Upon a being’s departure from the living coil, whether that be due to the erratic violent nature of war or the eventual overtaking of disease, their life will not just end as merely a statistic lost to time. More is beyond the universe, and whether through cosmic oversight or the power of a mage, they will be remade.
Typically, when a soul moves on from the universal plane, their ethereal presence is thrown through a frozen unmoving land, all colour and sense removed. In a rapid process, the soul is dragged into the after death, the previous void a mere pathway. This system worked well, all souls successfully passing through purgatory into the after death where they would remain. However, after the chaos caused by the second great war, Death’s personal grief took a toll upon the planes below and, without the almighty power above to stabilise the process, issues began to shape.
The once successful system, created by the primordial, allowed cracks to form, souls now slipping through and delaying their entry into the after-death plane.These souls watched over their empty terrain, turning more curious. As seconds turned to days, the souls took matters into their own hands, disturbed and confused by their seemingly never ending state of limbo. They wandered far and wide in this endless continual nothing trying to escape with all might but could not. However, a turning point plagued many souls in this situation. Maybe, returning to their mortal physical self is a possibility? Maybe their souls could reunite.
Certain drifter souls managed to crawl back into their own bodies that lay there, a pristine delusion covering the true decomposed reality. For those who managed this, their soul and body would reconnect. The bond once broken by the fleeting of life reunited in an unholy transgression not even imagined by any being before.
However, some who wandered beyond limits became desperate. Unable to ever return to their body without what would feel like centuries of backtrack and search. Yearning for return and desperate for control, souls reached into the nearest deceased and tried to claim it for themselves. To many’s surprise, the soul and body would connect, however the body, sensing the intrusion of an unknown soul, would begin to reject. While it couldn’t fight the strength of the soul, it would push back from the soul itself. Skin peeled from the bone and blood leaked as jerk reactions from the lifeless corpse defended this intruder. And thus, all that was left was a skeleton. They would return lesser but alive, a worthy price to pay to escape the makeshift hell of eternal limbo.
These two types of beings began to emerge out of graves and battlefields. They arose uncontrolled and unwatched, scaring the masses into theories and thoughts whilst gaining their title as “The Undead”.
The very first of these souls was a human of the empire Altranza by the name of Kael Veyrath. A man who grew through times of constant battle and siege as their home became locked in a never-ending war with a fierce rival empire. This constant threat which circled the man’s childhood inspired him, this inspiration eventually leading him to join the army alongside his closest friends to free others of this burden. Free his people. Let his family sleep peacefully at night.
Time flew past as he got older and older, passing dawn to dusk, working for his place. Unknowing the horrors of war which would follow him, he wanted peace and was willing to fight for it. Within a matter of days, the man was rolled into battle, his fellow recruits flooding the seams as they marched ahead to the enemy's position. Chanting war cries and laughing alongside each other, they felt like brothers. What harm would the war cause? They would be heroes! Praised across lands for the end of the evil that tarnished their towns and cities for decades. Blinded by propaganda and filled with confidence. A constant eternal tragedy covered as patriotism.
But even this delusion could not veil the harsh truth.
In a matter of seconds, spears started to fly and men began to charge in a supposed act of righteousness as they clashed between a swampy field about a marathon away from home. In a matter of seconds, the adrenaline-charged men carried out the battle, brutally breaking the frontlines in the once organised approach. The chaos ensued, the few soldiers left watching the life leave out of their faceless comrades.
Kael couldn’t think. He refused to pull together the horror of the situation and let survival take over, grabbing the man closest to him before taking their life without a second thought. As he stood there watching the eyes of the man in front of him drain, his heart began to weep truth. The atrocities he just committed swept over him in an appalling clarity. This moment of absolute thought and vulnerability led to his death, a spear shooting through his chest before swiftly leaving him on the ground, collapsed in agony.
His wound was fatal. Kael writhed in pain as he tried to move,his body refusing outright. His agony? Incomprehensible. His body began to shut down. His mind faded to black.
As the pain numbed and his body stopped moving, all he could do was reflect. His mortal form was weighed down. Every regret, pain, hate, and burden washing over him. And yet his soul began to physically lift, seemingly weightless. A euphoric sense of freedom washed over as vision turned from a blinding white to still darkness.
His world narrowed, mind distorting into flickers as the blissful darkness claimed him.
Suddenly, Kaels vision stabilised from the euphoric void that sent him to his slumber. His eyes met a black and white landscape, artificial and cold to reality. A freeze frame of his final moments. Each sense he possessed seemingly frozen along it; sound was unmoving leaving an eerie piercing silence booming across a colourless nightmare. Smells which once putrid violated his nose now… nothing. Kael’s soul was shaken by the experience which radiated through his ethereal form. It was at this point where the system would typically pull the soul to the after death to conduct its trial. However, in the case of Kael, no such process occurred.
Standing finally, the man looked down in horror, he couldn’t believe his eyes. Kael wretched at the sight but had no ability to vomit. A pristine apparition lay on the floor.His own body. The wound which took his life stared back at him, a vile, gut-wrenching, nightmare-fuel sight. He tried to scream but silence boomed over. All he could do was think. His panic slowly faded to intrigue.
Kael tried to take in this foreign yet familiar terrain; its peaceful nature collided with the uncanny aura surrounding it. Surely there’s more beyond this? This can’t be his end. Trapped in an eternal frozen hell staring at the same battlefield that ended his existence previously. Questions upon questions piled and piled upon each other as his soul moved through the hollow space, every deceased soldier still strung around him..
What if he was alone? What if this really was the end? Why would it be? What would he have done to deserve this? Questions circled his rotting mind over again and again. The situation was so hard to bear. Why him? Why him? Why him? Why? The silence of this purgatory was unmatched by the ringing in his head which filled every part of his ethereal form. He begged to go back to whatever higher power had left him in this limbo.
In his mind-breaking confusion, trying to cope, Kael manically stumbled back towards himself, trying to conjure tears of which he couldn’t even produce. Desiring an escape from this hell, he crawled into his body’s apparition, positioning himself exactly as he was once defeated. Unbeknownst to him, he had gotten his wish.
Kael's soul was violently snatched into the body once again, the soul seemingly attached upon the body like a parasite. The same visual display that overtook Kael before now acted in reverse, the colours flashing past him as he felt he was being dragged backwards.Sight, smell, and sound slowly returned to him. An unholy abomination of nature had been born.
He awoke.
An agonising pain kicked in across every cell of his body, shocking the man upwards in a cry of guttural torment. It wouldn’t go away, radiating from every pore. He almost collapsed whilst standing, his knees feeling ready to give out.
The field he perished in before was left in decay. Grass was left charred with a musty black foulness irradiating off it, mixed with the scent of rot created by the few decomposing bodies left. How long was he gone for?
Kael finally looked down at himself. His body was decrepit, aged flesh burdening his visual. The hole through his chest with a rib jutted out impaling his decaying flesh; every aspect of him festered with a repulsive scent and look. The tattered bloodied uniform of which he wore with pride before now a disgusting reminder of his death. It covered his mangled body somehow, barely functioning.
His mind couldn’t take him any further. It tried to think, it tried to fathom, but it could not.And thus, he walked off into the distance, uncaring.
Despite the first undead being one born of cosmic disorder, over time the universe would see another method of revivification appear. As the years passed and people started to observe the undead rise from their graves, the realm of magic users began to research the potential of controlling this rebirth for themselves. At first, the learning of this power was difficult, the lower mastery of it leading to husks being raised without a soul. However with perseverance, the first necromancer managed to successfully bring back a soul to their mortal body and thereby created the first zombie. The magic they used would create a direct temporary connection from the universal plane and the after-death, grabbing the soul from the plane with the same drag which once carried them there. These mages titled the magic as necromancy and learned they could further weaponise their current ability. In a time before the world united, this rise in the undead had catastrophic consequences related to the god of the underworld.