The Aedeion, a history of Kholos

Long ago, the reign of Moros Aklaustros, the Unmourned, inaugurated the use of necromancy in Arunia. His kingdom, located in the region we now call the Dragonback Range, was a strange and occulted one. It is said that Moros the Giant-King crafted the first necromantic magics, and that much of modern necromancy stems from his ancient and occulted court. In truth, it was the nearness to this awful place that helped foster the Twin Empires, as well as the Art studied by none other than Tharos the Necromancer, who rumor says spent time in Moros' court.

But there is another figure of import here, one who entered the broken ruins of Moros' kingdom some in the 6th Age and only emerged in the 7th; that is, Lakryss of Essadurea, a powerful magician who sought enlightenment through dark and unwholesome channels. Rumors persisted that he was a sorcerous general of Rho'anir, or that he had served Galos in the War of the Chains; whether they are true, we cannot say. He left the regions recently conquered by Haxrim the Conqueror, and fled west, away from the conquests of his Essadi kin. Lakryss emerged from the realm of Moros Aklaustros, ruined though it was, with the gift of vampirism—he had transformed into a vampiric spirit of the north.

Thus did Lakryss set about building his kingdom in the Aedeion. In this time, the cult of Tharos the Necromancer was first gaining strength. The seeds of that cult which would later sprout in Teral, in the 10th Age, were planted when Lakryss invited a quarter of Poison-Tongues to the shores of the Red Lake and made them his servants. Shortly after arriving at the Red Lake, Lakryss proclaimed himself king of the misty forest in that region of the world. He slaughtered the skin-changer hideaways and the peaceable giants of the region, collecting men from the wild regions of Vithania and the Dragonbacks, his ranks swelling with those fleeing Haxrim the Conqueror and his successor Tarkus the Indomitable.

This new kingdom grew up around a city bearing Lakryss' name: Lakra, on the Red Lake. Lakryss himself, having undergone a vile transformation in the hidden halls of Moros Aklaustros, grew to be known as the Weeping King; his eyes ran with thick phlegmy tears, streak with blood, which he never bothered to wipe away. This fearsome visage buckled the warring men and three nations of wood elves together under one banner—his. They resisted the onslaught of Soloth and later Caruel, remaining independent under the Weeping King's sign. This new kingdom was called Kholos.

To help him rule it, the Weeping King ennobled a number of men. He further drafted some into his service as vampiric children, heirs of his vile curse, making a brood of some fifty powerful vampires. He fought off others from the north, and was known as the mightiest king in west of the Twin Empires. But Soloth and Caruel fell, and Kholos did not.

Not until the coming of Roland of Sunhome, who's story is best told in other places. Suffice to say, this paladin who founded the Order of the Forge Divine slew Lakryss the Weeping King, and he slew many members of his vampiric children. In the aftermath of that violent conflict of the 8th Age, the kingdom of Kholos fell into five duchies, each ruled by one of the strongest of Lakryss' children. Lakra herself remained a free city, governed by a council of Poison-Tongues in the service of the Necromancer.

Wars and the advent of the Bleeding Plague reduced the rulership of these lands, and their people. The vampires fought one another until most of Lakryss' line was extinguished and only lesser beasts roamed the land. Amongst the remaining Heirs of Lakryss was the Duke of Dakrya, a region west of the river Dakesis. This vampire, Glev Redcloak, also called Glev Lakryos, was hunted for many years by mendicant members of the Order of the Forge Divine, dispatched by their Grandmaster to finish the work that Roland had begun.

Eventually, the Duke of Dakrya went into hiding, leaving the governance of his province to men. The Cult of Tharos spread, and after the fall of Teral, it found its seat in the ancient and now-abandoned city of Lakra. With great aplomb, they drove out the Forge Divine and re-established order through the eastern portions of Kholos, calling their newly forged land the Duchy of Aklaustria. In the west, beyond the River Dakesis, the Stewards of Dakrya continued to resist them. It was only with the emergence of Duke Glev and the foundation of the Order of the Black Hand that the power of the necromancers was checked.

Now, Duke Glev and the Poisontongues stand at each other's throats, neither side willing to commit to war, but neither willing to back down. The lands of Aklaustria lie blasted and ruined by necromantic magic. Towns have vanished back into the wild, and cities have been drained of their people. For two generations, Aklaustria has suffered under its necromantic masters. As the necromancers have no need of living subjects, they callously kill those who break even the most minor of laws. Their corpses are used to farm the meager lands required to sustain the cult at Lakra.

Lords of the Twin Empires

I was but a boy when Malvek became emperor of all Caruel. He was crowned in glittering glory and attended by fifteen of the great Shadow Wizards that made up his council. His crown was cut from jet and onyx and they say when it was placed upon his brow, the stones set therein glittered in homage to his might. All this I learned later, for I was too young to understand the significance of the procession, the parade. I'm certain my father told me what was happening, for he was a staunch supporter of Malvek. His entire fortune had been pledged to the new emperor; he hated the men of Soloth with such a burning despite that he was willing to gamble all that he had made in his long lifetime as a merchant to see the men of Kallatha humbled and the Wyrm King made to grovel in the earth.

Those days were before the accession of King Deshen, who would accompany Malvek to the brink of the abyss and beyond, bringing all his people down in ruin with him. The Solothans were weak then, and the Shadow Wizards led armies that ran rampant across their borders. I believe this was the six hundred and second year of the Sixth Age as the scholars in the south count it. I do not know for sure, but I seem to recall those numbers.

We lived in Tharaloss in those days, the capitol of the empire. Caruel was an old and storied empire even then, centuries stretching out behind her. My father liked to speak of the great civil war that had sundered us from our Solothan kindred a thousand years hence when Nashketh and Tashbet had their falling out. We were the stronger, borne from the nobility that supported Tashbet, the younger son, who had followed in the footsteps of his father's reign. We were the true sons of Tarkus the Indomitable and it was the Solothans who followed in the footsteps of the Witch-Queen that Tarkus had married.

Her name was anathema for us to speak, for we hated her so. She had corrupted Nashketh, turned him against Tashbet, and sundered these two kingdoms for-ever. No matter that Malvek was no relation to that ancient line: neither was Deshen of Kallatha the trueborn scion of Nashketh. The old house of Haxrea had died out, first in Soloth and then in Caruel. Eunuchs and dragontamers had ruled the north and here in the south wizards and merchants had taken the imperial throne.

I had heard merchants from the Trade Sea call out empires paltry. Nothing, they said, compared to the empire-that-was of Miles. But now the Mileans are gone and the Solothans are gone and every last man of Caruel is gone save for me. So what does it matter whose empire was greater? They have all been swept away.

I grew up fearing the Solothans and hating them. My mother weaned me on the stories of Szorn the Blue and his rider, Stathos Traven the Dragontamer. I would look to the skies in horror to see if Szorn was coming to punish us nightly, but he had been dead for five centuries. The might of both our kingdoms had sunk low. The wizards that had once strode the world with their magery were creeping shadowmasters, forced to rely on the paltry magics of bound demons that they summoned up from the blackest nethers, of shadow-familiars they called forth from the Wall of Night. How could anyone in Caruel have foreseen the end that we came to when our magicians seemed so weak? How could we have known that they still harnessed the power to wipe away all our pasts and futures?

I was fifteen, the year of my blooding, when the war that they called the War of Shadows began. I am an old man now, and my life has been lived in the shadow of that war. I have been born and raised at its pap, and now that I am nearing my last days I have spent most of my years fearing its coming. You see, I did not care for Malvek or his ostentatious palace. I did not care for the way he tore down the marble guardians of my house or redirected the water-channels so they did not water our gardens. I despised the way he grasped after the income of my slave-trading business and the way he "bought" slaves by the thousands with debased and worthless coin.

Malvek was my father's king, but he was not mine. All those years, I gave money in secret to the Shadow Wizards, praying to Tarkus that they would end this war and perhaps kill Malvek as well. They would send shadows by night, murderous shadows to stalk the streets of great Kallatha and teach the Solothans to fear. But never could they assault the king, Deshen the Far-sighted, Deshen the Sorcerer.

I was fifty years - or no, was it sixty? - when the shadows came home. Deshen and the Shadow Wizards had been waging a secret war alongside the battles of clashing armies. They had no need for Malvek Askor the Cruel, he was a toy to them. When I woke on the morning after the great spell, I found myself alone in a city of the dead. There were howlings that belonged not to man or woman, nor wild beast; that no gnomish slave or elven scholar could make and they echoed along the stone alleyways and between the slate rooftops. There were shadows racing through the streets, liquid-fast, stripping bark from trees and the flesh of the dead from their bones.

The city was a mausoleum, a graveyard. Alone I had survived, and alone I must wander Arunia with no homeland to return to. Malvek Askor is dead, and the Shadow Wizards are dead, and now Caruel is a curse and not a name, for it is a land haunted by ghosts and demons. Do any still dwell there? I think they do not. In the same night, Deshen the Sorcerer and the Shadow Mages worked their most powerful magics against one another... and so has ended the rivalry of the twin empires. So has ended the pride of Caruel and the hubris of Soloth.

Maybe it is best for such empires to breath their last. As for me, I stay up of nights, wondering when the shadows will find me. They have eaten my countrymen, they have eaten my family... they will someday come and close around me and I will have no way to ward them off. I have spent twenty years buying amulets and scrolls, twenty years burning incense and making offerings to your southron gods but even your Hammerer cannot protect me. For each night I hear their howls grow closer, and I smell the moist earth that must claim me. I am the last of Caruel, and as Caruel's last I shall die.