The Plot of Adivion Adrissant and the Whispering Way
Possible apocrypha, unconfirmed events, and outright lies follow.
From the time of his birth to his departure from public life, Adivion Adrissant wanted for nothing. Born in the former Ustalavic capital city of Ardis, the young nobleman dwelled in the lap of luxury, his family being well-regarded members of the local aristocracy with holdings throughout Ardeal county. An only child, both his wealthy parents and an army of servants attended to the youth with slavish attention and absolute devotion. His tutors were the finest in Ustalav, his playmates all came from noble stock, his playthings valued a small fortune, had Adivion been heir to the royal throne he could not have been dotted on more.
While in most youths such attentions would likely have spoiled the child into a life of idleness and debauchery, Adivion ever proved the exception. While never anything but a charming, gracious child, the boy ever proved more interested in the growth of plants, the migration of fowl, and the habits of insects than the gifts of his family or the attention of his peers. Such antisocial behavior concerned his parents, but they were able to dismiss each other’s worry with reassurances of their son’s obviously burgeoning intelligence and gifting him ever more extravagant presents.
By the time Adivion began attending the prestigious Quartrefaux Academy he had matured into an intelligent, well cultured, and handsome young gentleman, though withdrawn and dispassionate. In his varied studies he mastered every subject with a bored ease, finding nothing that inspired or challenged him. To him, academia proved nothing more than rote trivia, romance a foolish distraction, and religion the height of nonsense. By age 20, Adivion had weighed all that the world had presented of value, and found it wanting. Bored with Ustalav, he traveled for several years, expending a small fortune in the pursuit of anything meaningful—including research into the arcane arts—yet by age 26 returned to his family’s holdings in disappointment.
An utterly passionless genius, Adivion grew rightfully arrogant and ever more withdrawn, immersing himself in the nihilistic poetry of Krait, Perry, and Vhaags. From such grew an interest in death and an idealistic morbidity that such might be the only adventure life makes worth having. His fancies turning ever more morose, Adivion spent seasons investigating death, séances, theories of necromancy, obituaries, and the histories of fallen empires. A particular favorite of his soon became accounts of the rise, fall, resurrection, and conquest of the Whispering Tyrant. In Ustalav’s one-time undead ruler Adivion began to imagine a kindred soul, a genius burdened by the weight of a worthless world, one whose supreme intellect and ambition allowed him to defy even death in the pursuit of reshaping Golarion into an existence worth experiencing.
Adivion’s research into the Whispering Tyrant’s deeds and histories consumed the majority of his family’s wealth, the excesses of which he had never had much use for. Records of the lich’s rule, histories of the ages in which he was active, and relics related to the villain came to fill Adivion’s apartments, possessing his entire life. It was only by the scholar’s astute reasoning and eidetic memory that he eventually made an astonishing discovery. With his access to the imposing libraries of the Quartrefaux Academy, the county’s once royal record halls, and his own collections, Adivion discovered that the Whispering Tyrant, while alive, had sired at least one child, and through the years, his bloodline had survived. Even more remarkably, the thin but ever-descending roots of the archmage’s family ancestry reached all the way to modern Ustalav. In fact, the living Count Lucinean Galdana was the most noteworthy living inheritor of the Whispering Tyrant’s bloodline.
Shocked and inspired in a way he had never known, Adivion journeyed to the county of Amaans and arranged an audience with the count at his home, Willowmourn. Yet the meeting proved an utter disappointment, with Galdana appearing as nothing more than a lecherous lout to Adivion’s critical eye, an aging fop displaying none of his world-shaping ancestor’s vision or drive. Adivion had desperately desired some connection to the source of his morbid adulation, but here he found none, the potential for greatness obscured by centuries of forgetfulness and polluted blood. In dejection, Adivion returned to Ardis.
It was on the return trip that the seeds of inspiration—or madness—took root in Adivions mind. Witnessing a rite of metaphorical rebirth outside the Kavapesta Cathedral, he struck upon the idea for a grand experiment. History had already shown that, when exposed to certain ideas, events, settings, and magics, one with the blood Galadana harbored possessed the potential to reshape the world. What then should occur if a modern possessor of that same blood were subjected to the exact same ideas, events, and magics? Would it not follow that the heir would produce the same result as the ancestor? What if he himself could recreate the Whispering Tyrant, and in so doing gaze into the mind of a force that rivaled even the gods. With such a dark muse—one indebted to him for its very existence—could he not emulate that same path to world-shaping might?
Adivion had already dismissed the idea of embracing the path of mad necromancers by seeking to free the Whispering Tyrant though direct means—as went the accounts of many a storied failure. But if liberation was not an option, what of such a theoretical recreation? Could it be done? The knowledge he possessed; he was already perhaps the single most eminent scholar on the Whispering Tyrant’s past life, and though arcane modification could recreate such information into another’s memories with ease. The blood too he had identified and by manipulations could doubtlessly obtain. Even the location could be of aid, the nearby tower of Gallowspire, the Tyrant’s very prison, might be employed to impart a measure—if not the whole—of the archmage’s spirit into a selfsame host. But what of the singular most defining trait? That defiant mystery coveted by mages both insane and ambitious. What of lichdom?
In the next several years Adivion launched fully into his experiment, courting contacts within the nefarious cult known as the Whispering Way, a society of the death obsessed surely willing to share his goal and easily turned to his objectives. At the same time, he delved into the blasphemous secrets of lichdom, taking the unheard of and difficult path of researching not his own individual path to undeath, but another’s. After years of investigation, his delving, both scholarly and arcane, bore strange fruit: whispers from beyond death, a verse spoken from the spaces between death and the afterworld. This glimpse into what would reshape a man into a state unbound by mortality, the formula to an undying apotheosis, the ultimate proof of control over the world, Adivion dubbed the Carrion Crown.
With this knowledge, objectives gleaned through an age of research, and grim allies to mete it out, Adivion Adrissant set his plan in motion, a plot to transform one of the lords of Ustalav, an heir to a profane legacy, into a resurrection of the Whispering Tyrant himself. And through the archlich reborn, recreate a world worth having a place in.
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