Long ago, in a walled off city to the north...
*Ahem. Excuse me, wrong intro.*
In the Age of Ancients, the world was unformed, little to no sensory detail written into it. Then, there was text.
A stiff breeze whistled through the craggy stones of the Northern Asylum, leaving in its wake frail, shaking hollows milling about, moaning pitifully. Few had survived the curse that'd swept the land, and none remained in the asylum. Corpses littered the ground, some moving still. The smell of decay and rot had long been swept away by icy wind and the ravages of time.
In a particular hallway, a basement level floor on the western side of the building, a lone man, clutching his side, staggered to the floor of an open cell, its inmate lying face down nearby. The man was clothed in ragged strips of cloth, his skin a dark shade of pink, wrinkled and shriveled upon his bone frame. He breathed heavily when he sat, hands clutched tightly around a tiny black wisp near his breast.
The humanity sprite slowly slipped, bit by bit, into the man's darksign, a pitch black circle the size of a palm etched into his shoulder, covering the skin there. With every second he sat, doing nothing, a little more of the humanity slipped into the circle, his last link to sanity waning. Twin pricks of light in the wisp slowly dragged across the room, taking in the drab grey, mossy walls, the moldy hay on the floor, and finally, the undead corpse, cast face down on the floor next to him. It was a pitiful thing, hand outstretched toward the bucket a few feet away. The hollowing man had little to care for the already gone.
A single, heavy sigh shook the man as the wisp finally collapsed, its fragments tugged by an invisible string into his darksign in an instant. His thoughts moved to his family, and he pulled a small child's doll from his ragged pants. It was made of old, worn wood, and adorned with surprisingly smooth strings for hair, and a simple, smiling face. He found it in one of the storage rooms above, and had intended to give it to his daughter, when he escaped. Now, he clutched to it as a lifeline, struggling for a few more moments with it to his chest. In his last few moments, he felt himself tilt, accelerating rapidly toward the moldy hay next to him. His free hand flopped uselessly out in front of him, nudging the corpse.
Unknown to the slowly fading man, he had just nudged what was once an undead pyromancer's hand onto a small chalk scribble he'd hidden under the bucket, activating a tiny wink of power in the chunky, rough runes hastily scrawled on the bricks. A flicker of white light briefly passed through the room's doors, causing a few hollows to turn towards it briefly. When it had faded, the chalk runes were gone, and elsewhere, so was a young man. Police would later find his room empty, with no signs of leaving present. It was assumed to be a runaway case, a college student unable to cope with the stress of the work.
A sharp gasp filled the room. The pyromancer sat up.