With the knowledge of the Gaping Maw in hand, I returned to the mainland and with the funds I still carried from my days as a doctor, I was able to find mariner foolish enough to loan me a vessel and a crew. I had steered them towards open waters, far beyond the reaches of any landmass within sight and well beyond that of the Ivory Tower. It was only when I knew that we were hopelessly lost that we reached our destination. I once more consulted the tome that spoke of the Gaping Maw and its pages therein said a sacrifice was needed in order to gain knowledge of the beyond. In the dead of night, I ripped one of the crew members from his bed, hung his body over the side of the ship and slit his throat over the open water just before dumping the body overboard and waited from there.
For a few unremarkable moments, there was a calmness to the air around the ship just till a mass of tendrils had raised from the water and wrapped themselves around the bow of the ship and began to squeeze. The crew roused from their sleep and manned their stations, attempting to fight off this beast of the deep, but to no avail. The tendrils had already locked themselves around the vessel's hull and began to drag it into the frothing ocean. I stood there on the deck of the ship, watching these men pray to their gods, cry out in horror and eventually, accept their fate. When the water finally consumed the vessel and myself with it, darkness quickly took hold. What happened after is all a blur. To this day I can only remember rambling gibberish and the horrified screams of the crew just before waking on an unknown shore with a sense of, knowing. From that day forward, I knew that death had not been the end of a life, that by the will of magic, I could bring the dead back from the howling void. By the gods, I had.
After I returned to my home of Phillia and reassumed my work as a doctor, corpses were easy to come by. I had started simple with the freshest, youngest bodies I could find in the morgue and I managed to breath a sense of life into them. Progress was slow however, in the beginning, the most I could accomplish was just creating little more than a marionette made of flesh and bone with no mind or agency of its own. Further experiments with the recently deceased yielded better results, if it was only moments after their death, I could restore some semblance of their mind back to them but not to the same degree it had been before. They had still been missing something and I would not be satisfied till I was able to resurrect them to their entirety.
I eventually came to call this practice Necromancy, taking the old word for dead and magic and combining the two into one word. Though it was taught to me by another, I still considered myself the godfather of this art of the dead. In my youth I thought it selfish of me to keep this to myself and thus wrote down every bit of information about it. Eventually securing these findings by sending them off to the Ivory Tower to remain in the care of Chislon, the mage who greeted me at the tower years earlier. I only hope those tomes are locked away some place deep enough that the light of day is a concept foreign to it.
It would not be long till I found another issue with this practice. A connection must always be maintained with the body if I wished to keep it alive and thus made it difficult to bring more than a single person back from the dead at a single time. I wish I would have just left it alone from there, decided these arts were fruitless and stupid, but no, my ambition and grief overshadowed my better judgment and I would pay for it sooner than I thought. It was not long before the hospital found out about these experiments and promptly dismissed me without so much as a question asked. The records of my experiments and my involvement in the hospital were destroyed right before me and it was as if I had never worked there a day in my life. This choice would be for the best.
Still, I had a small fortune to spend at my disposal and my young mind would not be dissuaded. It took the entirety of my fortune to pull it off, but after bribing the right people and placing certain knives in certain hands, I was able to obtain a territory inside the human colonies of Stronge. I was pronounced the Lord of Hindertome within the year and quickly got to work with luxury the title afforded me. As the lord of this territory, so long as I paid my dues to the ruling parties, I could do as I pleased, when and where I pleased. I continued my experiments into this art I had since called Necromancy and I was able to make further progress and breakthroughs via the help of a town full of people and their deceased with no ethics board to make me see reason.
The bodies of the resurrected functioned on their own well enough regardless of damage. Many of them could have been reduced down to skeletons and I could have still raised them from the dead. But the more intact they had been, the easier the spell had become. From there, it was not hard to start repairing bodies with various organs and parts from the many deceased I found myself with. I created a horrible jigsaw of a being, but it could move on its own with little power from myself and in some cases, had even had the ability to speak however limited its speech had been. Just as I reached this milestone, I had run out of corpses to experiment with. The only ones left had been that of the grave yard, those rotten and fetid things were well beyond my skills now and the citizens of my city had started to become restless at the rumors that persisted about me. At the time, when the inevitable war came knocking, I counted it as a blessing.