Prologue

Modivar and his party had done it.

They had slain the last Warkin necromancer.

The bastard had enslaved countless people to his undying will, and, in the end, had crowned his crimes by turning himself into a lich. The war against the Warkin necromantic empire had taken years. Years of burned villages, raised dead, and battlefields had been endless. Modivar had gone into that final confrontation knowing there was a good chance none of them would walk out again.

He had expected to die first.

He had not expected to watch his companions die one by one.

Edith had fallen first.

Their healer had been behind him, shouting a warning he never quite caught, when a bolt of necromantic plague magic punched through her skull. It was not clean. The spell did not stop at killing her. It ate through her body in seconds, flesh sloughing away as the magic tried to claim her even in death.

Modivar would have none of it.

He would not let his friend turn.

Without hesitation, he hurled one of his remaining spells at her body. Light took her before the corruption could finish its work, evaporating what remained and granting her peace. The act burned through him almost as badly as the loss itself, but he did not regret it. Edith deserved rest, not servitude.

Velia would not be so lucky.

They should have retreated then. Any sane party would have.

They did not.

If not for Velia’s sacrifice, none of it would have mattered anyway. When the lich turned its full attention on Modivar, Velia did not hesitate. She threw herself into the fight, grappling the creature with raw, desperate strength while Modivar ran. She held it in place while he searched for the phylactery, buying him seconds with her life.

Her screams still echoed in his mind.

The lich tore her apart with magic meant to break armies. Bone shattered. Flesh burned. She never let go.

By the time Modivar found the phylactery, he was already alone.

He had learned more about necromancy than he had ever wanted to know over the course of the war. He knew how phylacteries were hidden, warded, and protected. He knew the shortcuts, the tells, the ugly logic behind their construction. That knowledge sickened him now. Seeing what their king had chosen to become in his final moments revolted him on a level that went deeper than anger.

He stood over the phylactery and raised his staff with shaking hands. Modivar incanted his final spell slowly, carefully, forcing himself to be precise even as grief threatened to pull him apart. Power gathered in his palm, hot and radiant, his staff blazing with contained brilliance.

A lens of white light pierced the perpetual gloom of Wargonia.

The phylactery cracked.

Horrified screams tore free as tortured souls were ripped loose, the lich’s bindings unraveling under the purifying force of the sunbeam. The magic did not simply destroy. It burned away corruption, scouring the phylactery until nothing remained but ash and fading echoes.

When it was finished, the silence was unbearable.

Modivar fell to his knees.

He wept for Edith. For Velia. For the others whose faces blurred together as exhaustion and grief took their toll. He wept because he was alive and they were not. He wept because the war was over and the cost of victory was written in graves.

He was the only one who had made it out alive.

They had sacrificed everything to stop that sick place from spreading further. He remembered their laughter on the road. Their arguments. Their small, stupid traditions that had made the years bearable. He stayed there for a long time, kneeling in the ruins of a dead empire, until there were no tears left.

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When he finally looked up, something intruded on the quiet.

A message hovered before his vision.

Congratulations. You have defeated the Lord of the Apocalypse, Vandagrath of the Lichlord of Wargonia.

For your heroic acts, you have been awarded ten billion experience.

You have reached level one hundred.

A prestige feat is now available.

Hidden perks have been unlocked.