Whispers from the Tomb

I heard the first scream hours ago. It came as a bit of a shock, since I had not heard a human voice in more than 200 years.

That first scream echoed through the upper levels of my barrow, filtering down through strata of charnel clay and ancient granite. It was a man’s scream, short, sharp, desperate. It ended abruptly—presumably because he who uttered it was immolated by a fireball ejected by a jade statue of Sakhmet, the hag-goddess of the Chaos Moon.

That was one of my more imaginative traps, I think you will agree. It was devised centuries ago, back when my tattered flesh still clung to my bones, when my rubies still glittered in the pale moonlight, and when my archive of Nehekharan scrolls seemed endless, an inexhaustible distraction from the rot and ruin of the mortal world. Those texts hold no interest for me now. I long ago committed them to memory.

I hear other sounds, closer than before! The ringing clank of rusty blades! The strangled howls of the wounded and the dying. The adventurers who have braved my crypt are intrepid, indeed. Good! It has been so long since my tomb was filled with slaughter! It is thrilling. I must thank the valiant idiots who wandered this way, braving the goblins of the Varenka Hills, and the ghoul-clans that lurk among the ancient ruins that surround my barrow. Their greed has brought me a momentary diversion, shattering the dull tedium of my eternal unlife. Yes, I will thank them!

And then, once I have made my appreciation plain, I will flay their flesh from their bones.

They will be like so many others. Mindless automatons doomed to wander the corridors and crypts of this place for years, until bodily corruption defeats my animating will and they crumble to dust.

I am cosigned to oblivion with the unquiet dead.

Pity me.

As I write, a screaming zombie bursts from the moldering clay. A parody of mortal birth. Its crooked jaw seethes with grey worms, and a beetle chitters in its shattered skull. I do not expect this fresh underling to be a great conversationalist.

This all assumes these adventurers are crafty enough to penetrate my inner crypt. More likely, they will die spitted on spike traps or dragged down by the scabrous claws of my long-dead retainers. There are many ways to die in my barrow.

Alas, there are none for me.

I—who toppled false kings in life and plumbed the depths of the Purple Wind, who was succored on the thrice-cursed wisdom of the Great Necromancer himself—I live on. I am waning, weakening, wasting. I am little more than a spectral shroud. But I do not die. I cannot die.

More screams. Closer now. Good! Most thieves who come this way do not make it this far. They perish painfully and ignominiously in the upper levels of my barrow.

Soon, I will venture from my inner sanctum and greet the luckless fools who remain. I would have them gaze upon me, reeking, rotting horror that I am. I would have them mesmerized by the green ghost-lights that dance in the hollows where my eyes once were. It is well that thieves see me, a monster who was once a man, garbed in silks now ragged and rotten, bedecked in gold gone pale and dull. I mock their craving for the things of the world.

And once they have seen me and trembled and bowed and blubbered out their prayers to their frail, feeble gods, I will suck out the very essence of life from each and every one of them.

Then, I will return to the chasmal, echoing silence of my books. I will return to my lightless, subterranean world. And there, in the midnight zone where nameless things creep and claw and crawl, I will wait. For I have lived an eternity, and I have an eternity yet to live.

- The Chronicle of Cunaxa the Hexed, Arch-Thaumaturge of Chorazin, Wyrd-Reader of the Purple Wind

This miniature was the product of two of my greatest creative influences: Ian Miller and my wife.

I initially approached this piece using a predictably moody palette, with an intent to model the piece on Keith Parkinson’s fabulous “Gods of Lanhkmar” cover painting. This first effort ran aground quite quickly. The sheer amount of black I was using was making the miniature look dreadfully dull. Also, I'm no Keith Parkinson. 

My wife, who is an astute critic, sized up the situation immediately. She recommended I repaint the miniature, this time using a lighter palette and color scheme. I went back to the drawing board, certain that she was right. Liches are undead wizards and in every fantasy setting they pop up in they are depicted as irredeemably evil and utterly insane. I wanted something livid and strange to convey those qualities. Eventually, I settled on shamelessly lifting Ian Miller’s classic blue-green-orange scheme and applying it my Lich. Miller’s works often rest on his use of analogous color schemes and his heavy reliance on blue gives his works an eerie, numinous glow.

Ian Miller's cover for the "Creature of Havoc" Fighting Fantasy gamebook, published in 1986

Ultimately, my wife was right. Going brighter worked out, I think, and I’m quite pleased with the end result. I feel like the color choices I made produced a somewhat unnerving and disturbing final piece. And I’m glad the miniature isn’t weighed down by the heavy-handed and self-conscious grimness you can get with lots of neutrals and drab colors. Ultimately, it’s hard to take a piece like this too seriously. It’s an equestrian portrait of a masked skeleton in a blue bathrobe, after all.

It was a lot of fun to reconnect with my old love of the Undead. This miniature is going to serve as the catalyst for my new year’s painting project, which I plan to post in the coming weeks. Stay posted!

Meanwhile, in the dungeon . . .