Cosmic Necromancy: the Cult of Unfission

“The stars are muses to many wizards across the globe, who peer into that high wilderness every night, fantasising about how their astral self may flutter between the constellations. An arcane mind is like a buzzing moth to the void-light of heaven's soaring and gargantuan mysteries, craving the extasy of being zapped by the lightning of the expansive cosmos. It is in fact safe to say that nearly all arcane savants in some way seek after the higher spheres.

However, certain categories of thaumaturges are seemingly exempt from this desire. The necromancers, like the druids, the shamans, and certainly the witches, do not point their eyes towards the sky but rather towards the soil and the earth, their ambition not superseding the limitations of our pitiful planet’s ash and dust. Indeed, it can be said that this is what separates them from the outstanding wizard and reveals them as being part of the less reasonable folk who approach the arcane mystery not with a scholarly interest, but rather with a narrow superstition.”

-Excerpt from Thaumoturgical Aphorisms by ‘Prilaxiom’ U. C. Vallance

Necromancy, over the centuries, has been a guilty pleasure of most wizards at one point or another. After all, there is nothing more enjoyably gaudy than an army of skeletons with horned helmets clacking their jaws as they charge the meat-brain adventurers that are after your jewel-encrusted skull and your staff that shoots flaming snakes. Naturally they prefer not to admit this to one another, instead writing dismissive and pretentious articles in their almanacs and grimoires like Prilaxiom the Unrefuted here. Let it be known, by the way, that when Tuweyn the Brave showed up to steal the enchanted crystal from Prilaxiom’s tower, the first thing he ran into were ghost skeletons. Ghost skeletons that were on fire.

That, in fact, has been the fatal flaw of necromancy among the orthodox wizards. Not the inherent nature of the practice, but the lack of imagination with which it has been wielded. The fact that even the most powerful necromancers could not think themselves out of the Venn diagram of “undead minions” crossing with “summon demon of undeath” and, for the creative ones, “postmodern fleshcraft.”

This has been changed.

Consider the following simple tenet: Necromancy is bringing what is dead, back to life. As happens in every school of thought, once some devout necromancers grew tired of skeletal dragons and flesh golems, they began pondering this axiom for the furthest extents of its meaning. Thus began Second-Age necromancy: soon, powerful conjurers brought long extinct plagues back from the dead, turned chalk back into floods of living micro-organisms, and even resurrected dead jokes back into funny-ness. And they did not stop. The necromantic masters ascended past the atmosphere to smash together entire planets and moons, resurrecting the dead star that had given birth to them. Under the light of these Lich-Stars, the final truth of the necromantic axiom became clear to the necromancers, who at this point had become a force of backwards running time, defying all natural currents.

The Cult of Unfission’s purpose, its desired masterpiece, is the resurrection of the singularity that gave birth to the universe, at the moment of the Big Bang.

Art by Peter Ellenshaw, The Black Hole concept art

To achieve this purpose, the sole tenet of the Cult of Unfission is that two must always become one. Separate entities must always be re-fused into singular ones. This makes the Cult of Unfission an extremely dangerous ideology, as many of its believers will simply fuse themselves with anyone and anything in their vicinity into an ever-growing polymerisation of matter and power. It is unclear what exactly they imagine the singularity-before-the-universe to be like, or whether they attribute divinity to it, but they are all convinced that it is the only perfect thing that can ever possibly exist.

Unfortunately, as this doctrine of necromancy is the product of a thinking exercise turned cosmic disaster, its notable practitioners are almost all highly schooled, if deranged, arcane masters. Small-minded necromancers may easily be swayed with the promise of giving up their miserable lives to become part of a perfect entity. They become blindly fusing entities that suck up everything around them like small black holes. The masters, however, are cunning enough to wait out immediate small steps of fusion, so that they can arrange for greater events to take place.

Art by Jesper Friis

Save for a few purists, the masters tend not to fuse blindly: they will distinctly seek out powerful entities to fuse with, thus making their journey in greater and more controlled leaps than the rabid fusion acolytes under their control. The great founders of this doctrine, who are of such power that they create undead stars, as mentioned before, are cosmic amalgams of stars, gods, archons, planets, and other entities of the heavenly spheres. The Cultists of Unfission on this and likely various other planets commune with them and follow the will of their gargantuan minds, exacting their plans towards the desired perfection.

Perhaps the only positive when dealing with this particularly outlandish and destructive brand of necromancy, is that you can likely count on traditional necromancers to put aside their differences from you for a while and aid you in the fight against the Cult of Unfission. After all, “those new-age brats just don’t appreciate a good skeleton anymore!”

ENCOUNTERS:

• A city-sized black hole is ravaging the landscape, heading for a town. It’s a bunch of Unfission acolytes who came across one another and, instinctively, smashed together into one big fusion monster. A nearby Unfission master appears and offers to move the acolyte-cluster away, but what does it want in return?
• A town is beset by an alien force that controls their minds, forcing them to attempt to fuse together. Could be townsfolk confusedly bumping into each other all the time, could be Junji Ito’s Army of One, depending on how much horror you want at play. The influence stems from a hidden Unfission master nearby.
• Someone is spreading Unfission manuscripts around the city, and the alienated and self-loathing are turning themselves into rabid fusions at the promise of becoming part of perfection. Confront the master that is orchestrating this propaganda campaign.
• For cosmic adventures: A Founder of the Cult of Unfission is approaching the solar system of your home, threatening to rip it and many surrounding planets and matter apart to resurrect the star they were born from. Somehow, it must be stopped.