically, a new era coming into being with new customs, styles, and technologies to become accustomed to. Becoming immortal had begun to slake his lust for power, as he realized he could begin his rise at any time in any lifetime, he didn't have to start until he had finished a life of peace here.

It wasn't to be. It had begun with the girl helping him through the rituals of power which would bind his essence to his resurrecting body for the next several lifetimes, but it quickly became clear that the girl was becoming obsessed with the occult. Chelsena became erratic, sneaking off all too often to the old Atrocitas crypt to study Asher's aging transcript of the Al Azif, which she was laborously copying, letter by letter, onto fresh paper. She did this hidden from her father and Asher alike, lusting for her own immortality and the power she could wield over others. As she worked towards copying the transcript, she practiced the simple incantations, preparing herself for raising her first corpse. She went to the only place in the Wilhelm lands where she knew the dead had rested; the spot where the house of Atrocitas had fallen. Try as she might with the incantations she had hurriedly practiced, the budding Necromancer could not bind a spirit to bones and give it life. Here, however, spirits rested which had been bound already by Asher's own first attempts at Necromancy, and feeling the stirrings of power above, a decrepit, somewhat besotted corpse rose to Chelsena's command.

When Asher returned from the fields to see Chelsena standing excitedly in the drawing room with a cadaverous visitor, he was speechless. His wife Leona stood delicately, her once beautiful frame ravashed by rot and reeking of death. Her eyes had been restored, however, and they stared at Asher hollowly, filled with a pain and despair that terrified him. Chelsena, not understanding the significance of the corpse she had raised and expectant of Lauer's praise and approval for how quickly she had advanced, couldn't begin to comprehend his fury now. He'd wanted a simple respite, a moment to pause and forget about the mess of death and power his existence had become.

"Leona my darling," he breathed, his voice thickening with resolve, "Kill the girl."

Several minutes of screams and frenzied wailing dissolved into hectic chaos as the drawing room filled with farm-hands and the hysterical Wilhelm family. The unstoppable corpse of Leona, heedless of the five strong men who tried to pry her away, finished clawing and chewing her way through the bloody mass of Chelsena's face and was scoring bone with her rotting teeth when Asher ceased her being with a release from the necromancy binding her to her undead body. Though the Atrocitas prince let out a heavy sigh and sunk back into one of the drawing room chairs, brooding, the crazed but only semi-irrational Lord Wilhelm drove a saber through the Necromancer's cold heart, within moments of entering the room and seeing what remained of his daughter.

The pages of incantations from the Al Azif which had been copied down for generations by the Atrocitas family line crumbled to dust, though the freshly inked copy Chelsena had made of them was preserved well in the buried crypts she had hidden in. In time the Lord Wilhelm became affected by dementia, and the once proud and influential Wilhelm family simply became poor farmers.

Whether it was an intricacy of the circumstances involving the ritual he had performed or his own sinking depression, Asher found his soul, or whatever thing he had in place of one, slipped through the soulstream and was guided at last to it's rightful place: Hell. The necromancer prince Asher Lauer Atrocitas found himself mired in the muddied ichor of the river Styx, where the gloomy and mournful sink within the depths, filled with sorrow but unable to speak. Having at the very least command of his own dead body, Asher made his way up and broke the surface of the river, where a grinning face leered down at him from an incompleted bridge.

Asher immediately hated Onizuka, a timeless lord of Hell who had either been possessed by a tiger demon or possessed a tiger, he didn't really care which. In the man's presence Asher couldn't provoke so much as a bat of the eye from the corpses with the full brunt of his Necromancy, so complete was Onizuka's control over the dead here. Though the two generally despised each other, Asher for his out-of-place arrogance and Onizuka for forbidding Asher leave the Styx, the two always watched each other carefully, and in time, the Atrocitas prince learned from him. Onizuka, though not a Necromancer by any right, could control the dead like puppets with raw power, a thing Asher hadn't been able to achieve. Over time, Asher sat by the hellish wasteland that was the bank of the River Styx and forced out his power, bending a nearby corpse to his will and attempting to manipulate him as Onizuka had. It was immensely difficult, progressing from the caresses he had once charmed Chelsena with to actual forced movements from an undead body. He was continually frustrated as the bored Lord of Hell would often wander by and put the Necromancer's minstrations to a halt, sometimes even manipulating Asher's dead body into movement as Asher was trying to learn, for his own amusement.

It was in these practices, however, that Asher learned a reverse of the Necromancy technique, drawing life from flesh and taking it into himself instead of pushing his power into the dead to animate them. Those damned to the Styx, though having died and fallen to Hell, were possessed of minute traces of life, enough for their flesh to move and for them to experience pain and suffering. On this Asher fed, slowly filling himself with life, with a cunning plan to escape Hell by becoming mortal and dying, reentering his being to the soulstream and reincarnating as his magics had intended. After several years of honing his drain of life from the barren Styx, he felt he could draw no more, and allowed himself to be eaten alive by several malicious undead. It was his most painful death yet.

With an expanded, somewhat enlightened view of the greater scheme of things, Asher rose from the dead, in a cosy coffin of a London cemetary. He discovered to his delight that he could nearly kill a living being on sight with just the life-draining abilities he had practiced, infinitely easier then drawing life from the undead (which was more like drawing blood from a stone than Asher liked to imagine), and within moments he was healthy and hale as he hadn't been for a century.

For a span of twenty years Asher did little but grow accustomed to the new world, learning what French and Portugese he could, learning to write in languages other than Latin. Naval warfare and exploration was chief in this age, as the Spanish Armada met it's grim end and the inquisition passed. During this time he was hounded by vampires and necromancers alike, Alice and Felix Falora having long since dissappeared and the necromancers of the age weaker and unable to confront Asher directly. Ruling from a small, abandoned mansion near the old Wilhelm lands, he acquired a small coterie of undead to himself, and later a cult of flesh-and- blood followers, led by his new concubine the witch Hexe. For years he perfected what he had learned of the Necronomicon and his journey to Hell, turning human sacrifice into an art and writing several books on the occult. Neither his followers nor his lover Hexe knew precisely what he was or where he had come from, but all coveted his position and power. In time, Hexe devised a plan to take his power into herself by bearing his child and then forcing it's soul into her through a witch's ritual, though the scheme met a grisly end when at four months the unborn fetus began to eat Hexe from within. Deranged, the mother preemptively fused their souls through witchcraft, and became a sort of mindless monster, filled with an uncontrollable power that dwarfed her and gave her characteristics of both an undeveloped child and an adult woman.

The hag, though unfocused, over several years slaughtered many of the Necromancer's followers, rather messily. before finally being captured and rent to pieces by Asher's undead.

Personality:
He carried himself as all noblemen of the time did, upright and with an even gaze, as was the appropriate posture for one befitting his position. He spoke with a full chest, as though having drawn in a breath but never exhaling it, brimming with the youthful vigor of a man in early adulthood. When was weary he would be seen to lean, but never to slouch or hunch his shoulders. When speaking or listening he would meet gazes with his uncomprimising blue eyes, when laughing his voice was rich and clear.

Appearance:
Asher, in life, was a lean, somewhat athletic man, arms and chest shapely with the curved lines of shadow that imply muscles without making them seem too obvious. He was fit, but no laborer. The young prince was not roughened by war-making or work of the field, his dusky- hued skin was soft and cold to the touch, the raven-toned fluff of his short, downy hair swept back from the arch of his brow but otherwise unchecked. Easily his most expressive feature were his vividly blue eyes, shaded by his inky black lashes. The pure blue of his eyes appeared to illuminate his entire face when he laughed, and seemed clouded an overcast grey when his thoughts were troubled. Asher had a small, boyish nose set in his pale face, and when bemused he would smile with his lips instead of his cheeks, as most men would be seen to do.

[Kurai]

You have passed Judgement Asher Atrocitas.