The Scion's Shadow

Reborn Necromancer, former rebel living in the forest, son to an escaped pitfighter

They say the world didn’t end. It just started rotting slower than anyone expected. In the old cities—stone giants choked with incense and fear—the priesthood calls it a test. A thinning of the veil. They burn the dead when they can, salt the ground when they can’t, and hang anyone even suspected of “communion.” Their Order wears white and gold, polished to blindness, but the gutters still run black beneath them. The rich feast. The poor vanish. And sometimes… the dead walk anyway. Not all of them are raised. That’s what makes it worse. You were born beyond their reach—at least, that’s what your father told you. The frontier isn’t lawless. It has its own laws. Hard ones. Honest ones. The kind written in scars and graves. Your father was a pit fighter in one of the great cities—never told you which, only that the crowd loved blood more than bread. He wasn’t just a fighter. He was owned. Him and dozens like him. Bought, broken, paraded. Until he broke something back. The escape wasn’t clean. It wasn’t heroic. It was desperate men killing guards with chains and teeth, slipping through smoke and screaming. Some made it out. Many didn’t. The city branded the survivors as beasts, criminals, deserters of divine order. The priesthood called it heresy. Your father called it freedom. They ran. Into the wild stretches where maps fade into guesswork. Where forests grow too dense, hills too quiet, and some patches of land feel… wrong. Places where animals won’t tread. Where the soil turns grey and brittle. Where, if something dies, it doesn’t always stay that way. That’s where you grew up.

The world did not fall in a single night. It has been collapsing for generations—quietly, stubbornly, like a body refusing to die. Once, the continents were bound by roads that never ended. Empires traded across oceans, scholars argued over truths that could be proven, and death—though feared—was understood. Final. Clean. A boundary no one crossed. Then the boundary thinned. No one agrees on when it began. The priesthood claims it was the result of mankind’s arrogance. Old records, what little remain unaltered, suggest something else—strange illnesses, mass graves that wouldn’t stay silent, entire villages abandoned after “restless nights.” At first, it was rare. A corpse that twitched. A burial that failed. Stories dismissed as grief or madness. Then it stopped being rare. The first confirmed outbreak—though no one called it that at the time—was in a lowland farming region now known only as the Ash Fields. The dead rose without ritual. Without summoning. Without purpose. They didn’t hunt. Didn’t think. They simply moved. Wandered. Collapsed. Rose again. It should have been containable. It wasn’t. Something in the land changed there. Soil turned grey, crops failed, animals fled or were found twisted, wrong. Even after the dead were burned, the place didn’t recover. That was the first cursed land. Now there are many. The rise of the theocracy came after. In times of uncertainty, people don’t look for truth—they look for authority. The Order of the Veil declared that death itself had been profaned. That unseen forces—blasphemies—were breaching the sacred divide between life and what comes after. They offered structure. Protection. Certainty. And in return, they demanded obedience.