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"I gave him immortality. He gave me an army. Neither of us asked what it would cost the world after we were done with it."
A 15th-level swordsman who became the first thing his own kind had ever seen.
Golaric Noxar was an early adventuring companion of William Silverrose, back when Silverrose still answered to just plain Whilly. But during his cursed era, the "Raven" years, he became more and more paranoid, and he decided he needed a protector who could match what he was becoming, who could guard him effectively, and whom he could control. He offered Golaric immortality. Using ancient, powerful magic, Silverrose turned his old friend into an unstoppable creature, the world's very first vampire, a being with no precedent, no lineage, and no idea yet what he'd become. History remembers him simply as "The First."
Golaric raised a vampire army from nothing and used it to guard him. Raven had created a very impressive black marbled tower in the middle of the Takli Malan Desert. He served in that role for decades. Then one day, Raven just disappeared. Years went by, and Golaric faithfully guarded the tower, abandoned and alone.
When he finally realized he was free of the bonds to Raven, he ventured out into the world, he and his undead army. Eventually he became tired of them, releasing them as well, an entire coven of vampires just released into the world.
Golaric became lonely still. Not wanting a group of thralls, he wanted a companion. Decades later, having come to fully understand his own abilities and powers, he met her: a woman he found to be the most beautiful creature he'd ever seen in his nearly hundred years of unlife. He courted her, got her to fall in love with him, and then turned her. Today she rules Vathia styled as its Empress, her true nature hidden from her own court.
A few hundred years later, Golaric and his wife were living in Vathia, and the state was being used as an ancient dragon's hunting grounds. Coincidentally, this was the same dragon Raven had subjugated many decades before. Now free of his influence, it was one of the most powerful dragons to have ever lived, and it was using Golaric's home as a hunting ground. So he decided to turn it as well. It was a test of his powers to the extreme, and it worked, mostly. But what Golaric didn't understand at the time was that this creature was too willful, too powerful to become a thrall to him. Instead it became an undead nightmare to the lands. It was sealed underneath the Ice Shelf for, hopefully, eternity.
Bloodthirst cursed him, and at times it would get the better of him. That is when Monitor stepped in. Golaric is now imprisoned in a temple of Iüdex built specifically to hold him, sealed beneath the Ice Shelf along a subterranean river of lava. But having two confined, powerful undead creatures thirsting for blood has cursed the Ice Shelf itself. Ever expanding, inches at a time, the Ice Shelf will eventually cover the entire continent, maybe even the world.