Backstory

Born with a prodigious intellect and an unquenchable thirst for arcane knowledge, Ariel Bannister swiftly rose to become the youngest Head Archmage in the history of the Emberfield Academy of Arcane Arts. Respected for her brilliance yet feared for her interest in forbidden lore, she was the city's undisputed magical authority. When the demonic hordes of the Shadow War poured from Stonewatch Island, threatening to annihilate Emberfield, Ariel proposed a radical, dangerous solution. Wielding the dreaded Book of Vile Darkness, she led nine of her most trusted mages to the island to perform a grand ritual of containment. At the heart of the maelstrom, she revealed the final, terrible price: the ritual required not only the lives of her followers but her own soul, which she trapped within a flawless red crystal to act as an eternal anchor for the seal.

For three centuries, she was celebrated as Emberfield's greatest hero, a martyr who had made the ultimate sacrifice. But on the island, her reality was torment. The trapped demons endlessly assaulted her spirit, their whispers twisting her love for Emberfield into a venomous hatred for a city she believed had abandoned and forgotten her. When a band of unwitting adventurers (The Dragonbone Vanguard) shattered the seal in their battle with the demon lord Orcus, they inadvertently unleashed the lich Ariel had become. Corrupted, insane, and wielding unimaginable necromantic power, she has returned not as a savior, but as a conqueror. She now lurks in the catacombs beneath her former Academy, using her red soul crystal to raise an undead army, intent on transforming her beloved, treacherous Emberfield into the capital of a new kingdom of eternal darkness.