Knossos is a man who was born to a small village family in the humble farming village of Aktí within the Kingdom of Ordos, a coastal nation with a large eastern coastline and access to the sea since seemingly time immemorial. A kingdom that had little access to the outside by land, save for a pair of crucial northern and western mountain passes respectively dubbed the "Chióni" (Greek for "ice", aka the 'northern pass' out from the nation's northern border) and the "Fiume" (Italian for "river", named such due to the great river flowing alongside the pass down a steep cliff as one passes through it), it had been in the middle of various issues or conflicts over the years as well as notably involved at sea. Yet even with having the sea so accessible, the growing of crops and rearing of livestock was still very much important. Indeed, this would be the task the family of young Knossos had taken up for many generations within the inner land region of the kingdom proper.
At birth Knossos's surname, as was his family's already, continued on in the same old local tradition of one's surname being taken from the work and job they had. A simple enough matter, as it were, for the region and culture in which he lived. Meanwhile, Knossos' first name was actually somewhat abnormal for common folk.
Whilst the first names of children would originate from anything ranging from figures in legend, to places they were born, to those who the family or parents wished to honor in their lives or pay respects to, and so forth, trends in this naming structure trended toward certain lines of things depending on one's place and status of birth. Farmers and Woodcutters and such would usually use more land and terrain-focused names, whilst those such as scholars and magic users might get names based on famous authors or constellations or other phenomena that sounded fancy and sophisticated to use as a name, etc. So in this vein Knossos' own name was something of an oddity, only chosen when a passing magic scholar was hosted by the family on a journey to the north and assisted in his birth when one of the local midwives or the village doctor would not be able to make it in time.
So grateful were Knossos' parents for the help that the traveling magic scholar was given the chance to name him out of respect. No small honor to be sure, no matter one's class! Thus the newborn was named for the constellation locals called 'Knossos', which looked like a king sitting on a throne, named for the great and wise legendary king who once ruled the region in legend. Though the last of said king’s bloodline had long been assimilated by successors who conquered the area later on, forming the “Kingdom of Ordos” itself that still ruled the land even by the time Knossos was born.
With all of this in mind, Knossos still simply seemed poised merely to inherit the family farm and land in life. He had nothing going for him otherwise, and while pushed to learn to till the land and learn how it worked he still seemed to feel a restlessness within him from a young age. Indeed his young mind would wander to things greater than himself and the old stories of kings and legends long gone, and his parents were often sore with him or given myriad headaches simply trying to deal with him at times. In the end they would not need to worry in perhaps the worst of ways, however, as the new ‘village doctor’ assigned to the village by the crown when Knossos was just five would begin to influence the boy in a different direction.
Secretly a member of a cult dedicated to an alien being from a far-flung dimension/plane dubbed "iL'Thris the Deep Lord". Said cult would influence and draw in the young Knossos (among others) until he was ten, after which he in particular had his death faked in the nearby woods before being spirited off to the cult’s epicenter in the now-former capital of the Kingdom of Ordos proper (Cretia). Here the cult prepared him more rigorously for adulthood and joining their higher ranks, until eventually by the age of twenty one Knossos had grown to become somewhat of a rather adept learner. He had learned all the magic of the cult that he could absorb (acquired from iL'Thris), and reached the upper ranks of the cult as its youngest member. As was fitting for one of his new higher-up station within the cult’s ranks, if not unique to it, he would then be infused with part of the very flesh of iL'Thris as other upper-ranks had received as a ‘gift’ as well before him. All likewise seemed to be going according to plan, though, at least until the time when the long-foretold "Day of Summoning" came along.
The ritual kicked off, and disaster came, but a brave band of heroes formed in those days before the ritual (due to being affected by the cult in one way or another) and began to rise up to combat the cult most heartily as soon as things hit the fan. Not seen as a big threat before, these heroes received the blessings of the local gods and gathered resistance forces together under one banner to inspire and act as their spearhead before destroying the cult in a climactic final battle within the ruins of Cretia. Neighbors of the Kingdom of Ordos had even been about to send in reinforcements to take local lands under the justification of containing the threat, though with the passing of the threat it would lead to other issues in the following decades.
In the end, the leading hero of the group of heroes married the kingdom's princess, who was about his age, after having saved her from being trapped in a magic crystal deep within the ruins of the former royal castle. Such was the reward the old king, whose sons had been lost to the cult’s ritual and ensuing chaos, gave to the younger man in order to establish a successor of sorts. A heroic and popular one at that. Among the scant few people of the cult who managed to escape the bloody final battle somehow, all of such being able to be counted on one hand at the very most, Knossos sought to flee the land rather than stay around for the following years likewise bloody purges of cult sympathizers and members from within the kingdom’s lands the general population was rallied around. Somehow, despite the odds, the man would escape the kingdom’s borders.…and did so questioning everything he had ever known. He had lived and survived another day, but everyone else he’d known and grown up around since being taken to Cretia hadn’t.
But what of the enlightenment the cult had promised? What of the power, the truth, everything? Something like the cult, yes, it had to be true. But if this route to truth did not manifest for them, perhaps the next would? Yes! Another had to work! It had to. There was no other way, it was all he'd ever known. So he would have to find another route! Yes! Truth itself lied beyond the veil of any of this, it had to, and he would find it for the benefit of all this time! He couldn’t give up yet!
Thus Knossos would desperately claw his way to a land far away from his own, that being of the desert Kingdom of Khamsin in the vast and expensive Khamsin Desert. Here a new cult was found by Knossos several years later, being a group dedicating themselves to an Ancient Great Demon Lord named Ashtara who sought to take the region and transform it into a microcosm of where she had come from: A ravaged, dark, horrid demonic plane of sorts that she promised to her followers would be a paradise. A paradise free of struggle, war, and turmoil. Nothing but the best pleasures of life and beyond, and for all eternity. Despite his former affiliation, he did join the cult and manage to rise the ranks to an extent once more as he pursued things with a new zeal for years to come.
From Ashtara, he as well as other mid-rank members would be granted to drink some of her blood to receive part of her power and gain new magics. Meanwhile the higher-ups were turned into mostly demons themselves by also being merged with her flesh. Conjuring/summoning demons, making use of curses, casting red energy attacks of tainted demonic magical energy, and conducting blood rituals would become the things Knossos found he could do using this new 'gift'. Things again seemed to be going on the right track, and if lucky the man felt he could finally manage to see the sort of ‘paradise’ he had been promised for so long. Finally, maybe, the dreams of the sleeping dead could finally be achieved somewhere in the world.
Yet it would be when this cult tried to rise up and cast their big 'summoning ritual' to bring forth their patron that things would eventually turn. Having been stirring up more and more active and open trouble in the desert kingdom leading up to the ritual itself, the local lords and ruler had brought in their own forces to deal with a conflict on the southern border to avoid an attempted annexation of part of its territory…..in that vein, not many were left to help keep order. Thus some adventurers, and even mercenaries, would be hired on to try to help quell the trouble and help with local monster issues as the area dealt with its other major problem simultaneously. Indeed, among these hired swords a plucky band of mixed-bag-mercenaries-turned-good-guy-heroes would eventually stand out among them in rising up to help lead the charge against the cult as it tried to summon its ‘goddess’ into the mortal plane. Barely manifesting an arm of their patron at most to try to crush the heroes, and unable to complete it despite sowing chaos around the ancient ruins the cult had set up in out in the desert, it became clear this cult too was going to lose. Ashtara could see the writing on the wall, and merely withdrew after it was clear the cult could not keep it up, dragging the higher-ups who had been bonded to her flesh and most of the surviving mid-level hierarchy away into her home plane as ‘reparations’ for her failed summoning and leaving the rest of them (Knossos among them) to die or the like without a care in the world for them afterward.
Those living members left behind by Ashtara’s cult, Knossos included, were pursued and killed and slain and put to the sword as they scattered to the four winds. Knossos was only thirty five years old at the time, and barely scraped through the desert with his life before collapsing at an oasis. From here, he would subsist for several months before fleeing the desert altogether by hitching a ride with an outbound but small merchant caravan after hiding or storing away his old cultish clothing and gear. Yet it was also here he began to waver once more, leaning more into desperation to find ‘something that mattered’ and see it through. Two cults were all he had known, and there had to be something….anything to prove that everything he had learned and come to know wasn’t a lie. That such a method to bring peace and paradise to the world was worth it, that it was true, that it meant something! He just had to look again. Such a thing seemed so incredibly rare to run into, so hard to find, and yet he had to just look for the signs. The threads. The traces of something that he could use to find another home, one that perhaps this time he could help ensure would succeed this time.
His journeys would bring him to a land far in the northern hemisphere, farther north than he'd ever been in his life before, to a place filled with verdant pine forests and icy pale wastes that could easily kill one who didn’t come prepared. It was here Knossos came across a group seeking the power of an ancient civilization called the Vilkyn, a grand civilization that had once owned the whole of this particular continent’s far northern reaches and taken tribute from places even far away due to their might. A series of disasters, internal and external and manmade and natural alike, had brought the Vilkyn down into ruin eventually. Yet within those taboo ruins of their, as those peoples who had moved into the area in the passing centuries to live there had deemed them to be, a new operation had been set up by a noble from a nearby kingdom to the east.
Having gotten ahold of some old Vilkyn old records, said noble (whose territory was on the border with this area) discovered there was something of great value that lied where the civilization’s old capitol had once been. He had funded an expedition, began skimming money to help fund it in part, and brought in materials and ‘experts’ to help him seek it out. Knossos, as it were, had a sort of expertise that the noble desired before hiring him on. Even so the operation itself became more and more cult-like over the years despite how it had been set up at first, this being mostly due to the promises of power and eternal life that the ancient Vilkyn ruins and texts promised to grant and showed great promise for. This in and of itself was learned more about as the operation dug up Vilkyn ruins and texts on the occult arts they’d clung to and made use of in their heyday. The use of necromancy had a fine art for them, putting the risen undead to use, alongside their creation and implementation of peculiar magic constructs making use of ‘crystallized mana gems’. Said ‘gems’ were a unique creation of the Vilkyn, solidifying mana itself and shaping it into abnormally ‘mana-dense’ gems that could be used to power a wide array of devices depending on their form. In fact, these occult power sources seemed to almost be ‘alive’ as they doubled likewise as ‘programmable cores’ to imbue with controls and commands etched into them in some form long-lost magical scrawl and arcane occult scripting. Such magic was far from a standard magical practice, or had yet to be developed anywhere else or adopted by them….and why? None could tell, but those delving into the Vilkyn’s secrets did not pay such heed to the signs in any case.
Having joined on at first as a simple 'expert in obscure magical arts', Knossos would rise in the ranks of the expedition-turning-cult as he eventually became the operation’s resident expert in Vilkyn texts and magic over time. Then as the group became more obsessed and cultic, driven by a desire for power and made promises by the noble of becoming immortal ‘living gods’ now, Knossos would hold back and retain his powerful but key position as he watched on this time from within. He would gain the magical knowledge the group sought in full, at least, before things this time went awry as the operation tried to boot up a ‘eternal life machine’ powered by a vast amount of the race’s trademark ‘gems’ in the ruins of the former Vilkyn capital.
No interruptions. No discovery. And yet it all still went horribly, horribly wrong in the end. What was a machine meant to make the living Vilkyn nobility immortal and maintain that, the machine had been shut down by rebels through damaging it enough during the last civil war that saw the Vilkyn Empire of ancient times finally be destroyed. The noble-led operation-cult would work to restore the device, hoping to bind themselves to it, but upon doing this and activating the machine something different happened than they had expected. Originally the souls of those to be made ‘immortal’ had been imbued into the original ‘gems’ used to power the machine, and the ‘gems’ had been modified to encase their souls as ‘phylacteries’ to root them into the mortal plane. What the group had done was miss that step, and instead repaired it and put in standard-type ‘gems’ they had produced into the machine before activating it once more.
As Knossos discovered this facet of things in his latest research, he ran toward the site of the device below the ground in a hurry-....but was too late to stop the repaired machine’s activation. Having been left to monitor research and operations above-ground while the machine was activated, but having been intimately involved in the repair and restoration of the machine itself, Knossos still hadn’t volunteered to be among the first ‘immortals’ to be created by using it. He wanted to see how things went at first in this case, maybe provide help in case things went awry, etc. Meanwhile those who had assembled to ‘test the machine first’ had decided, right before activating it, to be greedy and not let anyone else become immortal by using it. Rather, they thought to kill all above the ground and live as immortal kings and queens over a vast realm of undead. At the same time, the machine had no proper vessel for the souls of those who had newly bound themselves to it….and it was still bound to many of those former Vilkyn nobility who were long dead by now as well.
Knossos arrived to witness those using the machine, the noble included, have their souls sucked out and sent to the afterlife after having nowhere to go. Meanwhile the bodies of these people were left as walking, lifelike-looking immortal undead without minds of their own. Likewise, all across the northern wastes and former Vilkyn ruins, former Vilkyn nobility would ‘rise’ in a way not intended by the machine when it had been originally created. Their bodies were recreated as rotted, angry, and wandering undead whose souls were trapped hopelessly still in the remaining original ‘gems’ of the machine and who bodies were magically-infused and even stronger ancient undead who clung to the ruins or even wandered the open frozen wastes (where ruins did not remain anymore, but where they’d died anyway) to kill any unsuspecting fools who sought to travel off of the beaten path. It was as much as Knossos could do to try to evacuate the remaining cultists above, and then grab and bag all the information on the Vilkyn the cult/operation had before things went wrong.
Soon after, royal forces from the nearby kingdom arrived hoping to arrest the cult members and take them en-masse and by surprise. Because the kingdom the noble had come from did manage to figure out something was going on…..and the noble’s own son and heir had helped them to boot behind the scenes. Instead they captured or killed fleeing cultists, though, the force (including the noble’s son and the kingdom’s crown prince at their helm) would be forced to retreat from the area as the undead appeared before them and around them seemingly out of the blue. From these people Knossos would manage to flee in the opposite direction, albeit not intentionally as much as having done so by sheer chance, managing to escape into the icy freezing cold with what little he had and the clothes on his back once more. Again. For the seemingly impossible third time in his life.
Even so, the thrice-over cultist would only get so far. Through weather and struggle, constantly-returning undead and lack of resources, he would push through until he collapsed on the ground a bit after he entered the first bit of greenery his by-then frostbitten and starving and very weakened body managed to come across. Being near a forest path to the far southwest, away from where the group had finally set up at the old Vilkyn capital's ruins at least, as infused occult flesh and magical power sought to keep him alive somehow. Yet where he was wasn’t really the most used route either. It was well-trod, but as of recent years had seen little traffic at all. Someone collapsed off in a bush just a bit off the side of the road had little to no chances at being found, much less find help. It was thus here that his vision blurred, his wounds continued to worsen, and he would pass out expecting to finally die.
His resolve to find 'truth' in the only way he'd known how, so indoctrinated into it he had become blind, would too finally break as his body seemingly did. Truth? He sought truth, but this path was not it. This way was not the one. None of them had been, in the end, anything but misery and death and woe. And what had he done? Run about seeking all of this like a fool for decades of life? He, a fifty-four year old idiot and murderer and thrice-former cultist, was going to die and be damned for it. He would not see the power of the Deep Lord transform a kingdom into an oceanic utopia of peace. He would not see a glorious paradise of another plane form around him as Ashtara had promised. He would not see the common man gain immortality and power and riches and glory either, as promised by the third and final cult (actually operation-turned-cult) he'd joined. Nothing. And so as he felt himself drift, the aging man would scoff at himself and allow himself to drift away.
….But this was not to be his fate, it seemed.
Waking up, the man found himself in peasant’s clothes and lying in a warm bed. A warm bed located in a northern town farther to the south than where he’d been, and in particular within a shrine to the local god Drothur (God of Travelers, Merchants, Wanderers, Transients, Homeless, and Foreigners). It was here Knossos’ first reaction was to panic, then manage to relax, and then simply and finally laugh aloud like a madman without a care in the world. Alive. He was alive, still, by some impossibility even he couldn’t help but laugh aloud about in this case.
As it were, a passing cleric of Drothur had found him, the clothes on his back, and his magical satchel containing all his things, and brought him to the shrine for care before giving the unconscious and nearly-dead man a change of clothes and getting him in a warm bed. Walking in with a raised eyebrow and small smile on his face, the cleric who had saved Knossos would come into the room and lean against the doorframe until the other man had calmed back down again. As Knossos soon after seemed to drop into a depressed state, though, the cleric began to speak up in turn to explain things.
This cleric had been guided by a dream to take that road, in particular even seeing the location they had found Knossos in, and had felt the hand of their patron deity upon him. But why? Knossos would wonder this and ask as he was forced to heal up for some time at the shrine, talking about everything to the cleric as he tended to him personally after that point. The same cleric who had helped him would leave, returning to travel as was their calling to do again, but would leave him with a parting message when he asked one last time the question that burned so brightly in his mind: "Why?" "Why save me? Why would even a deity care for me despite all the things I've done?". The cleric merely responded, with a smile, that-
"My lord Drothur saw fit to save you, and frankly so did I even after looking into your things. Drothur is a god of travel, and you sir are not yet done with your travels it seems. Most do not survive the sort of life you seem to have led, and yet you are still here and thus it is a sign of my lord’s will I take it. I could never leave a traveler by the wayside, left to wither and die, for such is my calling to travel and provide such aid to those in need and clear the roads of evil.
You have come to see your own folly, and the veil of ignorance has come up from your eyes. This is a most precious gift indeed….a second chance. A rebirth. A time to take on another path, to pave a new road, and perhaps use those gifts of yours for a better reason and purpose.
So go forth, oh Knossos! Oh thrice-walker of dreams broken! Go now with my lord's blessing upon you, and see your new path to its very end without regrets! I shall see you there at the very end, my friend, or perhaps we shall meet again before then. Either way, farewell!"
And so the cleric left….and Knossos would as well some days later as well.
The occult-learned man would in the end find himself joining the Pilgrim's Caravan as it was passing through the same region. Claiming to be a hands-on magical scholar of sorts, he would take his occult expertise and magic and skills and set about to make the world a better place in any way he could. He would also seek to gather knowledge along the way to this end, to keep it safe, and to keep it hidden from unsafe hands. Not that he could do all of this for free, but the funds went into keeping his trade and business alive from stop to stop if nothing else. Allowed him to help others one way or another, even if it meant taking payment in coin or in gems or frankly in crops if it came down to it for his clients. Etc.
Ultimately on the road, and for the next seventeen years, Knossos would peddle his knowledge to assist others as an 'occult expert'. He would care for those dealing with haunted places or cursed items. He would be hired by nobles to investigate ruins, examine eclectic and rather niche 'magic items' for them, or try to assist with afflictions and issues caused by non-standard magical sources or origins. Such was his purpose. He would even buy up cursed items or such to 'contain' them safely, and for that he gained some reputation of a good but also wary sort. He even assisted areas with more 'zealous' beliefs to investigate certain matters relating to his expertise and skills, if only to work with the law and try to form an amicable relationship with such groups to avoid trouble on his part. At the same time, however, it isn't as if he is without potential to get into trouble due to what he is skilled in dealing with. His skills have been of use to the Pilgrim's Caravan itself at times as well, making him a staple of the last decade and a half in regards to certain matters if nothing else, and yet to date he knows the danger never goes away. The next plot, the next oddity, the next obscure magical issue, the next place that could potentially be where he runs into his past again, whatever it may be...
...but he will see his new chosen path to the end, no matter what!
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