pileofspirits | History

PHALANX: HISTORY

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→ The village of Eoan

Magic and technology had been tangling for decades, but out beyond the sprawl of the major cities, the two forces had settled into a much quieter amalgam. With the last war only remembered by the oldest citizens, and any border disputes far and quiet enough away from the rural areas, life was actually rather easy in the various hamlets strung along the roads between the fields. It was a good area to raise families and farms, and it was a good place to hide.

Eoan was the last little village before a good stretch of swamp, far enough from the major trade road to avoid most of the merchant traffic passing through, but near enough to the outpost to make a decent living on selling their produce and wares. It was a humble location to live, less than two hundred souls settling there at any one time, but it was comfortable and peaceful to those who loved it. Most of the Eoan families could trace their generations back to the founding of the village, and their children scattered across the land but stayed in touch.

It was a village with a soul.

→ The wizard and the tailor

The various residents of Eoan dabbled in both magic and technology, with very few considered an expert in either. There were a few local electricians and machinists, but the inventors tended to set up shop for only a year or so at a time before the village's resources proved too meager for them, and they inevitably head off to be closer to the city. Likewise, wizards and alchemists were fleeting, exciting presences in the village who moved on once the stores of local lore and knowledge had been fully explored.

This is why it was so terribly exciting when one of the traveling mages returned to the village a year after his first visit, purchased a house near the center of town, and settled in. His name was Abele, he was intimidating and dazzlingly intelligent, and most of the young people of the village were fascinated by him. The older generations warned the younger ones from spending too much time him, but it was much more do to a worry that their children would become dazzled by his tricks and stories of the cities beyond and leave them to farm and age by themselves. They didn't really think of him as dangerous.

A prime example of the effect that the mage had on impressionable people was a young man named Maicah. Though he had set himself up with a budding tailoring business, his curiosities and ambitions reached far beyond that, so when the mage began asking around for helpers, Maicah was one of the first to jump at the chance. Abele mostly needed help keeping up with repairs and mundane errands while he spent as much of his time to his magical projects as possible, but he also indulged his young friends with tales and lessons while they worked for him. Maicah's tailoring began to slip, and he stopped even pretending to look for a wife (much to his mother's dismay).

Magical exploration made him happy, though. Of all Abele's informal students, Maicah was by far the most genuinely interested in the practice, and proved himself to be both bright and loyal. As Abele's favor and trust in Maicah grew, the young man's infatuation with the magical arts flourished. His father had been one of those infamous traveling mages and had sent his bastard a few arcane texts in the place of anything useful, but the boy had treasured them... and now he had the opportunity to finally understand and put those books into some intelligible context. Even when he wasn't spending time with his mentor, he would study his father's books at home.

Though Maicah was intelligent, Abele greatly underestimated the young man's capability and understanding, beginning to allow him greater access to his workshop beneath the cottage and not realizing how much knowledge Maicah was truly absorbing. He didn't notice when Maicah began to catch on to the true nature of his studies. Abele believed himself to be exploiting the infatuation of a foolish youth, not training up a young apprentice that would ultimately foil all of his elaborate plans.

→ Creation of the Phalanx

Maicah realized the dangerous, necromantic potential of Abele's work long before he decided to act on it. He was not immune to the power-hungry tendencies that magic tends to encourage in those who invest themselves in it, and he dragged out his studies under Abele much longer than he should have. It wasn't until he discovered the exact nature of the grand project that Abele had spent his years in the village working toward (and the fact that it would mean the destruction of his entire village) that he finally raised his hand against Abele, and by then, it was too late to stop the ritual in its entirety.

The plan had been to trigger an event that would cut the souls from every human being in the vicinity of the village and bind them to a single object of power, creating a phalanx of captive, subjugated souls. This vessel would serve as an immense well of power for whoever knew how to wield it, either tapping into the souls as a source of magical fuel, or using the army of undead souls as a weapon itself.

Maicah feared that interrupting the Phalanx Ritual would mean his own death, but his guilt over waiting so long to intervene pushed his hand, and he threw himself and what little magical power he had at his disposal at Abele as the spell was being triggered. Maicah succeeding in destroying the object of power, but the ritual's destructive power fired anyway, erupting out in a rage of necromantic energy that engulfed the entire town.

The storm would be talked about for years, and the aftermath whispered about for decades after that. The general opinion was that the freak storm that hit the area that day caused a tornado that wiped out the town, or a localized plague hit them harder and faster than they could get help from outside sources. None of the details lined up in either case, so the fate of Eoan was left largely to speculation.

Thinking that his spell had been a failure aside from managing to kill an entire village, Abele fled as soon as he regained consciousness, escaping blame as no one was left alive to accuse him. Soon after, hunters returning to the village discovered the massacre and the alarm was quickly raised... though, there wasn't much else to do besides bury the bodies in as respectful of mass graves as could be managed.

Maicah's body, discovered in the rubble of the house in the middle of the village, was one of the last to be added to the graves. And once the work was done, most of the kind folks who helped lay the village to rest carried on their way--to deliver the news to the surrounding settlements and get back to their own lives. No one was around to see the body of Maicah dig its way out of the earth.

The original anchor of the Phalanx Ritual had been destroyed, but the body of a human boy thrown into the middle of it worked almost just as well. The Eoan souls (a little shredded and scattered from the half-botched nature of the spell) now inhabited the shell what was once Maichah, and the newly-born Phalanx set itself loose to go wandering the countryside.

→ The haunted swamp

It would be years before Abele (working under a new name, in a new rural outpost) heard of the ghostly monster haunting the swamp along the eastern trade road--or, at least, until he realized what the truth behind the rumors might be. Wrangling his new loyal assistants, he set out to retrieve his long-lost ultimate power source.

What he found was upsetting and more than a little bit disappointing. The undead construct had been wandering and unstable for far longer than he would have liked, and he wasted no time in whisking it back across the land to his new base of operations. The being was damaged, incomplete, and too unfinished to use in the state that he'd found it, so thus began a new venture to stabilize and repair his creation. For more than a year, Abele worked on his perplexing abomination, with the ultimate goal of turning it into a modified version of the weapon he'd originally intended. Once the repairs were finished, the experiments began.

→ The new apprentice

Once again, a trusted apprentice would be Abele's fall. This time, it was a young female protege who spent too much time caring for the abomination kept captive in the heart of his workshop. Underestimating Phalanx's growing cognitive and emotional awareness, and the girl's headstrong will, he failed to notice that a sort of empathetic connection was forming between the two.

The girl felt sorry for the tortured, captive creature, but this escalated to something much greater once she finally realized the truth of Phalanx's origins. She spent enough time with the creature to get the hang of its fractured way of communicating, slowly putting together clues. Especially when the creature's appearance would drift, hair and skin and mannerisms changing seemingly on a whim, recognizable pieces began to surface. The day that she recognized fragments of an aunt who had died years ago in a mysterious tragedy that had wiped out an entire village, she solidified her resolved to save what was left of those stolen souls.

The apprentice (Phalanx never caught her name) staged an elaborate escape, freeing the creature and securing transport to take it far from the province. Once more, Abele's plans were set back by years, but now his beloved power-source was lost in some distant land.

→ The wandering years

Since then, the spirits have been wandering the land in their strange vessel. It has been many years since they've seen their master, but keeping track of where they've been and where they're going is something beyond their ability. They have no idea how long it has been since they'd been freed, but they have enjoyed their time. The souls bound to this vessel don't understand much, but they do know that they're enjoying life much more than they'd enjoyed being dead--especially since most of the other souls they'd loved are all bundled up with them here.

SHORT VERSION:

• Village of Eoan: population of less than two hundred. Neither magic nor technology in any great amount, until mage moves in.

• Abele the mage: buys a house, hires local youth to help him out with mundane things while he works, teaches and entertains them in addition to modest pay.

• Maicah the tailor: young man who is the most enthusiatic of Abele's informal students. Eagerly gains knowledge under his mentor's teaching, considers becoming a mage himself.

• Discovers Abele's true intentions, but gets greedy and waits too late to completely stop him. Sacrifices himself but not before most of the massive ritual triggers anyway.

• The ritual is interrupted, the object of power that Abele was trying to create is destroyed, but the rest of the spell continues doing what it was designed to do. Maicah and the rest of Eoan are destroyed.

• Abele thinks that his spell must have been a complete failure and flees. The spell still ripped the souls from the citizens of Abele, but instead of the spirits infusing into a magical object as originally planned, or dispersing as Abele had assumed, they had anchored to Maicah's body.

• Maicah resurrects after burial as the Phalanx, digs out of the mass grave, and goes wandering.

• Abele hears tales of a ghostly monster haunting the swamps near Eaon, finally realizes it must be the Phalanx, and hunts it down.

• Phalanx is retrieved, repaired, stabilized, and experimented on by Abele in his new base of operations. This goes on for more than a year.

• Abele's new apprentice takes pity on Phalanx, and then resolves to free them once she recognizes the soul of a relative trapped in this vessel. She stages an escape and Phalanx is set loose in a different province. Abele's plans are once more set back.

• Phalanx has been wandering for an unknown number of years. The souls within the vessel shouldn't exist on this plane, but they're relatively content, especially since their loved ones are all trapped with them.