I have many, many titles. I bear titles given to me by my allies, and by my enemies alike. I care not in the slightest about those monikers ascribed to me by anyone, save for one being. He was my heart and soul, my one and only, my life and my world. He was my creator, and he has gone away. At such an inopportune time he fell into an endless sleep and no matter how I prodded and shouted he would not wake. Without him the world that was once vibrant and vivid became drab and colorless, like the spirit had been siphoned away from it and from myself.

For a brief time, I made the motions of rulership, but after interring my beloved within a marvelous mausoleum I lacked any motivation to even hold up the empire we had built together. Surely, he would be displeased with my act of abandoning my kin and the rest of Darksol, but I felt no emotion anymore as all that remained within my perfected undead form was melancholy and lethargy.

For several years I wandered the lands of the victorious ‘Children of Light’ but even the new sights and sounds and tastes of those lands that had just survived our might could not rouse me from my depression. I could only long for the days long since past where my husband and I enjoyed ourselves with many pleasant pursuits. The day where we slaughtered several cities filled of humans and used their blood to corrupt the land into a haunted forest of twisting and morbidly terrifying trees was one such memory among many. Alas, even taking a walk down memory lane could not raise me from the depths I had found myself in. I found my train of thought occasionally reaching lows that tempted my hand to take my life, and thankfully what little hope for the return of my spouse that remained stayed my hand from such an act.

Truly, thinking was not going to help me retain my sanity. Rather, the more I thought, the more often my stream of consciousness travelled to deeper and darker places that I knew that eventually I would not return from. I needed to act in order to keep my mind from falling further into the pit it had found itself within. Action would likely help me rise out from the bleak and shadowed cavern that I currently resided in. Metaphorically, of course. I was not actually dwelling within a cave, but instead it was as if my mind was chained in one.

I decided that I would pick up the pieces of the nation that had fallen a century ago and rebuild my creator’s dominion into something he would be proud of once he finally returned. I journeyed to the ruins of our once majestic home, the city we had built up from literally nothing into a land where even the humans who lived so far beneath us were as the kings of other nations.

What few hopes of reunification I had were dashed upon the rocks of foolishness, as when I passed through the tangles and twisted tree line and out before the shattered walls of Necrograd the myriad survivors of our glorious nation ignored my presence and continued to war incessantly over the scraps that were left. They bickered and fought and warred like short-sighted infants, ignoring the fact that a united force could truly stand again upon its own feet. Even my attempts to intervene and end the many-sided total war were ignored. They treated me as a pretender to my name or as a legend that was mere fable. What damage had befallen their minds in merely one hundred years to make them view me in such a manner? As I heard more from those who fell before my fury, the picture was made clear.

I had not spent a century in solitude, but instead I had spent four hundred years in isolation. Those whom I had given the blood kiss to had long since been slain, and so had their kin and so on and so on. The rabble that were here and bickered over the city were so far removed from those that were once the ruling class of our nation that they could be called newborn children fighting over the right to sit upon the throne of ancient gods!

It was at this revelation my depression returned with a vengeance. I no longer wished to be among those who now dwelled in this world. I would keep myself from falling to suicidal thoughts by taking a slumber as unending as the one my maker was in. I journeyed to his mausoleum, but it had been defiled by our ancient foes and my beloved’s sarcophagus had been stolen. With no way of knowing where my beloved now slept I searched for half a century for a suitable place to entomb myself in self-imposed exile for my myriad failures.

Surprisingly, the place I chose to be my resting place was the one city that had stood against the Empire for the longest, the fortress city of Ma-Ginotte. The massive catacombs that were continuously being expanded beneath the surface would let me hide out away from the watchful gaze of those who sought to end the last traces of the great work my beloved and I had undertaken. With simple Death Magic I created a makeshift coffin for myself out of bone and using Earth Magic I covered my box with dirt and gravel. I focused on building a massive whirlpool of negative mana, in the hopes that it would be useful many a millennium later when I had generated enough of a storm to hopefully wake my heart and soul from his deepest dreams.

Time passed, and I lost myself to sleep with the cycle I had made growing more and more massive with each rotation.

…

Something was disturbing the flow of mana. Humans were dying in pain and agony within the crypts and the influx of negativity caused ripples in the storm that woke me from my sleep. There was something else as well. A mass of negatively-charged mana that stalked the tombs like a terrible specter. It made the few humans that huddled in a mass above me give off a feeling I had long been unable to sense. Fear, Anger, Sorrow and so much more bubbled out from them and I felt the hunger that I had lost so many years ago come surging to the forefront.

Before I could act upon my need to feed, the ground above me rocked with explosions that only a Hero could unleash. Those damnable interlopers from other worlds! Had they now come to end my unlife? As the mass of shadow and evil slowly moved away, I could contain neither my ravenous thirst for the crimson wine nor my unbridled fury at the existence of those insidious summoned slave-soldiers any longer. I ripped through my coffin and up through the dirt without even using magic and made my declaration.

As my gaze fell upon the form of a handsome hunk who was just as tall as I, both the red haze that blinded me and the grey fog that had long dulled my world seemed to have vanished from reality. The voice of the one who I had found companionship in, who had created me and ruled by my side could be heard among the sounds of ricocheting debris.

“Lexi? Is that really you?”