Selected recollections of Asharadoth, written 03/07/2007. This text is non-canonical. I will eventually revisit it in some form.

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The master left without a word.

They had convened among themselves, after that mightiest and most terrible of wars, and the one who stood highest among them, He called Urêl, commanded of them: ‘Forsake this land, and all of mortalkind, if you wish them to prosper!’ And they built for themselves their own place, apart from that of their subjects, and dwelt there, and resolved never to come forth from it again.

The master left without a word, and we wailed; we wept. Why, for what reason did we live? We cried out to the bare heavens, must we endure this pale shadow of what was? For the master gave us purpose, he gave us strength and will, taught us secret crafts known to no other. We loved our master, our Lord Kiel. Our days were bright beside him, and that light had been stolen away.

Then the darkness came in fair guise, that fallen Host and their jaded sire, cruel Lazael in all his dreadful rage. He came at first as a blessing, but the archons in their fastness exiled him, and he saw us as the cause. How he hated and despised us, that ill-made angel, and our Lord Kiel could not protect us from his wrath. Cities burned, and the ash was trampled beneath his feet.

When his legions came to Ilveresse, I was in the tower. I begged and pleaded to the bronze statue of Kiel, image of a man fair and strong, with a great bronze serpent coiled about him. ‘Save us!’ I cried, and the answer was a great pulsing tremor in the earth from the tread of many boots, like the long slow tolling of a death-knell.

Out to the balcony I ran, out, out, to witness this pitiless doom. What a sight met my eyes! Bright Ilveresse, broken! Her palaces burning! Her people fleeing into slaughter! The streets were bathed in the blood of my kinfolk, and I felt as though I stood on a high precipice above an endless sea of crimson death.

I howled my sorrow: I, sorcerer-king, elvenlord, noble Asūr Daethe, helpless and alone. I called out then, to every dark and vengeful god, cried lamenting of the horrors to which I bore witness. I cursed the demon Lazael, and from that high tower lashed out, sorcery tearing through my veins in agony to mirror the torment of my soul. Such power tore out of my fragile body as to sear my flesh black, and its arcana of impotent fury and superlative grief were carved indelibly into me, a cursed mark that I will never be rid of, and that all who behold shall know my misery.

My sanity fled. More a beast than a man, I was reduced to the lowest of scavengers. Years passed, decades perhaps, and all I feel from that time is a vast, bottomless hunger, the hunger of a fiend that desires living flesh, and the life in it, for vengeance. Perhaps I sated such dark lusts on those deserving, those who had marched in iron boots across the dust of my city; or perhaps I slaked myself on the innocent, or those of my kin? The memory escapes me, and I no longer wish to recall it.

When next I formed coherent thought, it was in the presence of others who knew my insatiable thirst. They were not the same as me. I still lived and drew breath, but these were the blood-drinkers, nightwalkers—nosferatu. I found them repellent, these corpse-puppets, who had nothing in them that could sustain me. But they saw kin in me, and bade me join them. I refused. They forced their deathlessness upon me, and at once I loved them as one of their own; loved them even as I had loved Lord Kiel, so long before. I had a new master, and obeyed him without question: for the very notion of dissent was impossible for me to conceive.

My master asked my name. It had been so long, so many, many years since last I had spoken in the tongues of civil folk, and the name caught, deformed in my throat. It was not Asūr Daethe the king of Ilveresse that arose anew that night, but the monster Asharadoth. So I spoke, and was named, and so have I been named ever after.

Long and bloody were those years, and full of grim revelry. I served my master well, and sired servants of my own. I had regained a control over myself that I had not had since the sacking of my city, and as I grew once more in wisdom and intellect, I grew also in pride. Yet I knew that I was broken; that I had lost a fundamental part of myself. No longer would I feel pain, nor pity, remorse, guilt, true love or happiness; but I was full of spite, and scorn, a twisted and unwholesome devotion to my master, and the half-crazed glee of the murderer and heretic. I hated all that I beheld.

Fivescore years of such servitude, and my powers were returning; the might of sorcery I had once wielded had been restored along with what remained of my reason. At last I saw true and clearly. I had grown potent, glutted on the lives of countless thousands, while my master had become withered and debauched. At once I slew him, the master I had loved so blindly, and took his life’s-blood for my own. I had regained what he took from me. My brothers fled from before me, and I left the secret place wherein we dwelt and felt the sun’s light again, unafraid of harm. I was renewed, and all the crueller and more terrible for it.