Leaving the Crown was never going to be easy.
 
His parents, the fools, thought that Warwick would follow in his mother's footsteps and become a delver. The life of scratching a living off of rocks was not appealing for the ambitious gnome. While he went deep within the heart of the mountain, he was not looking for glowshroom. Instead he was singularly focused on discovering the secrets that might be hidden below, and the power that comes to those that discover them.
 
Throughout his younger years, Warwick found other like-minded gnomes. The Dark Seekers they called themselves. But while the others toiled on fruitless potions or muttering arcane words in the dark, Warwick found his interests piqued by other, darker experiments. Deep within an old tunnel carved in ages past he came across a desiccated corpse wrapped in a purple robe. In its hands - clawed over with rigor mortis - was a black tome. Warwick snapped off its fingers with ease but when he opened the book he found he could not read the arcane script within. What he did understand were the illustrations. Robed figures huddled in a circle around a body, the body rising with unholy energy, mages with an army of dead to serve their ends. Thus was born the sole focus of Warwick's mind: read the book, amass the power, etch his name in the history of the world.
 
He would need subjects. His first subject was the dead mage himself. He would return every day to study the book and attempt crude spells on the body. He soon figured out that fresher subjects would be needed and he knew just the person who would serve that purpose.