Salamandra

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Salamandra: The Shade and Lich

Artwork by Urara Regaki

Salamandra is a mage who has been known to have been instrumental in multiple magical affairs: including the discovery of electrical evocation, as well as once being a master of the Mages Guild when Ambros was Archmage. Known as one of the few golemancers in existence, and a powerful evocationist, he was also a well known and popular mage and dark-arts user, until he was promptly slain by the Prophet of the Clerical Order, Braxis Silverblade. Salamandra has recently returned, though his whereabouts are unknown, and whether or not he uses magic any longer is unknown.

During his life Salamandra performed Shade Magic bodyswaps frequently, to an unprecedented level. He pushed beyond what any shade had done previously. His spirit became very unattached to physical bodies. These shade rituals have since been lost to time, but the effect on Salamandra's spirit was strong. After the lich ritual it has become so accustomed to existing without a body, so damaged by it, that it cannot pass on to the afterlife, ever. Without a body it simply disappates into tormented energy, slowly draining away into the void and oblivion. It cannot become a ghost, it cannot pass on. While the monks are able to save Salamandra while he remains in his body, were he to actually die, there is no afterlife for him. To achieve immortality in spirit, he must achieve it in body.

The spectre of Salamandra is not Salamandra. It is the ghost of one of the poor souls he bodyswapped into, forcefully imprinted with Salamandra's mind over its own.

A crazed mage or possibly a crazed alchemist could, were they to become obsessed with either bringing back Salamandra (perhaps for his Shade Magic) or simply with resurrecting a ghost, captures the spectre of Salamandra using deceived clerics or fancy medieval mad scientist ghostbusters kit. They prepare a body with an arcaurum core in it, which is either a recently dead normal body or a Frankenstein body. Their plan is to trap the ghost inside to make a sort of flesh golem thing. When they try it, however, it all goes wrong. At first nothing happens. They force the ghost into the core and it doesn't animate anything (they don't know much about golemancy, after all.) However, the sheer trauma combined with all the magical energy and lightning conductors (got to have lightning conductors!) causes the spectre to reject the false Salamandra mind. Then weird stuff happens.

All this magic flying around makes reality unstable. The spectre provides the framework of Salamandra's consciousness, it's pretty much the same mind, after all. The tortured lich energy that is the real Salamandra, which has been spreading through the atmosphere since his death in Salvus, is drawn in, creating a huge magical storm above the building this is going on in. The spectre is destroyed, the room is destroyed, the failed flesh golem is destroyed. When the smoke clears, Salamandra's soul, reunited with his mind, stands in the room, in the body of the failed flesh golem, which is now very much alive.

This means Salamandra is returned, in a body almost identical to his old. That body has a golem core fused into its chest, although the core does not do anything unless he is Permakilled. It is visible when he is shirtless though. He is not fully resurrected, some of his being has drained away into the void while he was dead. This manifests as a loss of all his magical abilities and training.