First Pass.
Maleck Torment
Maleck Torment is a tormented individual. He is a Tiefling, pushed aside because of his race and looks and beliefs, he is alone in a crowd of people. His solace and purpose in life, is to unravel the mysteries and energies between life and death.
Maleck grew up in a small family on the out skirts of Baldur’s Gate. The slums were a horrid and dirty place full of disease, illness, and injury. So close to the healers of the city, but separated by walls, guards, and social classes. Still, Maleck’s family was a loving one.
Being a bit of an outcast among outcasts Maleck turned to his studies. He found a fascination with the powers that support life, those that can create life, and those that can take it away. He would often visit the deathly ill and sit with them until they passed. He made meticulous notes and observations. He wanted to know what happened, how, and why.
As he grew older, Maleck began to dabble in magic seeing it as one of the energies involved in the cycle of life. He traveled around Faerun looking for answers. What he found was the science and study of Necromancy; a magic art as outcast as he was growing up, yet with an almost scientific base. This wasn’t the holy power of a cleric saving one’s soul, this was feeding energy into or out of a body to give or take life.
As Maleck power and understanding have grown, so has the distrust of those around him. He is shunned at inns on the road, chased out of towns, and generally looked at worse than common criminals. Still he has begun to master the techniques of truly empowering a corpse to move again, to answer commands, and to serve. He views them like machines, devoid of a soul and a simple husk of what they were at one time.
Recently, Maleck returned to Baldur’s Gate to find that his parents had died while he was traveling. They were not murdered, or hung. They died in their sleep of a common illness. Maleck grieves that he was not there to help them, or at the least to absorb the last of their life’s energy to make their passing quick and painless.
The Necromancer left Baldur’s Gate and headed north. Deep in the northern mountains, covered in snow and ice he has stumbled across a most intriguing thing; a construct that seems to have lost his life’s energy. A giant, rusty great sword points forward while the construct’s other hand clutches an empty memory.
Maleck reaches out and pours some of his own life energy into the construct thinking the thing no different from the walking dead he has been able to create recently. As a semblance of life returns to the construct Maleck realizes his mistake. This construct, this warrior machine, has awareness and a sentience.
“What is your name, construct?” The wizard asks. The creature turns his head and looks at the Tiefling.
“I no longer have a name.” He waits a few seconds. “I am no longer who I was before.”