Miragul

A boy who knew

He was arrogant from the start. Miragul’s Earliest Journal, headed “My Thoughts By Miragul (Keep Out),” records that when he left home his mother wept, but he felt only joy: he had known since childhood that he would “rank among the most powerful beings on Norrath.” Studying one school of magic would be “nothing but wasted time,” he wrote; he would master sorcery and enchantment as well, and then perhaps “the whispered fourth art, the dark art: necromancy.” When a master made him blast practice dummies with a spell he already knew, he fumed: “I won’t take such a slight again.”

Four faces

He grew into one of the most adept mages in Erudin, and he despised both the humans of the mainland and his fellow Erudites, whose three schools of wizard, sorcerer and enchanter he found narrow. He fell in with outcasts who studied forbidden texts, among them that fourth art, necromancy, smuggled back by spies from Neriak. Intrigued, he used magic to create four separate identities and secretly joined all four schools.

Flight

When the council discovered the necromancers, Erudin went to war with itself. Miragul abandoned his fourth identity, pretended to side with the council, stole every tome and artifact he could, and fled to Qeynos. Afraid of Erudite spies, he fled again, north past Halas to the lake called Winter’s Deep, and later farther still, away from the thieving halflings of Rivervale, to a nameless tundra later called the Frigid Plains.

There, using only magic, he carved tunnels and rooms beneath the ice for his collection, spending one score of years out in the world collecting and the next experimenting in his laboratories.

The northmen’s shame

The barbarians remember him with sorrow. Miragul walked through Halas nine times, silent and watching, and no warrior or shaman ever confronted him, a cowardice the northmen still remember with sadness.

Marrow and the menagerie

Pages of his journal trace what he did beneath the ice. His first golems of pure ice and magic were “unwieldy, impractical, and difficult to control.” Ancient research from Odus then suggested a servant could be built from the body parts of the fallen, and the result, which he named “Marrow,” was sturdier than a skeleton and would last for centuries if kept frozen: “the first of many.” He shaped ice shards that howled in the wind to lure wild animals into his menagerie.

Paineel

Centuries passed, and age terrified him, because death would end his learning. He discovered the Planes of Power and Discord and the making of portals. He went back to Odus to find the necromancers, now living in Paineel, built in the chasm left by the war he had fled. They taught him to raise the dead, and he helped them build an undead army to attack Erudin, all the while pursuing his own goal: a way to turn a living being undead. His last pages admit that death was close at last, and that students in Paineel had sold him the missing pieces of the ritual “for nearly nothing.”

The lich without a soul

Nearly dead, he opened a portal back to his cache and cast his final spell, hiding his fragile life inside a phylactery stolen from the necromancers. What rose was a lich with all his mystical power. But in his haste he had made a mistake. The lich had no spirit. All his ambition and hunger for knowledge stayed locked in the phylactery, and his soul screamed in silence while the empty undead thing wandered aimlessly among his treasures.

Generations later, fishermen on the Iceflow found rotting fish, and a plague spread from a slowly growing “dark hole” of black energy. A dozen northmen and a dozen spirit guardians went into it and were torn apart. People fled the Frigid Plains, and the dead rose as the skeletons that still roam Everfrost.

Inside the phylactery

Two later stories go into the phylactery itself. In the EverQuest II book On the Origins of the Phylactery, Miragul says he searched the aether for months and was drawn into the Eternal Prism, an artifact worshipped by the barbarians of Halas, which he then filled with his memories. And in House of Thule in 2010, Miragul’s Nightmare is the dreaming mind of a lich locked in his phylactery, where “the dream keeps the waking horror at bay.”