Gaspard the Accused

‘Death. My first and greatest curse… the revenge I took… the blessing I seek… desperately. After all the effort taken to bring it upon me, much is now made to deny it me. What did I do? What have I done? Why… me? I am now a pawn… a… puppet. Hung by spectral threads and rusting chains. The end is all I desire.’ Gaspard is nothing more than a puppet, used by a necromancer to kill his enemies on a bloody rise to power. The Undead knight knows what is happening, but is powerless to stop it. Once, Gaspard was the ‘Iron Man’, unbreakable in battle and unyielding in tournaments. His muscles were hard, the walls of his castle in Kaerok were adorned with the majestic antlers of hunted stags, and the <i>Golden Lance</i> – the award for having jousted a hundred times without defeat – hung proudly over his great feast table. Many silently envied Gaspard. His boasts did little to ease their feelings. His liege’s easy tolerance of his open pride only infuriated them more. They moved against him. In the dead of night, his chambers were stormed by armored warriors, and he was taken prisoner – though he knocked several raiders unconscious before that. Within days, accusations of the most depraved acts were laid against him. Gaspard’s lord, a man who had only ever honored him, had him executed by guillotine, his body and head dumped without ceremony. The device’s blade was thrown in with him, deemed ‘cursed’ for having been ‘spoiled by the flesh of such an evil soul’. Gaspard was tormented. Why had this happened? Who was responsible? Furious and confused in equal measure, his body did not rest long. He arose, determined to find answers, with nothing but the guillotine blade and its chain binding his head to his body. Gaspard roamed his old lands, evading Sacred Order hunting parties, listening to travelers from a distance at night. He learned that an old friend, Duke Ranton, now controlled his duchy and claimed his possessions. The man had put Gaspard’s panoply, cloak, and tabard on display for the public to throw rotten fruit at. To Gaspard’s horror, it had been Ranton who had first ‘raised the alarm’ about his ‘deviant activities’. In the dead of night, Gaspard took his armor down and lovingly cleaned it. When finished, he sneaked his way into his old castle after sunset, following secret entrances only he knew of. Ranton was in his old bed chamber, where Gaspard tortured names out of him before hammering his guillotine blade into the man. Gaspard killed everyone Ranton named in similarly brutal fashion. But they were not all the plotters. Heswyth was a servant of Gaspard’s liege, a secret necromancer, and the mastermind behind the Iron Man’s end. He trusted Gaspard would rise Undead and kill the other plotters, leaving a path to power open for him while tying up all other loose ends. After finding Gaspard where his body had been dumped, Heswyth seized control of him with his necromantic powers. The rest is naught but bloodied history.