VVIZARDRY

History has had a long line of wizard-kings to terrorize and steer it, demented bastards with an ego so great that the world was forced to orbit them; in this way, they are completely identical to normal kings, save for an ability to make that last line more than just a metaphor. There have been efforts to trace this line back to its origin point, the one who inspired every subsequent ruling magus. There's the Serpent-Men, of course, who were basically an entire species of wizard-kings, but they're nearly all dead these days and they weren't human, anyways, so they don't count.

The reason they're basically extinct was a man, the very first wizard-king. He was called Bringer of Fire, Torchbearer, but his first and favorite name was Arum.

Charles R. Knight

Near the end of the Serpent-Empires, humanity as a species was in a pretty sorry state. Well, they were doing worse before that, what with being chattel slaves and livestock to inhuman blood-drinking monsters and all, but once the Serpents collapsed into a bunch of warring city-states, their interest in humanity changed from a general desire to keep their livestock and slaves alive to hunting wild populations of primitive men for sport. Arum belonged to one of these human tribes, struggling for survival in a ruthless world; having been born with a club foot, life was even less easy for him. However, he was as clever as a man could be in those days, a genius in days before books and education, and among a people with spirits crushed by inhuman cruelties and miserable subsistence, his force of will was unmatched.

Winter approached, and although the Serpents and their flesh-crafted servitors remained dormant in their walled cities, the tribe's communal fire had died and could not be stoked again. Doom seemed certain, but young Arum would not accept this. He hobbled around the cold ashes day and night, screaming obscenities at the dead fire, demanding for it to live. And it did.

In doing this, Arum became the first wizard. There had been shamans, yes, making bargains with spirits and healing the wounded- but Arum had looked reality in the eye, and when he told it what to do, it obeyed.

His rise to power was meteoric, reaching heights that humanity had not yet seen. First he advised the chieftain, and then he became the chieftain, and then other tribes sought him out for guidance and in turn became his subjects. He was a leader of leaders, the very first king- he even wore a crown, although his was little more than a circlet made from beads of gold and amber. His burgeoning kingdom warred against the fading city-states of the Serpents, laying them to waste one by one with fire, flint, and newly-discovered magics; the Serpents were never a strongly social culture, even at their peak, and the greatest contribution to their final defeat was their own unwillingness to swallow their pride and unite against this threat until it was far too late. Many individual Serpents simply cloistered themselves in isolated lairs to try and ride this little uprising out until the world was ripe to be conquered again. The last of these city-states was swallowed by the earth itself before the amassed army of King Arum, who concluded that this great, final victory was a sign that the world had finally decided to favor mankind.

Arum finally settled down to build his empire, and then realized that he would basically have to invent the concept, at least a version of the concept that had not been devised by bloodthirsty snake-people with a tendency towards sociopathy. He invented a lot of things, like large-scale agriculture, civic planning, and towers (which he was a big fan of), although the actual practical execution of these crazy ideas fell to his subordinate chieftains and advisors while Arum sat in his lavish three-story house and tried to invent more magic without any spellbooks or written language. Both ended up with pretty mixed but ultimately successful results; do you like having bread on your table? Do you like throwing fireballs at people? You've got Arum and his beleaguered underlings to thank. Near the end of his life, Arum sought out and managed to actually achieve immortality; as long as fires burned in his capital city, he would live forever. A couple years after he figured this out, his capital was drowned by a terrible flood that struck the river valley it had been built in; as the city's fires were extinguished, so too was King Arum, first of his kind. The survivors went on to found no shortage of other lost civilizations, each legends in their own right, while the Torchbearer was lost to the abyss of time.

Domain- That old river valley where Arum had once ruled his capital is still inhabited to this day. Children dig up bits of flint. A bright-eyed young woman wears a necklace of gold and amber beads she found while digging a ditch, and thinks of becoming a mayor one day. Towns throw festivals around bonfires and burn serpent-shaped effigies, although they no longer remember why.

Army- This happened in prehistory, man. They're all dead, their children are dead, and their children's children are--get this--dead as well.

Well, not quite. The Torchbearer tried to make a company of warriors who would never die or face defeat in his later years. He tried his hand at Necromancy, burning the dead to bind their spirits into shifting, formless bodies of flint chips- which did not make for very stable, and therefore useful, soldiers. He was a powerful wizard, but the art was still unrefined. These dozens of Stone Blade Men were sealed in a cave, which was then buried under a mound; he didn't know how to lay them to rest, and ended up dying before he could figure out how to do it.

The Stone Blade Men were already pretty unstable from the process of their creation. Being sealed in a cave for untold ages did not help. A minor earthquake eventually freed them from this confinement, and the ones who hadn't gone catatonic and de-animated shifted out from the darkness to find a world that had forgotten that it had even forgotten them. These survivors ambush travellers by night, demanding observance of obscure rituals in a language with no living native speakers, hissing with the sounds of scraping rocks before they start cutting people to ribbons. 

Castle- The THREE STORY HOUSE! Just kidding, it's nothing but dust these days. But there were extensive systems of tunnels under it, where the Bringer of Fire did most of his more dangerous experiments, including the creation of the Stone Blade Men and the opening of several portals to the elemental plane of fire. The walls are all extensively painted upon, recording years of magical study- the first spellbook. There's old pieces of Serpent-Man technology down here, too, spoils of war that the king didn't want in public view; of particular note is a large basalt tub of gelatinous red pulp that regenerates any wound or lost limb bathed in it, although the healed flesh comes back cold and covered in scales.

Monster- Domesticated animals, the Stone Blade Men, and while he didn't invent Fire Elementals, he definitely gave them one of their first big footholds on the material plane.

Spell- Create Fire, Fireball, all kinds of pyromancy. Of special note was the unnamed spell (Bind Soul to Flames?) Arum used to make himself immortal, which arguably made him the first lich as well. A man of many achievements, that Arum.