1: Having your heart cut out in tribute to House Elbar.
Catharine of House Elbar was born somewhere in Cartha roughly two hundred years before the corpse crash landed in Kithe. She was both a noblewoman and a mage of no small talent, learning her craft via an apprenticeship with a mage of the Knights Azure, supplemented by heretical tomes that the mage was in charge of confiscating. When her apprenticeship was over, Catharine had become a rather skilled necromancer. Necromancy being strictly forbidden by the church, Catharine hid this aspect of her power for many long years, until she was in her mid 70's or so, and looked no different than she did at the age of 30. Servants kept quiet for a good while, obviously, but eventually word got out, and she was swiftly beheaded by a contingent of exorcists. Beheaded twice, actually. When the beheadings failed to stick they drowned her, then burned her at the stake, then buried her alive. She was a lich.
Lich is a catchall term for a magic user that supernaturally defies death. There are a great multitude of ways to do it, but none are easy, and few are common knowledge. Catharine's technique involved creating something of a physical anchor, an object that is unlikely to rot, and binding the soul to said anchor. This process was not entirely stable and resulted in a bond that must be continually renewed, and so Catharine has maintained her grip in this world via the use of other mortal souls, which, when unraveled, can be used to fuel the magic sustaining the connection for a time. She is losing herself though, steadily, to the ravages of time. The Lich Queen finds herself with gaps in her memory, unable to hold the many centuries of knowledge she has accumulated over the course of her extended life within her head. She now has several heads, actually, but they're filling up faster than she can manage. Even still, in her bouts of magically informed dementia, she is as formidable a mage as she's ever been. To challenge the queen is unwise.
Catharine fought a pitched battle for control of her territory, but eventually her defenses collapsed, and so she took what remained of House Elbar and fled, eventually finding her way to Kithe, the great rotting jungle of Lakarta. She named the city Uraza, and so the City of Death was born. It started out small, of course, initially being made up of only a few hundred souls (and a couple hundred more bodies). Oh how it has grown, though! It's borders are constantly widening, ever encroaching on the rest of Kithe. Many of the peoples who still called the forest home now find themselves under the rule of this strange city ruled by people who are more corpse than man, and certainly some of them have had to give their lives to prolong the reign of its Eternal Queen, but for such a city, it is a sacrifice worth making.
The Queen is responsible for instating the Great Houses of Uraza. There are 7, the highest among them being the Queen's own, House Elbar. Each of the other 6 houses is ruled by a family granted a noble station by the Queen, and they are royalty here in this strange city. Once, the families of the Great Houses were merely Catharine's apprentices, but when the time came to build their paradise, she deputized the greatest among them, giving them purview to develop their own necromantic arts as they saw fit, and giving them each a part of the city to govern. Should the Queen perish (a treasonous notion) one of the other houses would elect a regent to take control of House Elbar's role as a steward of the city and its occupied lands.
House Elbar's school of magic is practically the Ur-Necromancy, their magics are fundamental and cover all different aspects of the Black Craft, from the spirit to the flesh. To study the ways of House Elbar is to reach wide, understanding the fundamentals of necromancy and much magic beyond it.
2: Falling into the dragon-ant pits of House Gray.
Uraza, like the decaying jungle around it, runs on death. The dark magics of the Great Houses power the city, and as such, the city's grim coin is the bodies of the deceased. Rotting flesh and bone are prized by artisans, inventors, soldiers, and scholars alike. Cadavers are worth their weight in gold. This leads to a weird sort of, let's call it callousness, towards death and the human body. When you deal with dead bodies as raw material, the physical form loses value. It's all just meat, and how its used varies widely.
At the center of the city's undead infrastructure is House Gray. They're the engineers and craftsmen of Uraza, twisting the dead body into new and innovative shapes to meet the needs of their city. Gray is responsible for the manufacture of state owned undead, as well as their upkeep. Urazan law dictates that any undead in service to the government or to be displayed in public must be clean, meaning mummification or a lack of flesh, and a skeleton can be a somewhat flimsy thing for battle if not properly reinforced. Much of Gray's work is dedicated to the humble skeleton, which begin their life cycle when a body is bought to the Gray dragon-ant pits. These are massive colonies of flesh eating, giant ants (some of them can get as big as half an inch large). They are controlled by a minor client house of both the Gray and the Lemue, the Bashir, who enjoy some of the wealth of the Great Houses, though lack their sway in government. The ants strip away all the soft tissue, leaving only a skeleton behind.
Once processed in this way, they are handed off to the bone-wrights, who will turn them into either servants or soldiers. Servants, if they are to be displayed in public are scrimshawed with the symbol of House Elbar and filled with intricate, beautiful designs (it is said no two are exactly alike), which are then painted with a rich purple hue. It is almost enough to make one forget they used to be people. Some servants, those responsible for cranking the winches of the city's many automatic doors, are not given such a treatment, as they are not to be displayed to the public. They, like soldiers, are reinforced with a thick cording, almost like muscle. that helps to strengthen their bones, though soldiers go on to be plated with a bit of metal as well (enough so that they are protected but still light, more armor can be added later based on the wishes of their commanding Lich Knights). Gray also makes composite servitors, amalgams of multiple (sometimes inhuman) corpses for specialized purposes. When they're used for combat, they're called War-bodies, and they're notoriously hard to destroy. This is considered House Gray's specialty.
House Gray's school of magic, necrokatasky, is dedicated to the creation of necromantic servitors, meaning their magic is the closest to the traditional notions of necromancy that we have. They raise the dead and manipulate their forms, possessing transmutive arts that allow them to mold bone and flesh like clay to better suit their intended purpose.
3: Being mulched for House Lemue's Carnal Gardens.
Though Uraza thrives on the dead, it is an obvious necessity that the city have some thin film of life to sustain those who live within it. This film isn't actually all that thin, to be honest, Uraza is teeming with life, though it is often crawling and squirming. One such example is the aforementioned ant pits, but there are other varieties of vermin which live within its' walls, and a large network of vegetation which they help maintain. The city sports a strange subterranean network known as the Carnal Gardens, composed of the few insects and plants that are able to survive the tunnel's warped soil and pale light. This network, to the uninformed, appears very similar to the natural web of life within Kithe, but to any who have spent real time within the jungle, it is obvious that the gardens are far removed from its natural equilibrium. This vegetation visually marks Urazan territory, with many of their settlements sporting shaded farms of a similar sort above ground.
House Lemue was tasked with feeding the people of Uraza, and to support a city of any substantial size, they would need to get creative, and get creative they did. House Lemue created the Carnal Gardens to grow food for the citizens of Uraza, using a delicate balance of botany and necromancy, because of course, like everything else in this city, death is what greases the wheels. House Lemue's system relies on the mulching of bodies, though plants also find their way into the fold here. The Carnal Gardens grow via consumption, feeding on fungus and those bodies unfit for the ant pits alike. Insects get in on the action too, of course. Many a corpse in the gardens is absolutely teeming with maggots and larvae waiting to burst free, and to begin maintaining the gardens alongside the other legions of insects.
The technical term for the type of magic the Lemues developed is necrobotany, and it combines the traditional necromancy of the city with acts of nature magic. This means growing life from corpses, but also tapping into that oft neglected resource for the necromancer, dead plants. House Lemue struck gold with its development of this craft, as much of the death surrounding the city is not occurring in animals but in the world of flora. There are great rotten trees that are known to march alongside the skeletal legions of Uraza, like zombified ents. Necrobotanical magic is also on occasion used to reinforce skeletons or other varieties of undead. House Gray and House Lemue are known to work closely together, and often their work has bled together along these lines to create some truly terrifying creatures.
4: Having your face stolen for a costume in House Masquer's next play.
In Uraza, the body is worn like clothing. Flesh is little more than fashion. "This skin tone suits your dress much better. These eyes really pop, don’t you think? Ah but they’re out of season. Are horns still in vogue?" Faces, limbs, whatever, it all changes with the seasons, among the elite of the city. There are a variety of strange looks among their number, some modifications chosen for practical reasons, some for fashion. Multiple arms, exposed bone, bloody stigmata, mummification, you name it, people are doing it. Body mods are readily available in the Flesh Market, where any number of parts can be bought and sold. If you have particularly notable features, a well sculpted jaw, a set of beautiful eyes, pearly white teeth, you can expect to make a decent amount of money off of your features, so long as you’re willing to part with them. The more “exotic” the feature the better. Of course, the fashion of the wealthy isn't the only use for soft tissue and skin. For the good stuff, you'll want to turn to House Masquer.
House Masquer is what it is today because the Lich Queen has a love for the theatre. Thus it is that Masquer became something of a a public works division, serving as an arm of the government responsible for financing the arts within Uraza. All legal theaters gain some of their money through the house of Masquer. They also finance other artists to produce works for the state, are responsible for maintaining the architecture and buildings of Uraza, and manage the few public gardens within the city's limits. Their job, primarily, is to keep the city beautiful. At least on the surface.
Initially conceived of for a usage in performances, the art of ptomasopony deals with the manipulation of deceased soft tissue, with much of the official theory being dedicated to the use of the cadaver as something of a costume. Those carnal fashions described earlier were initially conceived of as a way to spice up performances, with particularly beautiful faces being used as theatrical masks. It wasn't terribly long before this magic spread to other places as well, nobles of the great houses started stuffing their closets with commoner skin startling quickly, in fact. More importantly the practice became a tool in Abramo Masquer's arsenal as the newly appointed spymaster of Uraza. It is said that Masquer has agents in nearly every court in Lakarta, observing the inner workings and most hidden designs of foreign kingdoms with eyes that are not theirs. A troubling thought indeed.
