#his sister alisabet altenwald

[crtalley]

necromancy in tgoed talk ahead →

First: the only known successful necromancy in the TGOEDverse was by one Alisabet Altenwald, AKA Lady Lise of Clarin, daughter of Princess Margot and twin of Matthias. When she was younger she succeeded in bringing small animals back to life with what she calls “a touch of flame” – Altenwalds have fire-coded magic, so it makes sense that she associates her life-giving ability with fire itself. Generally this stopped at creatures like mice and squirrels. She showed her brother her accomplishments, and when he was curious about how she attained them without proper study, she started drawing out ritual circles and following some of the loose rules of the strictors. When she showed her mother, Princess Margot flipped the fuck out and told her to never do such a thing again; ashamed, Lise suppressed most of her own magical ability, using only what was necessary in a ceremonial context as the heir to the throne of Clarin.

Unknown to Clarin and the empire at large, when she was a young adult and was groomed to take over the lordship of Loënztorn, she returned to her passion – as a game hunter, no one questioned her taking up taxidermy as a hobby, and certainly no one would even think to associate that taxidermy with highly irregular, highly illegal necromancy. Lise studied the musculoskeletal structure of countless creatures in the dead of night, from the smallest of birds outside her window to the boars brought down on her hunts to the stablehand who died in her service, a stranger's bones burned in his place. A touch of flame brought breath into his chest – but no life in his eyes.

By the time she turned 25, she knew the body inside and out. She knew she could reanimate small animals, and they would scurry about and live as they had before; she knew she could keep them alive so long as they were close to her, but if they were too far for too long, the magic would degrade. Many of the cats in the granaries at Loënztornhold were much older, then, than they should have been.

When she was 30, her brother died.

It was a tragic accident in the letter that Claremontine wrote to Princess Margot. There had been a fire at the opera house in Grisencourt. Matthias was caught in it. Claremontine's daughter, no more than nine years old, was with him. It was devastating.

That girl knew nothing of devastation.

Lise wrote back, requesting the return of her brother's bones to Clarin.

The response was the same, that time and the next dozen times she made her request. She went through channels formal and informal, brought it up at every fashionable event that brought her to Grisencourt, ached – always ached – at how many hundreds of miles her brother was from home.

Always wondered. Could she? It hadn't worked with the stablehand, but the stablehand was not made of magic. Not like an Altenwald was. A touch of flame would rekindle the fire that was supposed to burn in Matthias's chest. It would bring him back, she was sure – she was so painfully certain – that she tested it a dozen more times to increasingly crushing results. There was life in the bodies she resurrected, but there was no life.

Finally, Lise searched out any information that could help her – that could reassure her that yes, she could have Matthias back; yes, her family could be whole again; yes, she could reclaim him from the southern princess who had killed him – and it had to be murder, because Altenwalds were made of flame. Finally, she crept down to the Lohennen crypt beneath her mother's palace, where the ancient rulers of Clarin had buried their kin before the Altenwalds and their hunts and their pyres. She begged for answers from ancient bones, trying each skull she found in case it held the spirit of some long-gone king or queen. Nothing.

In TGOED, it's been 18 years since Matthias's death – and no one knows about his sister's forays into the forbidden, but Margot can guess, having seen her daughter grow more and more reclusive over the last two decades. And Lise, still missing her brother, defies the empire in turn by keeping the traditions of strictors alive in Clarin long after the court declared their detailed studies of magic unacceptable.

And the cats in the granaries never seem to die.

[crtalley]

every time I create new lore for TGOED I make it that much more painful