The Black Hand

The Tower of Zards has borne an evil reputation since pre?Cataclysmic times. The Scarlet Witch King, when he rose against Lloroi rule, raised the mighty Tower with demonic aid and braced its cyclopean stones with potent magicks. In the end it could not shelter him from defeat, but its ruins stood tall despite the devastating upheavals of the Cataclysm which befell the world in the next generation. The barbarous survivors of the deceased civilization shunned the witch?built citadel, not caring to dwell in the shadow of grim, cliff?founded walls lit from within by a lurid glare whose source seemed to be neither the sun, moon, nor stars. The nomads early began calling the tower "Zards," a word that translates as "Evil."

Early in the twelfth century, a remnant of a Goblin raiding party came straggling back to the Nithmere Mountains telling a ghastly tale of howling specters amuck in the Shards. Shortly afterwards, the rumor was confirmed by Dwarven prospectors in the days of their sagely monarch Alcuin. The Dwarves had spied upon a wraith-like being at the ancient battlefield of the Wasted Dead, the place where long ago the Witch King's Scarlet Army had gone down to defeat. The wizard -- for such he, she, or it had to be -- walked a circled path in the dust where the magic?slain dead of long-ago uneasily lay. Hissing an invocation, the mage struck a bone against the ground, whereupon the earth commenced to crumble and a thousand soiled skeletons emerged or grew from it like proliferating weeds. The wraith?being gave a curt command and the undead army fell in ranks around him, like the flesh?and?blood soldiers they once had been.

A new tenant had come to inhabit the ancient Tower of Zards ?- a shadowy wonder?worker who possessed a dreaded glamour which allowed him to command the dead. The wraith?being gave no name and his appearance was so strange that even "his" gender could not be guessed with certainty. The barbarians called him the Black Hand, and so he came to be known throughout Minaria. Physical descriptions of the Black Hand are rare; the diarist Codew, a courtier in the palace of Pennol, describes him so: "A black, gaunt lich in crumbling mummy wrappings, whose details of visage were obscured by a dark mist that clung to his angular frame."

Opinion holds that the magician emerged from the East. Alas, no document or authoritative legend supports this guess; in Minaria most things unknown and unexplainable are attributed to the East. The ancient records are barren in regard to that region, other than to aver that the Lloroi arrived from the East during a war of gods and demons in their homeland. Nor has modern exploration dispelled the myth of the haunted East. A forbidding mountain range called the Wall of Aemmac turns back all but the most intrepid traveler. Dwarven prospecting expeditions dispatched east failed to establish mining colonies and the survivors brought back tales of "twisted and deformed folk," giant beasts, and lethal curses. Neither does eastern knowledge come to Minaria via the trading voyages of Mivior and Rombune. The southern subcontinent of Girion is vast and the sea lanes are dominated by the hostile Scarlet Empire, where, it is said, the ancient Witch King rules again, having centuries ago escaped from his Lloroi banishment.

The Muetaran scholar Asiongabur, who compiled a collection of Black Hand legends entitled Lord of the Dead, rejects the eastern?origin theory. He believes instead that the Black Hand rose from the Tower of Zards itself, an undying demon or mummy imprisoned in its collapsed dungeons since the fall of the Scarlet Witch King's first empire.

For the first few decades after his discovery, the Black Hand remained secluded in the Shards of Lor. The sight of his undead servants shuffling stiffly over the frosted rocks taught the races of Minaria to shun the necromancer's baleful domain. His castle being far from the beaten track, most persons who heard of him continued to not believe.

The Black Hand stepped into the outer world with devastating impact in 1248. The Goblin Gronek became war chief of the Mangubat tribe upon the sudden death of his brother Whynaucht. The ambitious Gronek aspired to extend the range of his people into the uninhabited Shards of Lor, from where raids might be mounted against the Dwarven principalities. He had heard of the Black Hand, but either dismissed the mage as a charlatan or esteemed his own conjuring powers overmuch. Leading his warriors through the Shards of Lor, Gronek beat upon the lofty barbican of Zards and demanded the magician's homage.

For reasons known only to himself, the Black Hand deigned not to hurl his undead servitors against the invaders, but instead appeared on a high balcony with head bowed and hands folded. The Goblin lord shouted up at him impudently, demanding submission and tribute.

From the shrouded wraith there tumbled down a hoarse, hollow voice like a reverberation from the tomb: "What you have asked for, you shall be served. I will bring you your tribute in the dark of the moon!"

Pleased with himself and relieved that an assault on the daunting Tower had proven unnecessary, Gronek withdrew to the forest of Leeks to await the arrival of his newest vassal.

In the starless dark of the next new moon, the scouts rushed into Gronek's encampment and beat a frightened alarm on the bronze warning gong. The aroused Goblins scrambled out of their sleeping rolls and rushed armed to the perimeter of the village.

An awed hush fell over the Goblins. No attackers were descending on the encampment, but tribute?bearing servants instead ?- servants like the Goblins had never seen before.

At the head of the procession shuffled a troop of hawk?beaked creatures with stringy simian hair -- ghouls from the dreaded Poison Desert of Yyng?go. In their shaggy arms they bore open casks of onyx, jacinth and lapis lazuli whose facets glinted in the ruddy torchlight like a million devilish eyes.

As the ghouls proceeded by, a fiendish screech descended from the air above. Small, dark bodies on leathery wings plummeted out of the black sky, driving the Goblins back by their terrifying demeanor. As they alighted, the air filled with the odor of the sepulcher, for held in the clawed feet of these awful flyers were canisters of rare funerary incenses and embalmer's spices: myrrh, cassia and every type of exotic aromatic. These grotesque beings, it later came to be known, were the half?legendary gargoyles, denizens of the distant Wastes of Folmar. The creatures scanned the trembling crowd with a scornful chatter, then carried their burdens on, into the heart of the village.

After the gargoyles came other entities with a dull, uneven step. They represented many races and both sexes, and all their ravaged faces were frozen in slack?mouthed stares. They were zombies all ?- deceased nobles and rich merchants mixed with mutilated soldiers and beggars in filthy rags. Some seemed newly dead; others were far gone into corruption. In rotting fingers the zombies clutched baskets of blood?red rubies and carbuncles. The host of Goblins released a few sporadic screams but a strangled silence held the village as securely as a stony golem's clench about a tender throat.

Scarcely had the undead staggered by than there sounded the clatter of bones. Uncloaked by the night, earth?darkened skeletons approached with an insect-like tread. The skeletons were swathed in kilts of gold brocade with buckles of topaz. On their grinning skulls they wore turbans of black silk starred with emeralds. Lights like flickering marsh fires burned within the hollow bones and the jagged teeth of grinning skulls. They came arrayed in jeweled scimitars and embossed shields, looking for all the world like a demonic guard of honor.

All eyes turned to the covered palanquin they escorted ?- framed of gilded wood and carried by a dozen soiled mummies. Magnificent tiaras circling their grey, withered heads suggested a rank long-lost in Death's kingdom and belied by their crumbling wrappings and the teeming parasites that feasted on their leathery flesh. From the shroud?covered palanquin issued a voice that Gronek had heard but one time before, but which he had been unable to forget: "This is the first portion of what is owed you. Is Gronek of the Mangubats pleased?"

"Is -- Is more to follow?" stammered the bewildered war chief.

"Draw back the curtains of my palanquin," said the concealed speaker, "and all you are owed shall be delivered."

Gronek ordered his varlets to the litter, but they stood paralyzed in awe. Ashamed to be thought a coward before all his people, Gronek invoked all the power of his gods and descended from his chair. With a trembling hand he, himself, tore away the fluttering shroud-cloth. The sight revealed to his tortured eyes struck Gronek like a mace to the chest. Within sat not the Black Hand which he had expected, but one other whom the war chief knew well.

The dark and corrupted features of Gronek's dead brother Whynaucht regarded his sibling hatefully. "Brother," rasped Whynaucht, "you are my murderer and a thief upon my chair. May your name be cursed for an eternity before your people and the gods you misserve! May you live in screaming madness and live like an animal eating the moss from the boles of the forest!"

Gronek howled and plunged into the woods, never to return. The Goblins say he lived out his days in madness, running naked along the woodland paths and, as prophesied, eating moss like a browsing animal.

Afterwards, the Black Hand returned his seclusion in the Shards of Lor, untroubled by further demands from Goblin chiefs. But if he had hoped that his punishment of Gronek would force other outsiders to respect his privacy, the necromancer miscalculated. Men who heard the Goblins' story in strange and filtered forms denigrated the power of the Black Hand while fixating upon his wealth in gems and gold. Adventurers lusting for his horde trespassed repeatedly upon the Shards of Lor, alone, in small bands, or in strong brigand gangs. Few of these returned and fewer still brought back any material reward.

An often?repeated legend from Basimar recounts the adventure of the warrior?maid Ashera and her band of bravos. They ventured into the Shards of Lor in the mid-1200's, seeking the wizard's gold, undaunted by the zombie sentinels they encountered and dispatched with enchanted blades. In the brown twilight they sighted the ruinous stronghold of Zards on the grim, piled scarps, its wizard-fires flickered weirdly behind dark embrasures.

Ashera led her band up an avalanche of fallen blocks and peered into the tower through an unpatched gap in the ancient masonry. The spectacle they beheld stunned them: The whole ground floor of the tower had been hollowed out to make a chamber of awesome vastness. The demolition had been a superhuman task for which the necromancer must have enlisted the aid of mighty legions of demons and familiars. Thick black vapors wormed their way out of a pond-sized cauldron filled with an awesome and noxious recipe. All about the rim of the cauldron writhed the necromancer's nightmare creations wrested from foiled Death, while the hollow of the vault echoed with the cries of flapping creatures which resembled bats and birds of prey, but were in fact sorcerous creations not of this world.

As they watched, the adventurers' souls were blasted by the monstrous and blasphemous. They beheld the dark mists above the vast pit-cauldron twist together like hibernating serpents and take on a kind of quasi?solidity. Before their stupefied gaze, a demon of horrifying size and features materialized. One of the intruders could bear no more, wailed in terror, and threw himself to his death on the mountainside. The creatures below turned laboriously toward the adventurers and Ashera knew they had been discovered. She shouted for her companions to follow her in wild flight. As the yells of the hindmost echoed in her ears, Ashera saw the flash of wings and plunged into blackness as a cudgel clanked upon her helm.

At length Ashera awoke to find herself in a luxurious room, no longer wearing armor, but gorgeous silken raiment. The chamber's air tingled her lungs with the beguiling scent of flowers and aromatic food, for upon a table was set a sumptuous meal and a multitude of aromatic bouquets. Rising with alarm from her couch, Ashera searched the room for an exit but found none.

She turned to face a mirror built into the tapestried wall, the apparent source of the strange sounds. This glass cast back not her own reflection, but that of a young gentleman in a stylish cloak and featured hat. "Who are you?" she demanded.

"I am the lord of this castle," the image replied. He explained that his servants had found her unconscious in the forest and brought her hither. He himself had been long absent, but was home now and welcomed her. He said that she might stay as long as she desired.

"I do not desire to stay anywhere where I am a prisoner!" she answered irascibly.

"Nonetheless, you must remain," the young man said, not like a jailor but a petitioner. Then his image faded from the glass. Angered by being abandoned before she had said all that her pent up frustrations of many weeks bade her to say, Ashera grasped a chair and shattered the mirror into a thousand pieces.

Instantly the room changed. The tapestries and furnishing vanished dream when a sleeper awakens, leaving rough, algae?caked stone and a few benches of unfinished wood. The dainty meal upon the silver trays became cuttings of fungus and roots on wooden platters, the flowers were changed to bunches of dead weeds in cracked clay pots. Ashera's gown itself faded away to be replaced by a tattered shroud like a woman would wear into the grave. The fragrance of the atmosphere fled, replaced now by the heavy stench of mildew and universal decay.

Behind the shattered mirror was revealed a lichen-stained corridor. Somehow Ashera managed to descend an outer wall and escape into the forest. For days she fled across wet and cold woods and hills, meeting an occasional woodsman's family or adventurer to whom she told her weird story. But always, upon stopping to rest for more than a day, she would hear her name shouted by a hoarse voice that vaguely resembled that of the man in the mirror.

Then, as Ashera fled along the pathless depths of Shadow Wood, wolves attacked and devoured her. The Black Hand arrived at the site of her death too late to save his beloved, but in grief he placed a dreadful curse on the wolves of Shadow Wood, laying the bane of intelligence upon them. Robbed of their innocence, the wolves henceforth knew good from evil and anguished over evil's continual triumphs. Their fierce pack leaders now understood the logic of gain and fought fierce wars with other packs for material possessions. Worse, the wolves realized they were mortal and the lurking specter of age and death drained their days of peace and beauty. Of the truth of this legend we are able to offer no authority, as the wolves of Shadow Wood do not esteem writing and one must either accept their oral tradition or dismiss it as mythology.

Perhaps the brief and tragic experience of love called the Black Hand back into the world from which Ashera had come, for his behavior changed markedly after the adventurer's death. He enticed an occasional mortal into his domain to act as his liaison with the outside world and before long, most of the kings of Minaria recognized the advantages of maintaining good relations with a necromancer as powerful as the dark lord of Tower.

On irregular occasions, the Black Hand would accept alliance with one or another of the Minarian monarchs and generally served them well with his hosts of zombies, skeletons, and flying familiars, which he could summon in numbers so vast that their wings could block out the sun.

In the last decade of the thirteenth century, the Great Chief Sagaradu Black Hammer led the northern barbarians in a war of conquest against Goblin Land. Minor bands swept the flanks of the Goblin country, entered the Shards of Lor, and approached the Tower, but were routed by the mere appearance of the gigantic Guardian demon whose construction Ashera had witnessed decades before. The Black Hand pressed his advantage, sending his hordes against their encampment. In this grim battle the necromancer tested his newest spell ?- the opening of a portal to the ghost world, allowing the yowling souls of the damned to career through the undisciplined mobs of the North. Black Hammer's panicked warriors fled the mountains and did not trouble the residents of the Shards of Lor again for many years to come.

Shortly afterwards, an ambassador arrived from Goblin Land to beseech the Black Hand's aid. The Goblin people, on the brink of being overwhelmed, had finally ended their intertribal quarrels and elected a single war chief for all Zorn, Ockwig, who called himself the Sirdar. He had sought allies elsewhere first, but his embassies had been rebuffed throughout the Goblin?hating north and Zorn's last hope was to beg succor from the mysterious necromancer.

As the weeks passed and the Goblin ambassadors brought back no good news, Ockwig drew up his last rag-tag army to meet the massed barbarians in Stone Toad Forest. On the eve of the fight he exhorted his troops and led them in the Death Song. It was better, Ockwig believed, to seek proud death against an enemy's spears than to take flight and live in disgraceful exile on the fringes of strangers' lands. As the Goblins were sharpening their blades against their oil stones, a clamor arose behind the barbarian watch-fires. The shouting quickly grew into a wild chorus of terror. From out of the night forest the barbarians came charging, not as determined berserkers, but as fugitives throwing aside their weapons in a blind panic to escape some unknown terror. The Goblins fell upon the fugitives with a vengeance, but a thunderous series of crashes coming their way interrupted their executions.

There loomed in the starlit sky the rude outlines of a giant towering above the trees. Its flared nose was like a hill planted in the center of a broad field, while its boulder-sized eyes were overhung by lids the size of curtains. Its flesh was as blue as a long?dead cadaver and the stench of the abomination sickened the astonished onlookers. The Goblins broke and fled alongside the barbarians, but the monster paid them no heed and withdrew. Afterwards, the Goblins deemed the woods where the Colossus first made its appearance bad luck, forever after called the Cursed Forest.

Since the Great Barbarian War the Black Hand has intermittently interrupted his experiments with periods of military activity, either in his own cause or, ostensibly, in another's. Cynics say that the necromancer is less interested in the goings?on of Minarian politics than in the opportunity to practice his death magic upon thousands of fresh corpses without too much offending his mundane neighbors.

Today we know little more about the Black Hand than did the Dwarves when they first saw him, more than two centuries ago. By his silence he declares that he has nothing to teach the mundane world, and by his actions he demonstrates that he is interested in no living thing of it.


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