The Skull of Katam

Katam was a sorcerer of terrible learning in the deep antiquity of the world, and when death took his body it did not take his cunning. What remains is the Skull of Katam, a yellowed relic in which the dead mage's malignant intellect yet festers, whispering the secrets of necromancy to any who will bend an ear to its dry, endless murmuring.

The Vampire Counts and the mortal necromancers who serve them covet the skull above almost any grimoire, for a written spell is fixed and finite while Katam's counsel is living, adapting, and old beyond reckoning. A necromancer who carries the skull finds his raisings stronger and his death-magic surer, as the ancient sorcerer feeds him workings lost to every other lineage of the black art.

Yet Katam does not counsel out of friendship. Every secret he grants is a thread woven into a design centuries in the making, and the necromancers who lean too long upon his whispering find their own ambitions quietly bent toward ends they cannot name. More than one bearer has been discovered dead at his workbench, the skull grinning up from the wreckage of a ritual that served no living master: only the patient, deathless will of the sorcerer who refuses to be silent.