The Eclipse
- Artificer's Eye : Can analyze enchantments, materials, people and souls.
- The Necronomicon : Can sacrifice lifeforce, souls or both in order to unlock knowledge within. It is currently sealed due lack of use.
| Power Grid | ||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Statistic |
|
|||||||||||
| Intelligence |
| |||||||||||
| Strength |
| |||||||||||
| Speed |
| |||||||||||
| Durability |
| |||||||||||
| Energy Projection |
| |||||||||||
| Fighting Skill |
| |||||||||||
- Biography
Elijah Morrigan's life is a chronicle of ambition, loss, and a relentless pursuit of redemption from powers that threatened to consume him utterly. He began as an archaeologist and mage, his keen intellect and innate magical talent undeniable. Yet, an insatiable curiosity for forbidden knowledge, for secrets others wisely left undisturbed, set him on a perilous course. This path led him to an ancient gravesite, and within its depths, to the Necronomicon. The book’s dark power proved an irresistible lure.
The Necronomicon never demanded obedience—it whispered possibilities. Elijah listened. When a child trafficker vanished without a trace, and the local river steamed red for hours, no one thought to connect it to the scholar with ink-stained hands and sleepless eyes. But the book did. He targeted those whose souls were already corrupted, believing he could harness their darkness. But with each soul taken, something shifted—at first imperceptibly. He began hearing whispers before the ritual circles were drawn. The air around him grew heavier. His reflection lagged. Whatever humanity remained was changing, being slowly rewritten by the price of knowledge.
The growing horror of this encroaching demonic nature, the raw terror of losing himself entirely, pushed Elijah to a desperate state. His accelerating corruption became a crisis that his mother, a powerful sorceress, could no longer ignore. With no other recourse, she invoked the oldest rite her bloodline carried—one that had no return clause. That night, Elijah disappeared without ceremony or witness, exiled not to place, but to time itself: the unformed edge of existence, where no clocks ticked and no voices followed.
In that timeless void, adrift for what felt like eons, Elijah grappled with profound remorse. The isolation stripped away his pride, forcing a confrontation with the consequences of his actions. He returned to the world fundamentally changed, his mind sharpened by ages of contemplation, his powers amplified, yet acutely aware that the demonic corruption would resume its advance. Knowing this, he sought redemption, embracing his family's legacy as The Eclipse, a symbol of Death and Rebirth.
Still, the demonic transformation threatened to complete itself. To permanently halt this process while he was still a half demon, Elijah embarked on a final, grim journey into forbidden arts to become a living lich. Through a perilous ritual, he bound his soul to his physical body, encoding his essence into his very cells. This act preserved his sanity and the remnants of his humanity, freezing the corruption. He became an immortal entity, neither wholly alive nor undead, his soul's eternal nature allowing his form to regenerate even from the smallest remaining part should his body be destroyed.
Though he achieved a form of immortality and halted his demonic descent, the weight of his past actions remains. Guilt is an ever-present shadow on his unending existence, a constant reminder of the harrowing path he walked and the steep price of his survival.
- Timeline
- 1844 - The Beginning:
*April 1st, 1844: Elijah Morrigan is born in the sprawling, shadow-laden Morrigan estate in the United Kingdom, the air already thick with the scent of old parchment and incense. His family, prestigious occultists, greet his arrival not just as a birth, but as the forging of a new link in a long chain of arcane practitioners. He is raised not with nursery rhymes, but with the hushed tones of incantations, the intricate genealogies of spirits, and the maps of lost, magic-steeped civilizations. Respect for ancient wisdom and the careful pursuit of forbidden knowledge are lessons instilled before he can fully grasp their weight.
- Childhood (1844-1856):
- Early Curiosity: From his earliest years, Elijah is less a child and more a diminutive scholar. While other children played with toys, he could be found in the cavernous family library, his small fingers tracing glyphs in books far older than himself. He wouldn't just learn languages; he devoured them, ancient Sumerian and cryptic Atlantean dialects falling into his grasp with an ease that startled his tutors. Cryptography was a delightful game, ancient texts a conversation across millennia. Sometimes, as he studied alone, his voice would rise in soft, absent-minded humming—a habit none could trace, but one his governess described as hauntingly precise, almost liturgical in tone.
His inquisitive nature, a relentless seeking, inevitably led him to the chained sections of the library, to the books bound in strange hides that whispered back when opened. These forbidden tomes, filled with the true, often terrifying, histories of the world, didn't frighten him; they sparked a blazing fascination.
- Magical Affinity (Age 10):
The governess had dismissed him an hour early after he'd completed his Latin translations in half the expected time. Again. Elijah knelt on the cold stone floor of the library's alcove, carefully copying the protective ward he'd glimpsed in his mother's grimoire before she'd snapped it shut. His small fingers traced the chalk lines with mathematical precision—each curve exactly as he remembered. The final symbol completed, he sat back on his heels, expecting nothing. The chalk began to smoke. Elijah scrambled backward as cerulean light erupted from the diagram, racing along the lines like liquid fire. The air above the ward shimmered like heat waves, and every book within ten feet fell open to pages covered in similar symbols, their illustrations writhing as if alive. The library door burst open. His mother stood silhouetted against the hallway light, her face a mask of terror and resignation. "Elijah." Her voice carried no surprise, only the weight of inevitability. "We need to talk." The ward continued burning for another full minute before finally fading to ash, leaving the stone floor unmarked save for the faintest outline of what he would later learn was a seal against the things that crawled between worlds.
- The Forbidden Mantle – “The Eclipse” (Age 11):
The vault beneath the estate had no windows, no natural light—only the steady flame of oil lamps that cast dancing shadows on walls lined with books that seemed to absorb rather than reflect illumination. Elijah's breath misted in the cold as his mother led him past shelves of artifacts that hummed with barely contained power. She stopped before an iron-bound codex, its cover bearing a single symbol: a crescent eclipse, black metal inlaid against darker leather. "Touch it," she commanded. The moment his fingertips made contact, images flooded his mind—not his own memories, but inherited ones. A Morrigan ancestor standing in a field of corpses, weeping as she performed a ritual that would end a plague by taking the death into herself. Another, centuries later, binding a demon lord to prevent it from consuming London, knowing the binding would eventually consume him instead. "When power grows unchecked," his mother's voice seemed to come from very far away, "when death outpaces life, when the balance tips toward chaos—we restore it. Not because we want to. Because we must." Elijah tried to pull his hand away and found he couldn't. The book held him fast, showing him vision after vision of Morrigans who had sacrificed everything to preserve the world's equilibrium. "The price," his mother continued, her voice breaking slightly, "is always ourselves." When the visions finally released him, Elijah staggered backward, his hand bearing a mark that hadn't been there before—a small crescent moon, pale against his skin, that would fade by morning but never truly disappear.
- Discovery of Ancient Symbols (Age 12): While exploring the crumbling, ivy-choked ruins bordering the Morrigan estate—a place other children were warned away from—Elijah's hand brushed against a moss-covered headstone, nearly swallowed by the earth. Pushing aside the ancient growth, he uncovered strange, deeply etched symbols unlike any he had seen in the family texts. They resonated with a cold, ancient power, a puzzle that sang to his mind. This discovery wasn't just a finding; it was an ignition point for a lifelong obsession: to unearth the buried narratives of forgotten civilizations and unlock the universe's most guarded secrets.
- 1857 - 1865: Formative Years and the Path to Archaeology
- Age 13-15: Subtle Use of Magic: Elijah’s command over the unseen arts solidified. His growing power wasn't brandished but woven subtly into the fabric of his young life. A whispered phrase before an exam might clear his mind, allowing facts to surface with perfect clarity; a focused gaze might gently nudge a reluctant acquaintance towards agreeability. These were, to him, mere practical applications of his studies. Only in music did he indulge something closer to joy. He would hum softly while copying glyphs or solving ritual permutations, his voice untrained but resonant, filling the study with something dangerously close to peace.
- Family Concerns: This casual wielding of influence, however minor, did not go unnoticed. Whispers followed him through the draughty halls of their home. His mother, in particular, saw not youthful experimentation, but the potential for a darker path, her gaze often troubled when she observed his quiet manipulations.
Age 16: Boarding School: He was enrolled at the prestigious Blackwood Academy, a gothic edifice known for its rigorous classical education. Elijah excelled, particularly in archaeology, linguistics, and ancient history, his mind a sponge for the narratives of bygone eras. The school's extensive, restricted library became his true sanctuary. While his peers pursued sport or societal niceties, Elijah spent lamp-lit hours devouring texts his family had deemed too volatile, his obsession with ancient, power-infused artifacts deepening into a fervent quest.
- Academic Brilliance & Alienation: His intellect was a beacon, acknowledged by masters and students alike, yet it also cast long shadows. Known for his academic prowess, he was equally known for his aloof demeanor and the unnerving secrecy that clung to him like a second skin, alienating most of his peers.
Age 18: Strained Family Relations: Visits home became exercises in carefully navigated conversations. His father, a man more grounded in the tangible relics of the past, encouraged his son’s passion for archaeology, seeing in it a respectable, scholarly pursuit. His mother, however, saw the glint of something far older and more dangerous in Elijah's eyes. Her concern over his deepening entanglement with the occult, and the nascent darkness she sensed stirring within him, became a palpable tension between them.
Ritual Failure: The unspoken conflict culminated one stormy night. Convinced he was ready, Elijah secretly prepared a complex summoning ritual in a disused wing of the estate, aiming to contact a long-forgotten chthonic entity whose name he’d pieced together from fragmented manuscripts. The ritual spiraled out of control. The air crackled, shadows writhed with malevolent intent, and a presence, ancient and vast, brushed against the veil, nearly tearing it asunder. Only his mother's desperate intervention, a torrent of counter-magic that left her visibly drained, prevented a catastrophe that could have consumed them all. The event seared into Elijah a profound understanding of the razor-thin line he walked, the true destructive potential of the forces he courted. Yet, perversely, the terrifying glimpse of power also solidified his resolve to master what others feared.
- 1860
- 1860: University of Birmingham
Elijah’s fervent fascination with the silent narratives of ancient civilizations naturally guided him to formal archaeological studies at the University of Birmingham. Here, within the hallowed halls of academia, his career blossomed. His theories were incisive, his fieldwork meticulous, earning him the genuine respect of world-weary professors and the envious admiration of his peers.
- Dark Obsession: Yet, beneath the sheen of academic success, his true obsession pulsed like a fever. The university’s archives were not just repositories of history, but hunting grounds. He sought more than pottery shards and faded maps; he hunted for the whispers of the supernatural, the echoes of dark forces that he believed had not merely influenced, but actively shaped ancient societies.
- 1862-1863:
- 1862-1863: Reputation for Brilliance and the Lure of the Necronomicon
At Birmingham, Elijah cultivated a reputation as a scholar of dazzling brilliance, yet one whose intensity often unsettled those around him; he was the "eccentric Morrigan." He'd spend days immured in the deepest sections of the university's archives, the air thick with the scent of decaying paper and forgotten lore. He wasn't just reading; he was interrogating the ancient texts, deciphering marginalia in forgotten tongues, his fingers tracing diagrams that hinted at magic too potent, too dangerous, for any sane mind to covet.
- Necronomicon Discovery: It was during one such late-night immersion, a flickering gas lamp casting dancing shadows on stacks of vellum, that he found it: a small, unassuming codex bound in faded calfskin. This manuscript, almost overlooked, spoke not of dynasties or trade routes, but of a singular, apocryphal artifact—a book of ultimate blasphemy and power: the Necronomicon. The text described it as holding the keys to cosmic understanding, to immortality, to a power that could transcend the fragile limitations of humanity. A cold thrill traced its way down Elijah’s spine. His interest wasn't merely piqued; it was seized. The Necronomicon became the new focal point of his relentless quest.
- 1864
- 1864: Increased Obsession
The Necronomicon legend consumed him. Elijah withdrew further, his rooms becoming a den of arcane charts, translated passages, and the ever-present aroma of exotic herbs burned for clarity or vision. His academic pursuits, once a passion, now felt like a pale shadow, a means to an end. Sleep became a luxury he rarely afforded himself, his nights filled with feverish study. It was then the visions began: fleeting images of cyclopean cities beneath dying stars, of dark, tentacled entities whispering promises of power through the very ink of the ancient texts he pored over.
- Visionary Influence: These were not mere dreams. The visions were potent, seductive, pushing him across the threshold from a dedicated, if unorthodox, academic into a true acolyte of forbidden knowledge, a future master of arts that could unmake worlds.
- 1865
- 1865: Graduation and a Dark Trajectory
Elijah graduated from the University of Birmingham with first-class honours, his name lauded as one of the most promising minds in archaeology. His dissertation on pre-Sumerian ritual sites was deemed revolutionary. Yet, a subtle disquiet followed him. Whispers among the faculty and a few perceptive students spoke of his unhealthy pallor, his increasingly withdrawn nature, and the unsettling aura that sometimes clung to him – a mark, they unknowingly surmised, of someone who had peered too deeply into shadows best left undisturbed.
As he packed his bags, leaving the structured world of academia for the unpredictable allure of fieldwork, his mind was not on ancient ruins in the conventional sense. His sights were firmly, irrevocably set on finding the actual Necronomicon, and he was chillingly aware of the dark, perilous path it would lead him down – a path he now felt destined to walk.
- 1866 - The Music Revelation
- 1866 - The Music Revelation
The year following his graduation found Elijah immersed in dusty digs and deciphering forgotten scripts, yet a peculiar hollowness echoed within him. His archaeological and arcane achievements, while intellectually rigorous, began to feel mechanical—an endless algorithm of dust and glyphs, devoid of joy.
One evening, drawn by the distant hum of brass and strings, he stepped into a London music hall on impulse. The space was warm, flickering with gaslight and laughter—human noise. The audience, a patchwork of laborers and scholars alike, sat in rare harmony as the orchestra tuned. He hadn’t realized how long it had been since he’d heard music performed not for ceremony or ritual, but simply to be heard.
He remained at the back, alone, arms crossed. But as the performance unfolded—violin trembling against piano, crescendos clashing with silence—something in him shifted. It wasn’t magic. Not even memory. Just resonance. He felt, for the first time in years, something stir beneath the layers of calculation and control.
Elijah said nothing when he left. But that night, and many nights after, he found himself humming—not the melodies, but their shape, their geometry. He realized music had always been with him. Not as spellwork, but as structure. A private logic in a world otherwise ruled by chaos.
- 1867 - Discovery of the Necromonicon
1867 - Discovery of the Necronomicon and Beginning of Corruption
1867: After pursuing cryptic clues across forgotten maps and through the shadowed alleys of antiquarian book dealers, Elijah finally stood before his prize. In a hidden vault beneath a crumbling Mesopotamian ziggurat, amidst offerings left for forgotten gods, lay the Necronomicon. It wasn't a grand, imposing tome, but a deceptively plain book bound in what felt disturbingly like human skin, its pages filled with ink that seemed to shift and crawl. The moment his fingers brushed its cover, an overwhelming torrent of knowledge and a chilling, exhilarating power flooded his senses, a dark magnetism that promised everything he had ever sought.
He began to experiment, the book's contents drawing him into a dangerous, intoxicating spiral. The rituals demanded a terrible price: souls. Yet, Elijah, clinging to a sliver of his former morality, established a grim calculus. He would not prey on the innocent. His targets became the dregs of humanity, those whose souls were already blackened by their own heinous deeds: a notorious slaver whose cruelty was legendary, a cabal of corrupt politicians who bled their people dry, a betrayer who had sold comrades to their deaths. He hunted them, learning their wicked secrets, judging them by a code only he now adhered to. He reasoned that these souls, already marinated in greed, malice, and deception, were fitting fuel for his ascent, a way to harness the very essence of corruption for his own ends.
However, the Necronomicon was a treacherous chalice. With each soul he fed into its abyss, with each terrible secret it whispered back to him, the demonic corruption, the price of its knowledge, took root deeper within him. The transformation was not sudden, but a creeping, insidious decay of his humanity, a slow burn that began to remake him from the inside out.
- 1868-1872 - Descent into Darkness
- 1868-1872 - Descent into Darkness
The following years saw Elijah plunge deeper into the Necronomicon's abyss. His obsession became a living entity, guiding his every waking moment. Transformation, once a subtle taint, now accelerated with each foray into shadow magic and the forbidden arts of soul manipulation. He wasn't just seeking power anymore; he was desperately seeking immortality, a way to control life and death itself, to escape the mortal coil he now felt was a fragile prison.
With each sacrifice, another sliver of his empathy, his human connection, eroded, replaced by a cold, calculating pragmatism. Yet, in return, new, terrifying powers bloomed: the ability to command the very blood in a man’s veins, to twist the shadows into sentient weapons, and to subtly bend the fabric of reality to his will, making the improbable probable. His physical form began to betray his infernal bargain. Sometimes, in the reflection of a darkened window, his eyes would gleam with an unnatural, crimson light. The skin on his hands would momentarily seem too pale, the nails too sharp. He became adept at concealing these subtle but horrifying shifts. A Mind Transformed: The burgeoning magical power was not just an external force; it was reshaping his intellect. He started to perceive the world not as a collection of disparate objects and events, but as an intricate tapestry of interconnected energies, a complex equation he could learn to solve. He saw patterns in the flight of birds, in the fall of rain, in the chaotic babble of a marketplace, patterns that hinted at future outcomes, at leverage points invisible to ordinary men. His thinking became razor-sharp, strategic, always several steps ahead.
- 1875 - 1900: Exile to the Dawn of Time
- 1875: The corruption was now a raging fire, threatening to consume the last vestiges of Elijah's soul. His mother, her heart breaking but her will iron, enacted the most desperate of measures. Invoking a magic that drew upon the very lifeforce of their ancestral lands, she cast him out—not to some distant corner of the earth, but to a place before place, a time before time: the dawn of creation itself. This was not a void of nothingness, but a roiling, primordial chaos—a canvas where reality had yet to be painted, and the laws of physics were mere suggestions.
Here, Elijah’s body continued to age, unshielded by time’s normal bounds, exposed to the chaotic flux of a realm where time twisted and stretched unpredictably. His mind, untethered from earthly linearity, expanded at an unimaginable rate. What felt like mere decades to the oblivious world stretched into subjective millennia for Elijah. He witnessed the birth of concepts, the first flickers of cosmic laws coalescing from infinite potential—while his physical form bore the relentless passage of years, marked by the relentless passage of time itself.
Mental Growth in the Void: In this timeless, formless expanse, there were no books, no artifacts, no external stimuli. Yet, his intellect, far from stagnating, ignited. He turned inward, meditating upon the fundamental structures of magic, reality, and existence itself, dissecting them with a mind unburdened by physical distraction. He learned to internalize knowledge directly from the raw stuff of becoming, to understand the universe not by observation, but by being part of its unfurling. At times, when thought dissolved into light and silence, a shape would reemerge—iron-bound, crescent-marked. The codex. Not literal, but imprinted on his psyche. He couldn’t read it here, yet he always knew it was watching. Waiting.
Mental Ascension: Elijah's mind transcended mere academic brilliance. He began to navigate conceptual realms, grasping the underlying algorithms that would eventually govern all magic and existence. His calculations became flawless, his foresight extending through myriad possibilities with breathtaking precision. He saw the patterns in the primordial chaos, discerning the framework of the nascent universe as an architect might see a cathedral in a block of stone. His problem-solving evolved into an art form, making him a silent, unseen master of strategic foresight.
Understanding the Abyss of Self & Magic: This infinite isolation was also an unsparing mirror. For centuries, he confronted the specter of his past deeds, unraveling his flaws, his guilt, his ambitions with a brutal honesty only such profound solitude could compel. He came to understand the subtle energies that connect all souls, the hidden pathways of will and emotion. This introspection gifted him an unparalleled mastery over his shadow magic, now able to sculpt darkness into extensions of his will; his bloodbending became an art of exquisite control over the very essence of life; and his soul magic, once a tool of sacrifice, transformed into a deeper understanding of spiritual mechanics. He learned to command the soul-bound shadows, remnants of his past sins now forged into loyal, potent servitors. He didn't just understand the Shadow Realm; he could weave its fabric, bending shadows into tangible blades, protective shrouds, or conduits for his power.
- ???? - 1900 - The Return of The Eclipse
- 1900: When the conditions of his exile finally waned, Elijah Morrigan returned to a world that had marched on for a quarter-century without him. He reappeared not in a blast of arcane energy, but as a subtle shift in the shadows of his ancestral home, the air growing colder, the silence more profound. He was fundamentally, irrevocably changed. His mind, honed by eons of contemplation, was a weapon of unimaginable sharpness, his magical abilities amplified to godlike proportions. He was no longer just Elijah Morrigan, the fallen archaeologist. He returned as The Eclipse, a name he chose to signify his unique position between utter darkness and the potential for a new beginning, a living symbol of death and the painful, ongoing process of rebirth. He sought not forgiveness, which he felt he could never earn, but a functional redemption through action, wielding his immense powers with a precision and purpose forged in the crucible of timeless exile.
Master of Reality-Bending: His exile had granted him an intimate understanding of reality's foundational laws, and now he could subtly, or profoundly, rewrite them. He could weave illusions so perfect they were indistinguishable from truth, crafting entire sensory worlds in the minds of others, or alter their perceptions of time and space to his strategic advantage. His mastery over bloodbending was absolute; with a mere gesture, he could animate constructs of solidified blood, quell a raging heart, or trace the vital essence of a hidden foe.
Strategic Manipulator: His intellect, already formidable, now processed information with terrifying speed, allowing him to perceive countless future pathways branching from the smallest decision. He became a grandmaster of the long game, his actions often appearing inscrutable to others, yet each was a meticulously calculated move in a strategy that spanned decades, even centuries. His goals were never born of rash impulse, but executed with the patient, unerring precision of a cosmic clock.
The Shadow King: Elijah was now a sovereign of the penumbra, able to step through shadows as easily as a man might step through a doorway, traversing vast distances or even slipping between the veils of different realities. His command over shadow magic was so profound he could seemingly alter the very balance of light and darkness in a localized area, bending the natural laws to create zones of absolute protection or suffocating manipulation. His soul magic had also evolved; while he no longer sought to sacrifice souls, he could, if necessary, draw upon the ambient spiritual energies of a place or even siphon the power from particularly malevolent entities to fuel his most demanding spells.
- 1905 - Living Lich: Halting the Demonic Corruption
1905: The shadow of his demonic corruption, though held in abeyance by his exile, began to stir anew with his return to the mortal plane. Elijah knew its acceleration was inevitable. He would not allow himself to become the monster he had fought so desperately to escape. The ritual chamber beneath his estate had taken three years to prepare. Every stone had been carved with protective sigils, every measurement calculated to precise astronomical alignments. The air itself seemed heavy with accumulated power, thick enough to taste—copper and ozone and something that made his teeth ache.
Elijah knelt naked at the chamber's center, surrounded by concentric circles of ingredients that had cost him fortunes both financial and moral to acquire. Mercury infused with starlight. Salt crystallized from the tears of the genuinely penitent. His own blood, freely given every dawn for a full year, now blackened with corruption but still pulsing with life.
The Necronomicon lay open like an open wound, its pages fluttering despite the still air. This would be the final time he fed from its well—if he succeeded, it would become irrelevant. If he failed, irrelevant would be all that remained of him.
The codex lay closed at the edge of the circle, untouched since his return. He had taken it from the vault when the house stood silent, the ritual chamber still unfinished, unsure why he kept it. Now he opened it—not to read, but to place it at his side, its crescent eclipse sigil aligned with the ritual’s heart. The mantle had chosen him once. Now he chose it back.
"I bind my soul to flesh," he whispered, the incantation burning his throat as he spoke. "I anchor eternity to mortality. I choose stasis over change, preservation over transformation."
The ritual began simply—a few spoken words, a drop of blood on silver. Then the pain started.
It felt as though every cell in his body was being rewritten with white-hot needles. His nervous system mapped itself in fire, each nerve ending screaming as his soul carved channels into his flesh. The demonic corruption writhed like a living thing, fighting against the binding, trying to complete its work before the ritual could lock it in place.
Through vision blurred with tears of agony, Elijah saw his reflection in the polished obsidian walls—his form flickering between human and demon, caught in a eternal moment of transformation that would now never complete. The Cambion state, half-damned and half-mortal, crystalized into permanence.
The pain lasted exactly forty-seven minutes. When it ended, Elijah collapsed on the stone floor, gasping. His heartbeat had slowed to something barely perceptible—not dead, but no longer truly alive. His reflection in the obsidian showed eyes that held depths they hadn't possessed before, as if his soul had become visible through his pupils. But more importantly, he felt no urge to feed the Necronomicon, no whisper of corruption demanding sacrifice.
For the first time in decades, Elijah Morrigan was truly alone in his own mind.
The changes revealed themselves slowly, like dawn breaking over unfamiliar terrain. Three days after the ritual, Elijah realized he hadn't eaten. Not from lack of appetite—hunger itself had become a distant memory, as foreign as a childhood lullaby. He stood before his bathroom mirror, studying a reflection that looked unchanged yet felt fundamentally different. When he pressed a razor to his throat out of curiosity, the blade met resistance his human flesh had never possessed.
The cut healed before the first drop of blood could fall. A week later, the shadows in his study began responding to his moods. When frustration flared over a particularly stubborn translation, darkness pooled at the corners of his vision, reaching toward the offending text like eager fingers. He didn't command it—didn't even notice until his housekeeper mentioned how the library seemed "unnaturally dim" during his working hours.
The first true test came by accident. While examining a Roman burial urn in his collection, his fingers brushed against bone fragments that had crumbled to dust centuries ago. The fragments stirred. Not dramatically—just a subtle tremor, like metal shavings drawn to a magnet. But the dead thing in the urn recognized him now as something between their world and the living one.
The true nature of his transformation became clear six weeks later, during what should have been a fatal accident. Elijah had been examining a collection of cursed artifacts in his vault when an unstable Etruscan death mask released a concentrated burst of necrotic energy. The blast tore through his chest, leaving a cavity where his heart and lungs should have been. He watched, with detached fascination, as his own blood painted the stone walls in arterial sprays.
Death should have been instantaneous. Instead, he remained conscious, observing his body's impossible response. Where droplets of his blood had fallen, new tissue began to form—not healing, but rebuilding from the cellular level. Each individual cell carried the complete blueprint of his existence, his soul encoded into the very structure of his DNA like a living phylactery.
The regeneration was neither swift nor painless. Over the course of three agonizing hours, Elijah watched his ribcage reconstruct itself bone by bone, his organs weaving back into existence from scattered fragments. Even a single cell clinging to the stone wall sprouted into veins that reached toward his reforming heart. The process was grotesque, beautiful, and absolutely complete. When it ended, he was unchanged—and everything had changed.
When the pain ceased, Elijah reached for the codex. The cover was cool, the crescent eclipsed in shadow. He didn’t open it. He simply placed his hand upon it, and it no longer held him fast. It recognized him. The Eclipse had not returned. It had awakened.: neither the fallen archaeologist who had first opened the Necronomicon, nor the demon he had nearly become.
The Eclipse had been born.
The Eclipse—a being caught in eternal transition, forever balanced between light and shadow, life and death, salvation and damnation. Every cell in his body hummed with the permanence of his bound soul, making him effectively immortal through the most fundamental of bonds. And for the first time since his exile, Elijah smiled.
- 1920 - The Seeker of Balance
1920: 1920: Elijah, now an immortal anachronism, had carefully woven himself into the tapestry of the new century. His true nature remained a closely guarded secret, known to few. He operated from the deepest shadows, an unseen hand guiding events. His vast network of contacts, built over years with meticulous care, fed him information, allowing him to gather ancient, dangerous knowledge before it fell into reckless hands, to track and seal artifacts of immense power, and to subtly manipulate geopolitical currents to ensure that no single faction – be it mundane, magical, mundane, or demonic – could achieve unchecked dominance.
Neutral Observer & Silent Guardian: He became a master of strategic non-intervention and precise, minimal intervention. As The Eclipse, he understood the necessity of both light and darkness, creation and destruction. His goal was not to eradicate one for the other, but to maintain a precarious equilibrium. He might subtly thwart a burgeoning cult dedicated to some forgotten, malevolent deity one week, and the next, quietly undermine an overly zealous order of witch-hunters whose fanaticism threatened to ignite widespread chaos. He actively worked to prevent others from stumbling down the same ruinous path of forbidden knowledge that he himself had once trod, knowing intimately the catastrophic price of such power. Though few, if any, knew of his existence or the true extent of his influence, Elijah Morrigan became a silent, eternal guardian, his actions shaping the unseen currents of history.
- 1921 - The Discovery of Resonance
March 3rd, 1921 - Whitechapel, London The narrow alleyway still carried the lingering scent of incense and old parchment from the modest antiquities shop below. Elijah stood in the doorway of Mahmut Efendi's flat, having concluded another delicate negotiation regarding certain Ottoman artifacts that had found their way into London's underground networks. The elderly dealer had been surprisingly cooperative once Elijah had demonstrated his genuine knowledge of the items' historical significance—and their less conventional properties.
As he prepared to leave, a sound drifted through the paper-thin walls from the adjoining room—a voice, achingly pure, weaving through melodic intervals that seemed to bend space itself without any magic at all. The singer's technique was flawless, each ornamental phrase executed with mathematical precision, yet every note carried an emotional weight that struck something deep within Elijah's carefully guarded psyche.
Hüseyni makamı, his mind catalogued automatically, drawing from linguistic knowledge absorbed during decades of Ottoman archaeological research. But the academic classification fell away as the voice soared through a taksim that spoke of desert winds and ancient sorrows, of exile and the eternal ache of longing for home. Elijah found himself frozen in the doorway, a being capable of reshaping reality rendered motionless by a melody. The voice belonged to an elderly Turkish woman, keening softly as she sorted through her own belongings—a lament not for death, but for displacement, for the music and traditions that withered in foreign soil, far from their native context.
When the last note faded, Elijah stood in absolute silence. For the first time since his return from temporal exile, something within him had stirred that had nothing to do with power, strategy, or the careful balance he maintained between light and shadow. The music had reached past The Eclipse, past the living lich, past centuries of accumulated knowledge and guilt, to touch something irrevocably, recognizably human. He left without disturbing the woman's solitude, but the melody followed him through London's fog-shrouded streets like a ghost of his former self.
- 1922 - The Voice and the Strings
- June 1922 - Café Byzantium, Soho
The coffee was bitter, Turkish in preparation if not entirely authentic in its London interpretation. Elijah sat in the café's furthest corner, ostensibly reading The Times while his true attention focused on the small ensemble performing for the handful of Turkish émigrés who had made this cramped establishment their informal cultural sanctuary. He had returned here six times in as many weeks, drawn by something he was only beginning to understand. The music varied—sometimes a lone oud player working through intricate taksim improvisations, other evenings a small group attempting to recreate the complex orchestrations they remembered from Constantinople's grand concerts. Tonight featured Kemal Bey, a former court musician whose weathered hands still possessed their devastating precision on the kemençe, accompanied by a younger man whose voice navigated the demanding intervals of classical Turkish song with effortless grace. As the vocalist soared through a particularly complex Hicaz passage, Elijah found himself unconsciously matching the pitches under his breath. His own voice, untrained in this tradition but naturally suited to its demands, traced the melodic ornamentations with startling accuracy. The high tenor range that had served him well in his youthful humming now revealed its true potential—perfectly positioned for the soaring, emotionally charged vocal lines that formed the heart of Turkish classical music. But it was when Kemal Bey's violin joined the voice in heterophonic harmony—two melodic lines interweaving while maintaining their independence—that Elijah experienced his revelation. The instrument didn't merely accompany the singer; it conversed with him, completed him, created a musical dialogue that spoke of profound understanding between two artistic souls. That, Elijah realized, was what he needed to learn. Not just to listen, not even just to sing, but to engage in that ancient conversation between voice and strings. His own voice could carry the emotional weight of the tradition, but the violin would give him the technical precision, the ornamental possibilities, the ability to truly dialogue with the music rather than simply performing it. When the evening ended, Elijah approached Kemal Bey with the careful respect due to a master. The conversation was brief, conducted in Elijah's flawless Ottoman Turkish, and concluded with an introduction to "someone who might be willing to teach a serious student." Walking home through London's midnight streets, Elijah caught himself humming—not his old absent-minded habit, but a proper Turkish melody, his high tenor voice finding its natural home in the tradition's demanding vocal ranges. For the first time in over two decades, The Eclipse allowed himself to anticipate something purely for the joy it might bring.
- 1923-1924 - The Humbling
- October 1923 - Morrigan Estate, Study
The violin lay across Elijah's knees like an accusation. Six months of practice, six months of dedicating precious hours to something as mundane as finger positioning and bow technique, and still the instrument produced sounds that would make a proper musician weep—though not from beauty.
This was... unprecedented. Elijah Morrigan had mastered death magic, conquered temporal manipulation, and bent reality to his will through eons of exile. He could command shadows to dance and make blood sing in men's veins. Yet four strings of catgut and a wooden bow consistently defeated him.
The irony was not lost on him. He could, with a thought, manipulate the air pressure around the strings, use gravity magic to guide his bow with mathematical precision, even subtly adjust time's flow to give himself infinite moments to perfect each phrase. But such shortcuts would defeat the purpose entirely. The music needed to come from him—not from The Eclipse, not from his accumulated power, but from whatever remained of Elijah Morrigan, the man who had once hummed while copying ancient glyphs.
His fingers found the familiar position for what his Turkish instructor, Ahmet Bey, called "the weeping interval"—the microtonal bend that could transform mere sound into lamentation. The note emerged cracked, imprecise, thoroughly mortal in its imperfection. Perfect.
- February 1924 - Private Music Room, Belgravia
"Yavaş, Elijah Efendi. Yavaş. The makam cannot be rushed." Ahmet Bey's weathered fingers demonstrated the proper süslemeler—the ornamental phrases that transformed simple melodies into vessels for profound emotion. At seventy-three, the master musician possessed hands that trembled from age but never wavered when touching his oud's strings. He had agreed to instruct the peculiar English professor partly for the generous payment, partly from curiosity about this foreigner who approached Turkish classical music with the intensity of a religious convert.
What Ahmet Bey could not know was that his student's intensity stemmed from desperation rather than devotion. Each lesson was a lifeline, each properly executed phrase a small victory against the abyss of inhuman power that threatened to consume what remained of Elijah's soul. The old master's teachings were mercilessly precise: "Music is mathematics made emotional, but emotion without discipline becomes mere noise. You must serve the makam before it will serve you."
Elijah found himself actually taking notes—not magical formulae or strategic calculations, but simple reminders written in increasingly confident Ottoman script: Remember to breathe with the phrase. The silence between notes carries as much meaning as the sound. Let the bow weight itself. For two hours each Tuesday, Elijah Morrigan ceased to exist. In his place sat merely a student, struggling with an ancient art that demanded humility, patience, and above all, the willingness to fail repeatedly in pursuit of something beautiful.
When Ahmet Bey's arthritic fingers finally coaxed Elijah's violin into producing a clean, emotionally resonant Hicaz scale, both men sat in profound silence. The master nodded once—the highest praise his reserved nature allowed.
Elijah had not felt such genuine accomplishment since before he had first opened the Necronomicon.
- 1926 - The Breakthrough
- September 14th, 1926 - Morrigan Estate, Dawn
The music room stood empty save for Elijah and the accumulated ghosts of two years' worth of practice. Morning light filtered through heavy curtains, casting geometric patterns across the Persian carpets—patterns that reminded him of the mathematical relationships underlying makam theory, the precise intervals that transformed mere sound into transcendence.
He had dismissed the household staff for the morning. What he intended to attempt required absolute privacy, not from fear of supernatural detection, but from something far more vulnerable: the possibility of genuine emotional exposure.
The piece he had chosen was Taksim-i Hüseyni—a classical improvisation form that demanded not only technical mastery but the ability to channel one's deepest feelings through structured musical expression. It was, Ahmet Bey had warned, "music that reveals the soul of the performer. One cannot hide behind mere technique." Elijah positioned his violin, his left hand finding the familiar grove worn by months of practice. The bow settled against the strings with the weight of accumulated muscle memory—not magically enhanced, but earned through repetition, through failure, through the slow accumulation of mortal skill.
The first note emerged clean, true, carrying within it the accumulated weight of three years' dedication. As the improvisation unfolded, Elijah found himself transported beyond technique, beyond conscious thought. His fingers moved through microtonal ornamentations that spoke of exile and return, of guilt and the painful process of redemption. The violin sang of timeless isolation, of watching civilizations rise and fall, of the terrible burden of power wielded without wisdom. But more than that—it sang of hope. Of the possibility that something human could survive even the most profound transformation. Each phrase was both lament and promise, acknowledging the darkness while refusing to be consumed by it.
When the last note faded, Elijah stood in absolute stillness, the violin trembling slightly in hands that had not shaken in over a century. He had just performed music that required no reality manipulation, no temporal adjustments, no supernatural enhancement of any kind. Simply a man, an instrument, and the accumulated weight of emotional truth translated into sound.
In that moment, Elijah Morrigan understood why music had become his anchor to humanity: it was the one power that grew stronger through limitation, more beautiful through the acceptance of mortal constraints.
The Eclipse could reshape reality itself. But only Elijah could make that violin weep.
- 1927 - The Integration
- November 1927 - Royal Geographic Society, London
Professor Elijah Morrigan adjusted his evening coat as the last of the Royal Geographic Society's members filed out of the lecture hall, their conversations still buzzing with enthusiasm for his presentation on "Musical Traditions of the Late Ottoman Empire." The slides had been well-received—carefully curated photographs of instruments, notation systems, and performance contexts that painted Turkish classical music as a worthy subject of academic study rather than mere exotic entertainment. What the distinguished audience hadn't realized was that they had just witnessed the final rehearsal for a much larger performance.
"Fascinating work, Professor," commented Lord Ashworth, the Society's treasurer. "Though I must say, your practical demonstrations were quite unexpected. Where did you study Turkish violin technique?" "Constantinople, primarily," Elijah replied with practiced ease. "Though one learns that such music cannot truly be mastered in foreign conservatories. It requires... immersion in the cultural context."
The lie was so smooth it barely registered as deception. By now, Professor Morrigan's scholarly credentials were impeccable: published papers on Ottoman archaeological sites, correspondence with institutions across Europe and the Near East, a reputation for meticulous research coupled with genuine expertise. The musical component had integrated seamlessly into his established identity.
But more than mere cover, the music had become essential to his actual work. Three weeks ago, while negotiating the delicate matter of a cursed Byzantine manuscript that had surfaced in a Vienna auction house, Elijah had found himself humming a Nihavend melody during the tense discussions. The opposing faction's representative—a Turkish bibliophile with his own supernatural connections—had recognized both the musical form and its flawless execution. What might have been hours of careful diplomatic maneuvering had resolved in minutes, sealed by mutual respect and shared cultural understanding.
As he packed away his violin, Elijah reflected on how completely the music had woven itself into both his mortal identity and his immortal purpose. The Royal Opera House had already confirmed his performance slot for November 1928—Professor Morrigan's public debut as a musician, carefully scheduled to coincide with a period when several sensitive supernatural matters would require his London-based attention.
The violin case closed with a satisfying click. Tomorrow, he would return to being The Eclipse, the silent guardian managing the delicate balance between light and shadow across Europe's increasingly unstable political landscape. Tonight, he was simply a scholar-musician, walking through London's gaslit streets with the quiet satisfaction of work well done.
Both identities were real. Both served their purpose. And in the space between them, something irrevocably human continued to sing.
- 1928 - The Performance of Perfect Chaos
November 15th, 1928 - Royal Opera House, London The violin sang against Elijah's throat, its resonance merging with his voice as the makam's intricate patterns unfolded in the hushed auditorium. Six hundred souls held their breath as Professor Elijah Morrigan—scholar of Ottoman musical traditions, according to tonight's program—guided them through melodic territories few Western ears had ever traversed. The piece demanded absolute precision: each microtonal inflection, each ornamental cascade, every breath calculated to serve the music's ancient mathematics.
The psychic whisper arrived during the taksim's most delicate passage. Professor. Istanbul. Auction house on Galata Bridge. Fragment confirmed—third binding, intact seal. Three buyers: German occultists, French hermetic order, private collector with Vatican connections. Bidding begins in four minutes.
Elijah's bow never wavered. The audience—diplomats, academics, society's finest draped in evening silk—remained transfixed as his voice soared through the ascending tetrachord. None noticed the imperceptible shift, the way shadows at the hall's periphery deepened by degrees that defied the gas lamps' steady flame.
Time folded. Between one heartbeat and the next, Elijah's consciousness split—a fragment of himself stepping sideways through shadow-space, emerging in the crowded auction house three thousand miles away. His body continued the performance, years of disciplined practice allowing muscle memory to guide bow and fingers through the complex passages while his projected awareness assessed the situation. The auctioneer's hammer hadn't fallen yet. Good.
The cemetery's disturbance pulsed against his supernatural senses like a migraine made of ectoplasm. Highgate's newer graves were practically vibrating, their occupants stirred by some fool's botched séance. Through shadow-stepping perception, he glimpsed the source: three university students with a ouija board and entirely too much enthusiasm. The spirits they'd awakened weren't malevolent, merely... enthusiastic. By morning, groundskeepers would find flowers rearranged into cryptic patterns and every headstone facing true north.
Lord Pemberton's faction demands immediate arbitration. The Whitmore Circle refuses to acknowledge jurisdiction over familiar-binding protocols. Situation escalating in Hyde Park, near Speaker's Corner.
The message materialized as ink bleeding through shadow-time, words appearing on air before dissolving. Elijah's fingers danced through the violin's most technically demanding passage—a cascade of thirty-second notes that would challenge virtuosos twice his apparent age. The audience leaned forward, entranced. Through temporally-dilated awareness, he addressed all three crises simultaneously. In Istanbul, his shadow-self whispered certain facts about the auction house's foundation stones—built on consecrated ground, poor choice for trafficking cursed artifacts—into the right ears. Sudden 'structural concerns' would delay proceedings until his people could intervene properly.
The cemetery required finesse. Elijah wove shadow-tendrils through Highgate's gates, gently shepherding the confused spirits back to their proper rest while planting suggestions in the students' minds: cold wind, time to leave, definitely time to leave. By the performance's end, they'd be halfway to their dormitories with no clear memory of why they'd fled.
Hyde Park's petty supernatural politics demanded more direct intervention. Through a carefully constructed time-shadow fold, Elijah projected his presence between the feuding factions—not physically, but as an authoritative voice that seemed to emerge from the park's ancient oaks. The Eclipse's reputation preceded him; both sides recognized the subtle harmonics of power that accompanied his words. Arbitration could wait until after midnight. Everyone would return to their homes. Now. The makam reached its climax, Elijah's voice and violin intertwining in patterns that spoke of desert winds and forgotten empires. Applause erupted like thunder, six hundred people rising as one. He lowered his instrument, bowed with practiced elegance, and allowed himself the smallest smile.
Three crises resolved, one transcendent performance delivered, and not a single audience member aware that they'd witnessed the casual orchestration of reality itself.
As he departed the stage, Elijah's consciousness fully reintegrated, the temporal dilations collapsing back to linear time. His whiskey glass waited in the dressing room, somehow refilled despite no one having entered. The liquid caught the gaslight with perfect amber clarity.
He raised it in a silent toast to the evening's mundane chaos, then drained it in one smooth motion. Outside, London's supernatural community settled into its proper rhythms, three potential disasters quietly filed under 'handled.'
Tomorrow, he would return to being the scholarly Professor Morrigan. Tonight, The Eclipse allowed himself a moment's satisfaction in work well done.