The Lich King
The Frostbound Tyrant • The Nameless One • Warden of the Endsleep • He Who Whispers Through Ice
“The Lich King was not born. He was forgotten into being.”
— Prophet-Scribe Halien Vey, final entry before vanishing into the Ice Clefts of Mournvaal
I. Forgotten Origins
The being now known only as the Lich King was once a Tiefling—a horned mortal touched by infernal blood, born with the stigma of ancient sins. His early life is a mystery not merely of time but of deliberate obliteration. It is whispered among the occult that he forged a pact with something older than the gods—a force beneath even Hell and the Abyss—offering his name and identity in exchange for power that would defy the mortal arc. His name was not simply lost—it was burned from history, erased from books, memories, and even divine records, as though the world itself agreed to forget.
He emerged into record only as a servant—a court arcanist bound in subservience to Valdar the High, a resplendent and noble dragonborn king of the early Ka’Reath Concord. As the mortal realms consolidated power and rebuilt civilization in the wake of the previous age’s end, this Tiefling watched and waited. Even then, in silence, he studied the minds of others, mapping fear and obedience with perfect clarity. He found fascination in the dragons that ruled the skies, seeing in them a divine arrogance ripe for the breaking.
What he was before servitude… is a blank space. And that absence is terrifying.
II. Rise During the War of Unravelling
The War of Unravelling was not merely a war of armies—it was a sundering of fate itself. Old pacts between gods and mortals were violated. The Weave trembled. Leylines fractured. In the midst of this chaos, the Tiefling cast off his mortal form and ascended through undeath, not as a decaying wretch but as a perfected intellect encased in deathless stillness.
He did not conquer through brute force—he subjugated minds. Through rituals now long forbidden, he gained dominion over thought and will. Entire cities surrendered without battle, their people smiling with hollow eyes. Nobles awoke one morning with new, alien thoughts that led them to hand over their keeps. Wizards willingly dismantled their own towers.
He bound dragons—primarily chromatic—not through fear or greed, but through the manipulation of their base desires. He whispered to them in dreams, promising sovereignty over ash-covered kingdoms. A thousand years of fire and frost. And they followed him, some in chains of ice, some in dreams of glory.
The Ka’Reath Concord, young and bold, stood as the bulwark against him. And nearly broke beneath his march.
III. The White Betrayer and the First Fall
Amid the scorched and snow-choked ruin of the Concord's outer provinces, a single white dragon—its name lost, its bones enshrined in holy ice—refused the Lich King’s call. Some say this dragon had glimpsed the true cost of his promise: the extinction of all desire, even the desire to conquer. The cold offered by the Lich King was not elemental—it was conceptual. The death of change. The stillness of thought.
This white wyrm, once a beast of bitter winds and bone-crushing hunger, turned against its kind, and flew alongside mortal heroes in the final stand. In a cataclysmic battle atop the Shattered Spires, the wyrm shattered the Lich King’s corporeal form, destroying the anchor of his mortal existence and forcing his soul to retreat to his phylactery, hidden deep within the bones of the world.
But even in death, he plotted.
IV. Descent Into the Underdark and Final Binding
Maimed but immortal, the Lich King descended into the Underdark, the lightless veins of the world where even the gods walk with caution. There, he sought a place to reforge his body and rise again—but he was pursued. Not by armies, but by champions.
One such champion was Astreon, the Dawn-Warded, a paladin of the Sun Goddess Caudiel and a paragon of both wrath and sacrifice. Wielding the last ember of Caudiel’s living flame and blessed by divine vision, Astreon followed the Lich King into the dark, where no light holds sway.
Their battle is the subject of a hundred contradictory songs, but all agree on one truth: Astreon did not return.
He gave his life to cast the Lich King’s soul into the Primordial Cold—a realm beyond death, buried deep in the mantle of reality. A silence where nothing moves, and nothing decays, because nothing is allowed to become. The Lich King's body was frozen there, suspended in an eternal instant, watched over by warding spells and Caudiel’s fading flame.
Astreon's sacrifice sealed him there—but only just.
V. Legacy and Whispered Return
Though bound in ice and silence, the Lich King's influence persists. He does not speak, but dreams, and in his dreams he reaches those who slumber near forgotten glacial vaults, deep Underdark rifts, or the ancient frozen rime of the north.
Some say his runeblade, once wielded in undeath, now lies shattered into seven shards, each carrying a fragment of his will. Others say it reforges itself when touched by true desperation.
Cultists, warlocks, and desperate nobles have begun to whisper of the Endsleep—a prophesied stillness where the world ceases to suffer because it ceases to move. Where war ends, because memory dies. Where the sun does not rise, because there is no one to wish for it.
Should the Lich King return, it will not be as a man, nor even as a god.
It will be as a concept.
The End of Want.
The End of Fire.
The End of Time.
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