A robed underling escorted a half dozen shackled prisoners through the passageways and corridors of the dark lord's fortress, each one accompanied by a man-at-arms. Under the careful eye of the guards, the prisoners had done little in the way of resisting. It seemed that they had dejectedly accepted what they presumed to be their fate: torment and death. These prisoners didn't know the half of it. If they had any idea what awaited them in the Court of the Dead, the bald-shaven minion of the dark lord was certain that each of them would be fighting against their captors with every ounce of strength left in them. They would wail and gnaw at their shackles if they had the faintest idea what the dark lord meant to do with them, for the victims of Lord Octa faced a fate worse than death.

The underling was thankful for the obliviousness of his thralls as it made the task of escorting them through the fortress much easier. This was as the dark lord intended. Lord Octa took care to ensure that no knowledge of his true nature made it beyond the fortress' ramparts to the ears of the populace. The dark lord's agents within the realm and abroad cultivated the rumor that Lord Octa was a dashing prince whose charisma and effective application of brute force had allowed him to conquer the realm and several neighboring principalities. Foreign informants and agents of the Revolt - the underling was sure there was at least one or two spies who dared operate within the very nexus of the dark lord's power - gave slightly-more accurate reports to the outside world as to who, or [i]what[/i], Lord Octa actually was. A demigod, perhaps? A demon?

The bald-headed minion was a learned man, and by his reckoning Lord Octa was best described as an aspiring lich. When the underling was a boy, Lord Octa served the king of the realm as a court warlock. But at some point, Lord Octa gained both the power and initiative to overthrow the king and claim the realm as his own. The underling remembered the years of the Usurping, back when he was still Agael and not just a nameless minion. Naive barons who believed to be fighting for increased autonomy allied themselves with the rising Lord Octa against the Crown Prince and his loyal armies. By the time the dark lord's true intentions were clear to the upstart barons, Lord Octa's magic was too powerful to resist. Few people survived from the tumultuous years of the Usurping, and the peasant rabble outside the fortress' walls knew next to nothing about how their dark lord came to be. The bald-headed minion who had once been Agael was one of rather few men alive who knew the truth behind Lord Octa, and or that alone the dark lord could add another withered corpse to the Court of the Dead.

As he recounted the Usurping and the rise of Lord Octa to himself, the bald-headed minion had reached the gates of the the dark lord's throne room. They were great, heavy double doors of burnished iron, flanked on either side by a pair of the dark lord's imposing dread knights. Despite being called knights, the underling recognized that it was quite probable that these redoubtable guardians could very well be nothing more than suits of armor enchanted by the dark lord to serve as ever-vigilant sentries. Once at the doors to Lord Octa's chambers, the men-at-arms knew to leave the prisoners for the underling and the dread knights to handle; the only ones who were permitted to lay eyes on the dark lord were his robed lackeys and those unfortunate souls who would never live to recount the tale.

With the guards out of sight, the enchanted armor suits clasped the door handles in their mail-clad fists before opening the doors and ushering the prisoners into the Court of the Dead.