The Beginning

The ground was cool against my cheek as a I slowly started to come awake. I had been someone of worth to the world. It had taken years of hard work to build my fortune and with my fortune, I had started businesses that began to clean up the waters around the planet and develop new renewable technologies to provide clean and renewable energy. It was at a gala for the mayor of the city after he won his reelection when everything changed.

I had been working the crowds, moving from person to person and pressing the flesh when someone had approached me from the left, offering me a drink. I took the drink and raised in it in a sort of salute before taking a long drink from the glass. After that, the events of the evening began to blur. Within two hours, I wasn’t feeling right. Everything was spinning and I felt like I would vomit at any minute.

I looked over at my friend and told him I was going to find the bathroom. He nodded and asked if I needed any help. He thought that I was looking pale. I shook my head that I would be fine, walking with a little bit of a stumbling gait. It took me several minutes before I fell in a hallway, landing on a rough threadbare carpet. I closed my eyes, hoping that if I rested my eyes for a few moments, the nausea would pass.

Slowly, I started to come back to my senses, I felt myself moving down a hallway. I was slowly thinking that someone was trying to take me to a bed or something to lay down. Soon I was dropped on cold stone, facedown. It was roughhewn rock with small pools of moisture collecting across the ground. I tried sitting up but found that my limbs refused to cooperate. I felt a weight shift beside me as I turned my head, seeing another body on the ground beside me.

It wasn’t long before I realized, I wasn’t on the floor, but on a crude stone altar. I wasn’t restrained but with my body unable to move, what was the need for restraints. A group of people were arranged around me and the other body on the alter. They were chanting in some language that I couldn’t understand, and runes painted in black paint were starting to glow beneath me.

Suddenly, an intense rush of euphoria and overwhelming sense of finality began to flood through my body. I don’t remember if I screamed or not. It began to feel like needles of ice were being driven into my very pores. Suddenly, there was a crescendo of chanting and screaming. I felt something warm trickle from my ears before slipping into what I thought was the embrace of death. My thoughts became disjointed and fragmented as I felt ripping and tearing beneath my fingers, the warm spray of blood as I raged and screamed. When I woke, I was sitting against the wall of a stone passageway just outside of the altar chamber. Inside the chamber, bodies were strewn around the room with blood dripping everywhere.

The gore would normally be something that would cause me to become extremely sick but now, nothing bothered me. I felt strong, I felt ancient and new all within the same moment. Energy rippled through my veins, and I felt as though I could take control of the world now. A shadow rippled through my consciousness, revealing ancient memories of an entity that was older than time. I knew what had happened. Some cultists had thought by sacrificing me and another, our souls would be given to the demonic entity they had worshipped.

They had been wrong. All they had achieved was creating a monster. I was empowered by another soul and could call upon the cold strength of the shadows to consume the soul essence of those around me. I didn’t need sleep anymore, and regular food held no interest. I hadn’t been turned into a vampire or werewolf; I was something more. Beside the altar lay a broken piece of a mirror. When I peered into it, I saw my glowing grey eyes and my hair, now streaked with grey.

I summoned shadows to my form and draped my frame in fabric woven from that shadow. What I was, was a shadow forged. I was possessed of demonic shadows and the cold finality of the underworld. I was peerless, walking alone now in the mortal world. This was my plane of life now, sitting on the material plane with the powers of death and world of shadows. No longer would anyone stand before me. I was complete, born as to what I was always truly meant to be. I have become Shrade Baden, the Dark Oath of the Infernal Tundra.