Malkizid

Malkizid is a powerful devil who was once a powerful servant in the service of Pale the God of Death.

Shortly after Pale created the first afterlife, he was confronted by the Lady Karma. She agreed to allow the continued existence of the afterlife on the condition that the soul of any being whose immortal body was destroyed would be returned to the cycle of reincarnation. She then tasked the Black Hound with enforcing the deal. As a true believer in Pale's mission to end reincarnation and provide an afterlife to all souls, Malkizid was bitterly disappointed with Pale's acquiescence to the demands of Lady Karma and the Black Hound. Malkizid believed Pale to be a coward and urged him to fight for a true eternal afterlife. His resentment was manipulated by Lloth, who promised him that if he supported her son Dynam in the assassination and replacement of Pale, Dynam would break the agreement with Karma and no longer return souls to the cycle of reincarnation.

Malkizid assisted in the overthrow of Pale, and in the ensuing centuries worked tirelessly to find the means of defeating Karma' champion the Black Hound. His research and experiments were cruel and horrific, but he justified his actions with the belief that he would use the knowledge he was gaining to free all souls from the cycle of death and rebirth. Although he did uncover many secrets surrounding death, souls, and the shadow realm, Malkizid's work was far from complete when he realized he had a bigger problem than the Hound. Dynam was insane. Malkizid's new master reveled in slaughter and causing suffering. An eternity in an afterlife ruled by Dynam would be worse than reincarnation. Malkizid gathered his research and abandoned his second master.

Fleeing to the mortal realm, Lloth's agents eventually tracked him down, and Malkizid was defeated by the Eternal Emperor Maeglin himself. Rather than kill him outright,  Maeglin bound and sealed him away in a remote corner of his empire. An fallen angel of death could be a useful pawn in later endeavors. With Maeglin's defeat, and Pale's return to his rightful position as God of death, the imprisoned Malkizid was forgotten.

For nearly two and a half millennia Malkizid sat alone in the darkness with only his plots to keep him sane. After the cataclysm, the receding polar ice exposed his prison where it was found by an ambitious young wizard seeking the secrets of immortality. She freed him in exchange for his research and the key to unlocking it. The research was stored on a device would not activate unless unlocked by Malkizid's own DNA. Unwilling to spend a lifetime as a piece of furniture holding the device for the wizard, Malkazid fathered a child on the woman, leaving her with someone else to activate the device when she required it.

Malkazid has since returned to the shadow plane where he has carved out a domain for himself and spent the last thousand years working on new lines of research. His mortal decedents still possess his artifact, but have struggled to master the complicated theories contained therein.