“Their roots are ancient, these necromancers. The cult appropriated the name ‘Sindon’ from an Elder Race, one which initially dwelt in waste and arid places beyond the sea. There they learned their dark arts from the demons who inhabited this wilderness after being banished there by the servants of Elyon, the ancient priest-kings and queens of Aslem-Beth.
“The Sindons then rose up from the waste places and overthrew the tribes of certain men of the west, upon whose backs they built the Sindon Empire of Vohl-Uz. Then, after a millennium, their rule and culture were overthrown by barbarians out of the east who made Vohl-Uz their own.
“The last remnants of the Sindon race died out in the days of this new kingdom that supplanted them, and the new kingdom itself was already old when Atlantis was little more than a confederacy of island port cities.
“The Sindon cult, then, grew from those who became acolytes and disciples to the few blood members of the race before they finally died out. Once their greatest surviving necromancer, ‘the Mirror Magus’ was his title, lived on a palatial estate by a great lake. Here his followers sat at his feet and learned dark ways which should have perished with the last one of this Elder Race.
“The Mirror Magus plotted to slay the then-sitting king and raise up a man of the royal council to revive the Sindon Empire. Except for a Pict loyal to the sitting king, who slew this magus of the elder blood, the plot would have succeeded.
“But the Mirror Magus had already taught his cult to converse with the demons of the Sindons’ native lands. The race had maintained communication with them long after their exodus from the wilderness that the two once shared. When the cult began to practice necromancy, it was not the dead but those same demons of the wastes with whom they communed.
“The Mirror Magus also had been able to instruct them in the occult preparation of looking glasses, and how they may be used to supplant the gazer’s personality, and to imprison the demons with whom they communed to serve them. Thus the Sindons turned what they had learned from the demons back upon them, using this dark knowledge to make familiars of entities so proud that they had once thought to storm heaven with a great mirror of their own…”
CONFIRMED SINDONS (some identifiable only by title; most are only still known by one or two references at all in the extant literature):
BEFORE ATLANTIS
The Sindons of Vohl-Uz
Dynasty of Doom: the Sindon Monarchs
Heasoid Doom, First Sindon Monarch of Vohl-Uz
Empress Morcades (Self-Proclaimed)
The Apollyon
Slayer of Souls
The Hierophant
After the Fall of the Sindon Empire, in the Days of the Atlantean High King
Death’s Head Doom
The Mirror Magus
ANCIENT WORLD
Linus Sergious-Antipater
Antigone Augusta Agrippa
Felix-Samares (Antigone’s Cat, Believed To Hold the Spirit of Heasoid Doom. She Intended to Enthrone Him and Turn The Roman Empire Into the Neo-Occulta Sindon Empire. Some Historians Argue She Succeeded).
MEDIEVAL PERIOD
Post Norman Invasion
Vicomte Yves Fitzavignon
Demoiselle Lys Fitzavignon
Duchess Albion Grey
MODERN ERA
Coraline Gruszka, The Mother of Tears
King Doran Serapion II
Maeol Gealdor (posing as the revived Sindon Hierophant of Vohl-Uz)
–all of the above from Reverend Munnin Woanaz’s annotations to manuscripts found in the cabin formerly inhabited by the late Marguerite Chopin, courtesy of the Munnin Woanaz Special Collection, Royal Archive at the Main Palace at Elfarborg, Kingdom of Aarastad.
BELOW: Reverend Munnin Woanaz is confronted by one of the last confirmed Sindons, Coraline Gruszka, “The Mother of Tears.” Art by Neil Vokes; Coloring by Nathan Pride.
