The Death of Worlds: Capitalizing on Calamity with the Lich Patula Obrove; Or, The Best of a Bad Situation; Or, No Bones About It; Or, A Bone to Pick; Or, Bone Appetite; Or, Bones, Sans Flesh
Madame Patula Ansley Chatham Garrick Everleigh Obrove just wants to be left
alone. The ex-elven noble only wants to spend
one day of her immortal life peacefully contemplating the universes’ demise, without her work being interrupted by yet another catapult volley delivered express from one of the local feudal lords. When would they learn?
Why can’t they just
leave her alone?
To be fair, the lady’s profession probably doesn’t help things. Her appearance even less so.
Patula Obrove is an an ancient
lich, a spellcaster who has cheated death by freeing their soul from their body and storing it in a special container called a
phylactery. Patula has ensured that she will always exist in some form so long as her phylactery remains intact. If her physical body is destroyed, the existence of the phylactery will allow her to restore herself. Patula’s body has yet to be destroyed--all attempts by the petty lords of her world have been thwarted--but...she’s getting there.
Becoming a lich doesn’t guarantee eternal
youth. Though some liches are able to simulate their mortal appearance with illusions and other magic, many choose to focus their energies on pursuits other than baser vanity. Patula abandoned her flesh centuries ago, and all that remains of her body now is a collection of polished white bones. Granted, she allows herself to indulge in
some pridefulness. The lich still dons the regalia of her once-noble house, dressing her bones in extravagant flowing robes and crowns of gems, as if mocking the materialism of the squabbling mortals who regularly attack her ancestral home. Despite the constant attempts by her neighbors to destroy the
foul lich, she persists, with nary a fingerbone out of place.
Part of this is due to Patula’s tremendous power. Total mastery of death and decay comes with the territory of being a lich, and Patula Obrove can raise undead armies and slough flesh from bone with the best of them. What elevates her above even other liches, though, is the
source of her power.
Centuries ago, when Patula was only a practicing necromancer, she became fascinated with the
process of dying. The stopping of the heart, the brain’s cessation of function, the domino effect of a body’s failing that could stem from so
many macabre variables. The girl would often retreat to her family’s dungeons to experiment on small things like rats or insects, to catalogue
how they died as a result of different causes. When her family found out, they put a stop to such morbid activities, but by then Patula had exhausted what she could learn from vermin, and began attending gladiatorial matches at the local arena to witness the deaths of bigger creatures.
In observing so many deaths, Patula noted the release of a curious energy at the moment that a body shut down. The instant a soul departed its body, there was a final pulse of magical power sent forth that could be gathered up by an opportunistic mage and used to fuel spellcasting. This energy, which Patula dubbed
Mori, could in practice power spells from all schools of magic, but seemed, fittingly, to be tooled more toward necromancy, curses, and other less savory spellcraft. Mori allowed Patula to cast death magic efficiently and with greater ease than if she were using another source of power. All that was required to access this new energy was a little bit of
death.
Fortunately, Patula would receive many opportunities in the coming years to practice wielding Mori. The political unrest on her world of Auratum erupted in war between the various great city-states. The girl could often be seen on the edges of battlefields, using the surplus of Mori released to hasten the deaths of opposing armies. One fallen solidier fueled a spell that rotted away the bodies of two, which led to the reanimation of four, and so on. From her high vantage point, the young elf wove a rolling cascade of annihilation.
However, such wanton carnage could not go unanswered for. Some of the soldiers managed to survive, and they reported seeing a mysterious girl overlooking the battlefield. When they came to Patula’s family estate and slaughtered every person living there, the girl used the energy generated by those deaths to purge the invading soliders, and to elevate herself into a lich. Elves were long lived, but as had been demonstrated in Patula’s home that day, they were hardly safe from
being murdered. In that moment, Patula took a step toward becoming a little more
everlasting.
The state of affairs on Auratum continued to worsen as the years passed. In-fighting within the the city-states caused them to fracture into the disparate estates of bickering nobles that exist today. Resorting to the weaponization of powerful magic disrupted the planet’s equilibrium, resulting in countless natural disasters.
A dragon moved in. All of this was well and good for Patula Obrove, however. She used the chaos on Auratum to her advantage, to further her understanding of death and that curious, potent energy that it exuded.
It became clear to Patula that only harvesting Mori from “living” things meant limiting herself.
Every object that existed, be it a mote of dust, a flowing river, or a towering mountain, possessed a soul. Furthermore, the lich learned that
any complex system possessed a soul, and those souls could leave their “bodies”--those complex systems could “die,” releasing Mori for the lich’s use. Mountains and rivers were difficult to kill, but households, armies, and
nations were dissolving across Auratum. The world was ripe for the newly-christened lich’s harvest.
Of course, this escalation in scale led Patula to pursue the energy released by the end of the universe. Not that she witnesses the event in person, mind. During the violence that consumed Auratum in the ensuing years, the lich was lucky enough to come into possession of a special scrying device which allowed her to peer as far forward, backward, or sideways in time as she wished. Her reality, she discovered, was not only
cyclical, but existed parallel to dozens upon dozens of other realities, each of them with their own apocalypses. Once Patula had
knowledge of a specific end-of-the-world, wielding the Mori released in that moment was a simple matter of drawing it forth across the boundary of space and time--a trifle for a mage as accomplished as Patula Obrove.
Upon reaching the logical conclusion of her research into Mori energy (save for harvesting the death of
multiverses), Patula realized she really didn’t have a
use for all that power. An armageddon’s worth of necrotic energy could at the very least put the wretched planet Auratum out of its misery, but then...Patula didn’t see much point in that. She knew the outcome of killing the planet, and that was a hefty sum of powerful fuel for her magic. Destroying Auratum would be
boring. That, and Patula
lived there. In a certain sense, at least.
Patula had learned all she could from studying the moment a death transpired, so she returned to her roots and began researching the
process of dying, albeit on a grander scale than before. Rather than watching rats and insects die, Patula used her scrying device to determine the exact circumstances that led to the destruction of a universe. The systems which held together a given cosmic order could fail in the same way a body’s could. From her tower, Patula observes the cause of that failure, and then records it in a growing catalog of ends of the universe(s).
Provided the neighbors don’t interrupt her, of course.
The Hither and Thither Expanded; Or, Drawing Back the Curtain!
Patula Obrove is the alternate universe analogue of the fairy Odonata. She is not her former life, her blood relative, or a close acquaintance. She's the Obrove if Obrove were a powerful lich in residence on the troubled world of Auratum, while
Odonata uses the powers of creation to shape tiny pocket universes!
More Obroves can be found on their alt list,
here.
There are more "Danalogues" to come, eventually, so we kindly ask that you...
STAY TUNED!