Since the fateful day the great Archaon had been run through, his blood spilled upon the cold and rotten earth beyond the monolithic Umbara, it remained silent. The corruption within him spread across the land with his death at the epicenter. Umbara was a slaughterhouse. The dead piled upon every floor of every level inside the wretched darkness. Blood curdled and splattered across dark stone. The level of death and corruption was unmatched in those halls. It had no warning. No notice. It had come, and it had gone. Archaon, however, was nowhere to be found.
He had died that day.. the Battle at Umbara. That much was sure. Where did his corpse go? Some knew of the tremendous power that lay dormant in the staff he so treasures and carries with him at all times. Some say he could never truly die. One thing was certain, and that is that his body had disappeared from the slaughter. Did Archaon rise from the dead as he was known to do? Did someone steal his body? Perhaps someone even destroyed him once and for all. No one truly knows, except for one.
Umbara was perhaps cleansed of that day by now. It had been months since. There had been no sightings. No uneasy presence. Wraith and Spectre, his two strong mephos, had not been seen in as many days. His own castle even lay unkempt. Vines and rotted leaves floating freely about the courtyard. His precious beasts fending for themselves within the castle, tearing at the stores for sustenance. Not even his personal catacombs were safe. Bones and foetid meat littered the stairwell.
As the silent days and weeks pass, a solitary figure begins to roam within the world. Gaunt, cloaked in blackness that even pure midnight sky would be envious of. This figure roamed the world on horseback.. or what seemed to be horseback. It was ghostly in its appearance. No noises, no neighs or whinnies. Not even the sound of any armor clanging together upon the rider as this mysterious figure waded effortlessly through the forest as if no trees existed, before fading away into the nothingness within the forest.
There was no true purpose for this figure's presence that could be discerned. It had come. Like a stealthy apparition, it would appear from the forest, only to disappear as suddenly and quietly as it had appeared to those whom caught a glimpse of the rider. Was it scouting? Was it perhaps stalking, or was it seeking? It made no movements outside of appearance and disapperence, and any attempts of locating this specter had come up with nothing. No hoofprints, no footprints, nothing. Strange sightings of this mysterious wraith on supposed horseback also point it towards Umbara's location, scouring the land where the dark lord had died before disappearing like the wind towards the wooded land and out of sight.
Perhaps no one will know of this apparition's purpose, whether it will prove good.. or prove ill.