Fiction

Apostate Fiction of Elanthia
Status	Active
Race	Human
Gender	Male
Guild	Necromancer
Instance	Prime

Fiction is a Human Necromancer of the Philosopher of the Knife ideology, though his views on Lichdom place him at the heterodox margin of that camp. He is Forsaken, a status imposed by circumstance rather than chosen through practice. He was exiled from Therengia prior to the Lyras conflict, spent years studying under an Elothean scholar of high circle in Qi'Reshalia, and has since returned to the mainland where he operates primarily in the southern provinces.

Appearance

Fiction has a vast network of crisscrossing wrinkles across the face, slightly pointed ears and tormented abyssal black eyes. His crystalline hair is long and thick with stark white streaks at the temple, worn arranged in tight dreadlocks. He has charred black skin and a skeletally thin build. A tattoo of a bleeding heart marks his hand.

The title "Apostate" is self-selected and deliberate. Fiction considers it a statement of position rather than a confession of sin. One cannot be an apostate from a faith one never held. The gods did not lose a follower. They gained a competitor.

On the Name

He was not always Fiction. He carried a birth name once, a Human name from a Therengian town whose records have long since been amended to remove any trace of him. That name is no longer spoken, least of all by its former owner.

The word "Fiction" originated as an epithet. When a Moon Mage and her circle of stargazing friends stripped his cover in Riverhaven, the citizens who had known him as a trader, a neighbor, a man who paid his taxes and attended festivals, arrived at a collective judgment: everything about him had been fabricated. His trade was a fiction. His friendships were fictions. His prayers at the Temple were the most elaborate fiction of all. The word followed him to the docks and onto the ship that carried him from Therengia.

He kept it. He has used no other name since.

The name functions on three levels, and Fiction is aware of all of them. First, it is an acknowledgment. The life he constructed in Therengia was indeed a fabrication, and he sees no value in pretending otherwise. Second, it is a shield. A man called Fiction has no family to threaten, no hometown to investigate, no records to subpoena. Third, and most importantly, it is a philosophical declaration. The divine order, the Immortals' claim to supremacy, the Temple's assertion that mortality is sacred and the soul's passage through the Starry Road is how things must be: these are the true fictions. The gods are not transcendent beings. They are creatures who achieved what Fiction has not yet achieved, and then constructed a religion to ensure that no one else ever could.

His name is his argument, delivered in a single word.

Before the Fall

Fiction came of age in Therengia, the Royal Province. Seat of the Baron. Domain of the Morzindaen, the Great Noble Houses. The province boasts a population of nearly five million across cities like Riverhaven, Therenborough, Langenfirth, and Muspar'i. It is orderly, traditional, deeply pious, and the single worst place in the known world to practice necromancy.

The precise mechanism of his turning is not recorded, and Fiction does not volunteer it. The Philosophers of the Knife have only existed for roughly a century, their origins deliberately obscured by unknown forces possessing resources sufficient to hide information from even divination-capable scholars. What is known is that Fiction encountered the philosophy, likely through Kigot's foundational text or through the Old Man, the spectral guide who appears to those with aptitude for the Work. He accepted the central axiom: between a Necromancer and a monster is the width of a knife.

He pursued the Great Work quietly. Young Necromancers can disguise their Arcane attunement. The corrupted nervous system that perceives Lunar, Elemental, and Life mana as a single aggregate initially registers as whichever mana type the corruption happens to mimic. Fiction kept his Divine Outrage below the thresholds that trigger visible consequences. He practiced Thanatology in the Zaulfung swamps, where Empress Merthamone's palace crumbles into black water, and on the fringes of Throne City, where the Moon Mage Guild's restoration has not yet reached the deeper ruins.

He maintained associations in those years. He does not name his associates, as some of them survived his exposure and continue to operate. Not all of them knew what he was. He is no longer certain which of them suspected.

The Accusation

The woman who destroyed Fiction's life was a Moon Mage operating in Therengia with a circle of well-connected peers. Fiction does not name her publicly. He considers her unworthy of the distinction.

Moon Mages present a particular danger to Necromancers that exceeds even that of Clerics and Paladins. A Cleric senses corruption through prayer. A Paladin feels wrongness through holy instinct. A Moon Mage perceives mana directly, and a Necromancer's aura, that freakishly bizarre illusory aggregate of corrupted attunement, is visibly wrong to any trained observer.

Whether she detected Fiction's corruption during routine mana perception, or through deliberate scrying, or through a prophetic vision in which the Immortals' web frayed around a void where his soul should have been, is not established. What is established is the sequence that followed. She informed her circle. Multiple Moon Mages confirmed the reading through independent perception. They then brought an accusation of Forbidden Practices to the provincial authorities.

Therengia is uniquely hostile to accused Necromancers. It is the only province that employs an automatic suspicion system: any Forsaken Necromancer standing unconcealed in a Therengian justice zone accrues suspicion passively, triggering automatic accusation after approximately forty-five minutes. The province also maintains the slowest Social Outrage drain rate of any region in Kermoria. The system is not designed to punish Necromancers. It is designed to make Therengia permanently uninhabitable for them.

Forced Forsaken

Fiction was not Forsaken by choice. This distinction is central to everything that follows.

He had maintained his Divine Outrage with discipline, keeping it below the threshold at which the gods take permanent notice. He used alternate mana preparations to mask his Arcane attunement. He avoided and in all but the most isolated circumstances. He was, by Philosopher standards, exemplary in his caution.

The accusation destroyed that equilibrium within hours. Locked out of banks, refused by merchants, pursued by guards, Fiction was forced to employ his full capabilities to survive and escape Therengia. Every casting of drove his Divine Outrage higher. The floor locked in, that mechanism by which a Necromancer's minimum corruption rises with circle and can never again descend below it.

Empaths could no longer transfer his wounds without suffering shock. Holy magic registered him as a cursed being. Clerics sensed rot in his aura. The alternate preparations that had hidden his attunement ceased functioning. The Forsaken state, once entered, permits no return.

The Moon Mage did not expose a monster. She manufactured one. The Forsaken creature that fled Therengia did not exist before her accusation. Her intervention forced the very transformation she claimed to have detected, a self-fulfilling prophecy of the kind that Moon Mages, who traffic in such things, should have recognized.

Exile to the Islands

The Baron's representatives did not merely banish Fiction from Therengia. They exiled him from the mainland entirely.

He was put aboard a ship at Riverhaven and sent to Qi'Reshalia, the volcanic archipelago that has served throughout its history as a haven for refugees, outcasts, and those whom the continent prefers to forget. The S'Kra Mur called M'Riss the "Isle of the Damned" in their original tongue. Hara'Jaal remains a pirate port where dangerous wildlife and dangerous people coexist in uneasy balance. Ratha, the teeming city, is divided into four tiers by wealth and status, with the lowest tier housing seedy taverns, brothels, and establishments where questions carry a price that few are willing to pay.

Fiction spent many years on the islands. He does not specify how many.

Ratha's fractured governance provided cover. The Council of Advisors, nine patriarchs of competing Great Houses, creates jurisdictional gaps wide enough for a careful man to inhabit indefinitely. Certain Houses maintain documented connections to the black market. The sewer networks beneath the city are dangerous, rumored to be inhabited by twisted creatures, and consequently unpatrolled. For a Forsaken Necromancer with patience and discipline, the infrastructure of concealment was adequate.

But the islands provided more than concealment. They provided education.

There was an Elothean already established in Qi'Reshalia when Fiction arrived. A scholar of high circle and considerable infamy whose reputation preceded him across the provinces. Provincial lords had refused him audiences on the grounds that it would be unbecoming to meet with such a purveyor of evil. He had been studying the Great Work with the quiet patience that Elotheans bring to long endeavors, and he had been studying it for a very long time.

Fiction does not speak his name. The Elothean would not want the attention, and gratitude among Philosophers carries implications that neither party would find comfortable. What Fiction acknowledges is that his years under the Elothean's tutelage reshaped his understanding of Thanatology, of the architecture of the soul, and of the mechanisms by which immortal beings sustain their existence across millennia.

The Elothean pursued Transcendence, as proper Philosophers do. Fiction studied everything the Elothean offered and arrived, privately and without announcement, at a different conclusion.

The Heresy

The Philosophers of the Knife pursue Transcendence as the endpoint of the Great Work. Transcendence represents semi-divine existence, Promethean self-divinity, the fire of the gods stolen and repurposed for human liberation. Fiction respects the ambition. He believes the Philosophers stop too soon.

All known Liches belong to the Perverse, the ideological camp that rejects moral frameworks entirely and holds the most temporal power among necromantic factions. The Philosophers dismiss Lichdom as a grotesque parody of immortality pursued by those too crude to understand the Work. Mainstream Elanthian society regards the Perverse as monsters in human skin.

Fiction's position is that the Perverse found the correct door and lacked the capacity to walk through it.

Xerasyth demonstrated that a Lich can resurrect itself, returning from death in bodies not its own, cycling through forms as though mortality were a garment to be changed. Lyras proved that a single Lich could challenge the entire divine order, depopulating provinces, killing Prince Vorclaf of Zoluren, and requiring the coordinated intervention of Empaths, Immortals, and the Philosophers themselves to bring down. She failed not because Lichdom was insufficient but because she was insufficient. She was consumed by the Hunger demon rather than mastering it. She wielded power without comprehending its architecture.

Fiction's heresy, stated plainly: the Thirteen Immortals are Liches who succeeded.

They achieved a form of eternal existence and then constructed a cosmological framework to protect their monopoly. The Temple, the Starry Road, the cycle of souls, the concept of divine favor: these are not natural laws. They are institutional architecture maintained by beings with a vested interest in ensuring that no competitor ever reaches parity. Divine Outrage is not the wrath of offended gods. It is an immune response. The divine assault on a Necromancer's soul is functionally identical to a king's army destroying a rival claimant to the throne.

Fiction does not seek to escape the divine order. He seeks to join it.

If the mechanisms of Lichdom can be perfected, if the transition from undeath to true immortality can be understood and replicated, if the precise architecture by which the gods sustain themselves can be reverse-engineered, then the gap between Lich and Immortal is not metaphysical. It is technical. And technical problems have solutions.

This places Fiction outside the consensus of every faction. The Philosophers consider him confused about the distinction between power and purpose. The Perverse consider him a Philosopher who dresses honest brutality in unnecessary theory. The Temple considers him a standard abomination, unaware that his ambitions exceed their most anxious projections. The Inquisition, established after Lyras's defeat in 397 AV to systematically hunt Necromancers, pursues him as it pursues all practitioners, not recognizing that he regards their existence as evidence for his thesis. If the gods required a mortal institution to defend them, they are not as omnipotent as advertised.

Return to the Mainland

Fiction left the islands eventually. The circumstances of his departure are not public knowledge. The Elothean's instruction may have reached its natural terminus. The isolation may have become counterproductive. The resources and texts available on the archipelago may have proven insufficient for the next stages of research.

He returned to the continent but not to the north. Therengia remains closed, not merely by the Baron's decree but by the structural hostility of the province itself. The suspicion system, the slow Outrage drain, and the Hounds of Rutilor, reformed in 396 AV with great numbers and resources as a joint Cleric-Paladin organization dedicated to destroying Necromancers wherever they are found, render the northern provinces a killing ground for the Forsaken.

The world Fiction returned to bore little resemblance to the one he had left. Lyras had crossed the Barrier in 393 AV and waged a campaign that killed a full third of mainland Kermoria's population. The Holy Inquisition had been established, sanctioned by the Temple, dedicated to the permanent destruction of Necromancers, their work, and their research. The Hounds had reformed. Anti-necromancer sentiment had reached levels unprecedented in living memory and showed no sign of subsiding.

Fiction observes this transformed landscape with what might be described as grim validation. The Philosophers of the Knife secretly assisted in Lyras's defeat, feeding critical Thanatological knowledge to the Empaths who disrupted her undeath. The guild saved the world, and the world hunted them harder for it. This is precisely the behavior Fiction would expect from a divine order protecting its monopoly: eliminate the competition, then rewrite the narrative to ensure no one remembers the debt.

He operates in the south now. Ilithi maintains a more tolerant posture toward Necromancers outside of its justice zones. Zoluren provides access to Zamidren Book's network, such as it is. The spaces between provinces, the ungoverned stretches where no Baron's law applies, serve well enough for the Work.

On the Moon Mage

Fiction does not speak of the woman who exposed him with rage. Rage is a young emotion, and the islands burned it out of him years ago. He refers to her only as "the Moon Mage" or, when feeling less charitable, "the witch who reads stars and calls it wisdom."

What remains is a contempt so thoroughly integrated into his worldview that it has become indistinguishable from philosophy.

She serves Fate. She reads the stars and calls what she sees destiny, never interrogating who designed the patterns, never asking whether the threads of probability are natural phenomena or a system of control maintained by entities with an interest in keeping mortals predictable. Moon Mages traffic in shared visions and consensus prophecy, validating one another's readings until collective sight becomes collective blindness. They see what they expect to see, and she expected to see a monster.

She had the power to perceive what others cannot. That is the Moon Mage's gift and, as Fiction sees it, their particular damnation. She looked at a man attempting to break the cycle of suffering that grinds every living being into dust and chose to enforce the cycle. She sided with the machine. She used her sight not to question the divine order but to defend it, not because she examined it and found it worthy but because questioning it never occurred to her.

Fiction does not want revenge. Revenge is a transaction, and he is not interested in transactions with people who cannot comprehend the currency. What Fiction wants is to succeed. To achieve what he has pursued across decades of exile, study, and solitary practice. To become the proof that the divine order is breakable.

When he achieves parity with the Immortals, the Moon Mage will not be punished. She will simply be wrong. She will spend the remainder of her mortal life knowing that the man she destroyed became something her precious Fate never predicted and her star charts never showed.

That is not revenge. That is the Great Work, completed.