Where Thal’Zarok treads, the waters rise—not to cleanse, but to drown.
Beneath the blackened waves, where the light of the sun is devoured and the weight of the abyss crushes all, is the remains of a kingdom. Its name has long been lost, drowned in time and swallowed by the tides—but its ruler remains.
Thal’Zarok was once a king, sovereign of an island nation that bent the ocean to its will. A conqueror, a warlord, a man whose ambition knew no shore. He ruled with an iron hand—until the sea took it from him.
The Fall into the Deep
Obsessed with dominion, Thal’Zarok sought power beyond mortality. He turned to the whispers carried by the tides, the drowned scriptures of forgotten beings, and the echoes of something that slumbered far beneath. He prayed to the abyss, and the abyss answered.
The sea cracked open beneath him, pulling him into a darkness older than time. There, in the crushing silence of the deep, he was remade. His body twisted, reshaped by the will of the Dreamer beneath the waves. Where once flesh and bone had ruled, now only writhing tendrils remained. His right arm—his sword hand, his king’s hand—was gone, replaced by the shifting mass of abyssal appendages, their movements no longer his alone to command. The whispers had become voices. The voices had become hunger.
Thal’Zarok did not return as a man. He rose as something more… and something far less.
The Abyssal Fang
Clutched within his writhing grasp, entwined in the mass of his own cursed flesh, was the Abyssal Fang—a spear unlike any forged by man. Carved from the spine of a drowned leviathan and bound with tendrils of living abyssal matter, the weapon does not merely strike—it pierces the boundary between the physical and the eldritch. When he wills it, the spear lashes out as if alive, its reach extending far beyond its form, hunting like a predator of the deep.
With every strike, the ocean bends, obeying his call for a fleeting moment before resisting once more. The power is never his alone—he is but a vessel, an arm of a will far greater than his own. And the more he wields it, the more the abyss takes from him.
The Tyrant’s Curse
No longer a king of men, Thal’Zarok turned against his own kingdom, offering it to the tides as tribute to the Dreamer. His people did not perish—they transformed, bodies warping into grotesque shapes, bound to the same abyss that had claimed him. Now, they wander the ruins of their drowned home, caught between devotion and damnation, servants of the master who was once their king.
And Thal’Zarok remains, lurking beneath the waves, neither dead nor truly alive. He does not walk the land as he once did, for his form is no longer meant for it. The tides are his domain, and when he rises, it is not the ocean that welcomes him, but the nightmares of all who dare to sail its waters.
For he is no longer merely a tyrant. He is an extension of something greater. A will that does not slumber. A hunger that does not end.
For the ocean does not serve him willingly… but it has learned to obey.