The Time of Dying

Three thousand years ago, seven great necromancers combined their power and dead armies to exterminate the demon kings. Life was wiped from the continent. All other magics and gods fell. Only necromancy survived, and only necromancy held humanity together. This extinction event is the origin of the world. There is no “before.”

What remains is the Road of Graves: an endless road paved with gravestones. It runs one main course without ends, over mountains and under rivers, through forests, caves, and castles. When people die, their gravestones join the cobbles. The Road expands forever. The sun is cold and slate-colored. The harridan’s moon is yellow, marking the night of witches.

Beyond one curve of the Road lies a cursed forest: skeletal trees, rotting sprouts, and leaves carried from some eternal-autumn plane, already fallen and decayed. Around another tract a wetland of poisoned pools sprawls. Beneath the Road in yet another place lie the Oldvaults: ancient necromancer laboratories, sealed for aeons, filled with forgotten experiments and undead. The undead roam freely everywhere beyond the paved epitaphs. Nearly all civilization clings to the Road. Its people are the dwellers, descendants of the necromancers’ acolytes, servants, and slaves.

The seven necromancers turned on each other after their victory. Most have died at least once. Repeated deaths, doctrinal confusion, and lingual drift degraded their power. Once immortal, all seven are now cursed to different forms of pseudo-immortality. They are still worshipped, though their power is limited. Each is bound to one of the seven deadly sins:

• The Thin Man (Sloth): god of sickness and entropy, locked in eternal sleep in his Sickened Cradle.
• The Old Man Below (Pride): god of history and age, a roving spirit issuing from the End of the Road.
• The Scratcher (Wrath): god of blood and curses.
• The Mother of Worms (Lust): god of decay, a vampire beautiful outside and rotten within.
• Gallbladder (Gluttony): god of consumption, worshipped at the Lake of Tomatoes.
• Lady Horsehair (Greed): god of possession.
• The Red King (Envy): god of persecution.

Necromancy is the only surviving magic. Among witches it is called the Words of Rotten Syllables. Its magical language, Deadspeech, derives from Hungarian. The dead do not rest easy. Ghosts, skeletons, and wraiths are common, whether raised by necromancers or risen on their own. A place beneath a Road epitaph is said to shield the soul from necromancy.

Alongside humans, three lineages of Satr (elves) and the Grot (toad-centipede-necromancers) inhabit or once inhabited the world. The Holtsatr, translucent blind forest elves with starlight innards, have been extinct for roughly six hundred years.