The Black Star and the Anti-pope
Two of the various pieces of the Beyond that ended in the Material Plane don’t seem to fit the current understanding of reality. The Black Star had no counterparts in the cosmology before the Collapse, nor did it seems to follow nature and magic laws. The information about these phenomenons is scarce, as it has a terrifying guardian keeping out the curious.
The Black Star is the source of the power of Libeyner I, the Anti-Pope: a potent undead spellcaster (a lich) that rules Bashert, a city on an island of the river Tsop. All the inhabitants of the Bashert are living dead: zombies, skeletons, ghouls, revenants, vampires… And all of them share the will of the Anti-pope in a cultish fervor that resembles a hive mind (or, probably, the other way around).
The few undead prisoners that have enough intellect to be interrogated told that Libeyner wants to unburden the people of the world from the weight of life itself and welcome them in the Bliss, the supposed ecstasy of the un-living. These zealots see themselves as part of a church: their murders are “conversions”, their raids are “missionary efforts”; the marching hordes are “crusades”. They call this cult “the Shadow Gospel”: life burns like a merciless sun, the Black Star is the tree that casts the gentle shade where everyone can find relief.
The Shadow Gospel is a twisted version of the Angelist religion and its focus on unity and communal efforts. Not only: the Shadow Gospel also mimics the titles, hierarchy, and imagery of the angelists, up to use the same symbol, the seven-point star, but turned black.
In the north of the Angelic Unison, there’s a cycle of war, or better said crusades and anti-crusades, in which the undead start claiming more and more territory until they are pushed back in their city by the celestial army. During the centuries, many Popes tried to siege Beshart and raze it to the ground but it proved impossible. Undead don’t need food or rest, they are fearless and ruthless in “converting” soldiers (as to say killing them). Lastly, the more you go close to the star-like cathedral at the center of the city, the more you feel drained of every energy and thought, eventually turning into one of the citizens of that dreadful place.
The few scouts that observed the inside of the city and came back all tell that the cathedral host the Black Star, but why it’s called that and what it actually is no one knows. The main activity of the undead inhabitants is to wander the city in long and winding processions that will pass through the cathedral of the Black Star. Some “citizens” paint icons of supposed saints or decorate with frescos the stops of some future procession. These works of art are usually ugly and patchy, nothing more than the scrawls of the mindless body; others are masterful but obscene and unsettling in style and subject. The Beshertian art is not as hunting as the songs: during the procession, choirs of corpses mumble droning hymns without meaning that can be heard many leagues away.
Beshert is not in ruin. The city became the home of Libeyner in the III century, almost 700 years ago, and most of the buildings have that ancient style. But the Anti-pope did not idle and commanded his devote subjects to construct church after church and hollow out the buildings to make them temple to the Black Gospel.
The Anti-pope is not doing everything by himself: he has his Vampire Cardinals, highly intelligent undead that apparently control the population. They are also the generals of the horde and the chiefs of field missions. The cardinals have a mind and a personality, but this individuality is just a facade: their will is completely subjugated by the Anti-pope. They are unwavering devout: capture one of them “alive” is very difficult as they will seek “death” rather than imprisonment (they think they will become part of the Gospel if their body is destroyed). If interrogated, the Vampire will try to evangelize, praising the Libeyner and describing the Bliss of the un-life. Only the most powerful masters of mind magic were able to extort some information from the Cardinals.
It is believed (but proofs are few) that some Vampires have infiltrated Angelic cities to spread the Shadow Gospel. What is sure is that there are books that praise the wisdom of Anti-pope and depict the Bliss of unlife as the most desirable of states. In these books, is depicted a blasphemous cosmology where the world is the after-life: living is hell, and becoming undead is to enter paradise. Some people, clearly driven by desperation, have been seduced by the promises of these books and joined Beshert willingly.
At the moment, in the late X century, the Anti-pope is making moves after decades of slumber. He exploited the war between the Anglic Unison and the Holy Infernal Empire to take some land and started to fortify. “Missionary raids” have begun again, but rarely, not to cause too much concern. The Celestial Clergy at the moment is too busy dealing with internal power struggles to care about some isolated incidents caused, and Libeyner doesn’t want to change their mind.
While the central authorities are understating the threat, the local bishops are recruiting, arming the border for an imminent conflict. Many adventures come there to get the lucrative work of scouts, tasked to do incursion in the Anti-papal territories and gather intel. Not all these mercenary scouts do their work for the good of the country, many just seek riches, in the form of information to sell to necromancers.
How the Black Star work and how it can create and sustain this population is an enigma. Put it crudely, the current conception is that the undead are bodies with a spell in place of the soul (for the ghosts it’s more or less the reverse). Every spell needs life force to be cast and kept active, and the spells that animate the dead are not an exception.
A zombie created by a necromancer is sustained in part by the energy infused by its creator, in part from feeding (living flesh for example), and in small part from just the “background” life energies that are entangled in the mana field when something alive is present.
“Wild undead”, people brought to unlife by environmental conditions, show the same pattern. If a person dies in a place rich in “negative elements” (like salt, void, dust, or ash) it can come back as an undead: the soul will leave a mana imprint in the element (as they absorb energies) and that mana afterglow can remain entangled in the weave of the body. Wild Undead, laking the energy of a caster, are either lethargic or ravaged by hunger.
The animated corpses of Beshert are different: they are active even if they do not feed and they don’t seem consumed by hunger. The source of energy must be the Black Star but that energy is some paradoxical “negative energy”. How can something that should just soak and absorb energy also emit it? Wizards everywhere are ready to cover you in gold for the answer.
