Frontiers of Necromancy: Limitations and/as Possibilities - Dronain R'Athiel, The Leech Prince

As most young men, though for altogether different reasons, I in my adolescence witnessed my father fail to become my father. The essence of a suddenly shattered mythologization of a father by his children goes back even further than fathers and children, to the very origins of creation itself; so it is no small thing that my situation, in a pattern that has repeated itself since before time was born, is unique. The seed that quickened in my mother's womb came from Reman Karoodil, an Altmer king with a lineage that traced back to the most ancient and powerful families in Summerset and Cyrodiil, of which Karoodil is an elven corruption; yet another had laid claim to me before my birth, and it was his bony fingers that reached from a world outside of the world to tickle breath into my body, and his name was Mannimarco, the King of Worms who had burrowed a hole into the world, and the touch of his cold fingers was the gesture of an absent father's present love.

I grew as I putrefied in the crypts beneath the isle, witnessing my bothers and sisters learn from stuffy Altmer and imported Dissident Priests while skeletons and sloads, vampires and vermai, the daedric and the dead saw to my tutelage. I knew my Father Above was searching for my Father Below, but I could visit him only in his dreams to tell him the King of Worms had burrowed out of the world and would never be found. In my early adolescence, or so I think it would have been were I living, my Father Above ceased in his attempt to find my Father Below and began, perhaps even unknowingly, attempting to become him. The more I have learned of his method, the more I am convinced it originated with me; having conflated the two fathers both as my Father, I set them on a path to union which neither intended and that neither could ultimately control.

Those who seek to understand Karoodil's transition should look to the works of the Dunmer mystics and of his own successor to my father's title, for they say as much of it as is known and understood. I do not concern myself with becoming another, since I have not yet become myself and doubt I ever really will until all things are as frozen as Atmora. What I sought to understand then, and what I seek to understand now, is why Karoodil proved (and why his successor proves still) unable to transform himself into a lich, as the Mannimarco before him had done; even after he answered only to the name of my Father Below and walked as him in all ways, he could not not follow the same path. His own statement, that the "Jills of Aka-Tosh" were responsible, rings hollow; old men always blame time for their own failures.

The first and more banal possibility is that lichdom, though it is not traditionally understood as such, involves an initial infection with a metaphysical disease, much like vampirism and lycanthropy. Like those diseases, and like many more mundane poxes, it is possible that one can be infected only once; because the earthbones came to recognize Karoodil as Mannimarco, he could not infect himself again with the disease he'd already contracted when he first became a lich so many centuries ago. Since the diseases are not, in fact, strictly bodily but also "ailments" of the soul, even a partial union of the two prevented a second infection. The most promising solution comes from Fyr's research in the Corprusarium. Corprus was widely known to induce immunity not only to all mortal diseases, but also to the onset of vampirism. Fyr, however, managed to infect one of his patients with porphyric hemophaelia by artificially inducing a susceptibility to disease through magic or alchemy. (For the curious, vampirism did not alleviate and perhaps worsened symptoms of Corprus.) Unfortunately, this aspect of destruction magic has been largely lost to the world, and the means of increasingly one's susceptibility would need to be rediscovered before this method was viable.

The more troubling possibility is that the Apotheosis of the first Mannimarco puts him outside of the false duality of life and death which the process of undeath subverts; to subvert what is already subverted is to reinstate the original condition, or reinforce the opposition of life and death instead of rejecting it. In other words, the two means of escaping the axioms of life and death are incompatible, necessitating mutually exclusive or contradictory metaphysical processes or even ontological states. If this is the case, I fear each successor my fathers' crown will ultimately meet Karoodil's fate, to die pathetically at the hands of a mortal, never able to truly become who, or rather what, he already became; they are became Mannimarco, but shall never become the King of Worms.

I represent perhaps the only means of escape from the latter inevitability. As the last great experiment of the first Mannimarco before his descent to the world below the world. Aside from the Dragon Priests, whose condition is not a viable alternative for any number of reasons, mine is the only form of Lichdom other than the traditional form originally devised by Mannimarco. The implications are twofold; firstly that other forms are possible and secondly that those forms provide unique possibilities and challenges. Ultimately, if the means by which an axiom is violated (my condition represents an inversion of the process of birth rather than the process of death) can produce a parallel state of undeath, could not the axiomatic opposition being violated produce a similar parallel; in simpler terms, a form of lichdom that ruptures the opposition between mortal and divine, fusing live-and-dead with neither-live-nor-dead as conscious undeath combined life and death. If this is possible, the difficulties caused by Mannimarco's apotheosis are in fact opportunities, new challenges to overcome on the path to a still greater triumph of the bones of man and mer over the bones of the earth.

Rain's Hand 4E149 Dronain R'Athiel, Prince of Leeches, Knight of Slugs, Son of Worms