Vecna

Vecna was a once-human lich that ascended to godhood, known across the planes as the Whispered One. His past is riddled in mystery, with accounts of who he was prior to becoming a necromancer lich. As a mortal he hailed from the meek farming town of Oerth, before leaving to study at a magical institution. Becoming paranoid of his mortality, Vecna sought lichdom as the key to his longevity, and soon lead a cult known as the Undying to test his powers. Yet during a ritual in his tower meant to ascend him to a greater state, his loyal aide Kas severed his hand and gouged his eye, interrupting him mid-ceremony and banishing Vecna to an eternal state of purgatory.
While stuck as a spectral entity seeking a physical return to the mortal world, he traveled through the Forgotten Realms and bore witness to the wars between demons and lesser deities that rampaged across them. One such being he would encounter was Valdreg, a banished Source God that sought vengeance and ruin. The two would be in conflict multiple times, with Vecna having to retreat into the shadows due to the growing power and support Valdreg would encumber over the millennia.
After so long, Vecna would finally find his vessel to lead him back to the mortal world; a satyr named Dyokyros, crying over his dead sister. Vecna would revive his sister, and Dyokyros would serve him and draw magic from Vecna's innate power. Dyokyros would venture to the High World, where Vecna would sense his lost hand and eye now in the hands of the vile Myslevian in the academy of Windurstein. Vecna would brand Dyokyros as an Undying, and his devout follower would travel to Windurstein to reclaim his lost body parts.
Vecna planned to revel in a world of mass undeath, where all were immortal and could live so long as they pledged undying fidelity to the lich god himself. Vecna would grow irritated with Dyokyros, possessing his body and battling Valdreg through his own vessel, Eve Linfree. A massive battle ensued between Vecna, Valdreg, the Angel of Bone, and the High World Guardians, as Dyokyros would overcome Vecna's hold and claim his life back from him. 
Despite his efforts to kill the Guardians and ascend to godhood, he was ultimately defeated by the combined efforts of the Guardians, Valdreg, and a resisting Dyokyros. Reclaiming control of his body and banishing Vecna, the lich would return to the Forgotten Realms powerless and forever stranded for the rest of his days.
==History==
===Accounts of Origin===
There are many stories regarding the childhood of Vecna and what made him the way he was. The first records were fairly malevolent and vile in nature; he was an emissary from the Forgotten Realms, a demon overtaking the body of a poor, innocent baby. Through this infant child, he would slowly plot his eventual rise to lichdom, to create a world where all undead bowed to his will. The mother died at childbirth, and before departing home for his arcanic travels he would kill his father as well. During his travels, liches who heralded his return found him and thus started the birth of his cult. This backstory is believed to have been fabricated, to try and justify the horrific tales and rumors of his reign in this world.
Another tale recalled that Vecna was a magistrate of a powerful kingdom, but over time he sought to covet the throne for his own desire. One night, the great demon lord Orcus would come to him, and give him a contract; if Vecna acted as his disciple, he would give him all the power he needed to become a powerful enough wizard to dethrone the king. He would become the ravenous lich he would soon be known as, and slay the king in cold blood. He would become the lord of this land for years, churning it into a land of decay and rot. But soon he would be destroyed by a group of courageous adventurers, and banished to lands unknown. While most believed this theory, it would soon all fall apart when records of these adventurers were never found or confirmed to have existed. The decayed kingdom, while being the location of his lair the Rotted Tower, was never stated to have become that way due to centuries of his reign, and more so became that way after a swift and horrific ritual held at the tower.
The current account of his backstory is the most believed, yet it is still vague in specifics. It states that Vecna was born a half-elven farmer from a town called Oerth, whose mother died during his adolescence and sent his father into a depressive spiral where he committed suicide. Vecna would grow a fear of death, and would try to find a way to prevent himself from succumbing to his own mortality. He would study overseas in magical academies, and became a very powerful wizard. He would study ancient cultures that focused on the extension of their own life, and soon leave the academy to amass a group of acolytes that also sought immortality. While the records of a person named Vecna were found in Oerth, it is still debated as to when this person existed; some believe he was born after Vecna's reign, but others state that this was where he was initially conceived. Oerth is a deserted, ruined town festering with goblins, so any further evidence to prove this tale true are no more.
Vecna being his name wasn't even known across the lands. It was simply a rumor yet to be proven true, and as such he has accumulated a mass of aliases over the years that try to capture his personage; the Lich King, the Undying King, yet the most popular one that stuck around was the Whispered One. 
===The Undying and the Rotted Tower===
Vecna and his cult would be known as the Undying, and they would venture to old tombs in order to find traces of their studies. This journey took decades, and age was catching up fast to the half-elf. It was believed he viewed he and his acolytes as saviors of humanity, a cure to age and death, but over the years and further conflicts he would slowly decay into the being he is feared as. One of the first conflicts that turned him bitter was encountering a church that had an artifact he sought after, yet the clerics refused to give him the help he needed. Vecna also began developing an incurable sickness deep in his bones, and he couldn't bear the thought of dying so close to the end of his mission. He and his cult destroyed the church and engaged in a large-scale conflict with the clerics, slaughtering them all in the fire. This encounter would make Vecna recognize an acolyte of his as his greatest mage, a tiefling named Acererak. A paladin of the church would also pledge servitude to Vecna and his cult on behalf of his survival, a human named Kas. Vecna would make the ruined town his base of study, as he began indulging in the great evil within himself.
Vecna would subject the survivors to unspeakable torture and experimentation, struggling to find a way to perfect immortality. He would create reborn, beings brought from the dead when the remnant soul within them awakens, and would use them as slaves for his cult. He would subject Kas to an experiment that inadvertently turned him into a vampire, thus discovering a new way to create vampires. These experiments would persist, before Vecna had an idea; he would need the souls of a thousand innocents in order to unlock the gates to immortality that he so sought. 
So one night, Vecna and the Undying went to a neighboring city and began conducting a ritual of mass death and famine. At the beckoning of his hand, the Rotted Tower erupted from the earth, which Vecna would describe as the arm breaking through the mortal barrier. Fire would bellow from the ground, streets erupting in necrotic energy as all rotted and decayed in record time. Within the hour, the entire kingdom became a graveyard, and Vecna had a thousand souls at his side for sacrifice. To fully convert himself to lichdom, he and his followers would put their souls in phylacteries, hiding them in the Rotted Tower they would now rule from.
===Betrayal of Kas the Bloody Handed===
Vecna's body was dying, and his time was almost up. Thanks to Acererak, he discovered that with the amount of souls they coveted from the land they could transfer them all evenly amongst themselves, with the amount of souls being enough to render themselves practically immortal. Age would now have no bearing on he and his kind, and they would be able to live as gods amongst men. The one who stayed quiet during this entire ordeal was Kas.
Kas pledged servitude to Vecna because he wanted to live, believing the Undying were saviors of a religion he felt trapped by. But soon, he realized how cruel and violent they would become. Vecna was no longer a savant doing this for the betterment of all mortals, he was now a power hungry lord seeking godhood. He viewed Kas as inhuman, that the vampiric transformation robbed him of any humanity he could of ever had. Kas, dehumanized and enslaved, knew that nobody could stop Vecna from ascending to godhood and spreading his necrotic reign across the world at large.
On the eve of the ritual, Vecna and his liches enacted their ascension to immortality. Surrounding a pool of necrotic flame and liquid, their cryptic tongue echoed throughout the tower as Vecna grew closer and closer to the immortality he sought for so long. But mid-ceremony, Kas would sever Vecna's hand and pop his eye out with a dagger. The ritual became unstable, and as Vecna bled out and screamed in pain, Kas cursed Vecna for robbing him of his humanity and kicked him into the green inferno. In a burst of energy, Vecna's body rotted and regrew over and over in a horrific cycle of pain and rebirth, before all imploded in on itself and Vecna was no more. Kas would slay the liches soon after, with Acererak fleeing in a decayed state. Kas would take notice of Vecna's eye and hand, and threw them out of the Rotted Tower window into the moat below. He could feel the innate magical energy residing in those artifacts and knew they were too dangerous to be left for human hands to pry.
Kas would hunt down the cowardly Acererak to a tomb hidden in a mountain. During his hunt for the lich, Acererak would dub himself Acererak the Eternal, and would amass a group of Undying sympathizers to try and accomplish what Vecna could not. He would reside in the Tomb of Horrors, where travelers would be slain and feed the souls of his dormant phylactery as he and his acolytes tried recreating the same ritual that Kas interrupted. Kas would find the Tomb of Horrors, and do battle with the powerful Acererak in his dominion. After losing his arm, he would finally put an end to Acererak by breaking his phylactery and beheading Acererak. He would limp out of the tomb, and records of Kas' life afterwards would be left up in the air. Some say he continued his lich hunt until death, others believed he lived a humble life in a cabin. No matter the tale, all end with him passing away peacefully at the rise of a morning sun.
But Vecna would not be dead. Due to Kas' interruption and actions, Vecna was placed in a purgatory state between pure godhood and mortality. Vecna had the powers and foresight of a god, being able to peer through his severed eye, yet he could not accumulate the energy necessary to return to the mortal world in a body. He could only wander in this new, foreign land filled with demons and the most horrific kinds of beings; the Forgotten Realms.
===Meeting Valdreg===
Vecna's time in the Forgotten Realms was as irritating as it was enlightening. He would witness the Khor Agul firsthand, learning of the different sub-cultures and groups such as demons and the illithids. He saw these undead, demonic forces as tempered and uncivilized, and believed that with his new powers he would be able to tame them under his command. He would gather a new Undying cult consisting of demonic liches, and sought an alliance with the illithids due to their technology and great psychic powers. But he would encounter several lesser deities that attempted to destroy Vecna and his campaign of terror, one of which being the ravenous and gluttonous Angel of Bone. Vecna would struggle against these foes, but he would defeat each one easily, proving himself to be a powerful being that could perhaps breach the barriers of the Forgotten Realms and return to the mortal world.
But Vecna would meet a mysterious figure of incomplete form and black hair. In the absence of chunks of his physical form, a dark volcanic storm making up for what was lost. Clad in black robes and a silvery, demonic helm, Vecna would bear witness to the rumored King of Malice himself, Valdreg. He would hear murmurs of his existence as a calamity amongst the Khor Agul, but his first encounter would spell doom for Vecna. In their first encounter, Valdreg had eradicated almost all of Vecna's forces and nearly killed the lich king. Valdreg didn't want to kill Vecna however, and wanted his aid as his follower. Valdreg spoke of an event called Eschaton, where all would thrive in rapturous harmony, and needed all the help he could get before it happened. Vecna hated the idea of serving another god, and so he rejected his offer and retreated to gather his forces.
For the millennia he remained, Vecna would beckon armies that ravaged the Forgotten Realms. He would do battle with other demon warlords, all fighting for supremacy as the true lord of all demonkind. But Valdreg would rarely intervene, arriving every once in a while to reset the playing field for all who sought his crown. And with each sighting, Valdreg would prove to win over the loyalty of the Khor Agul. His main opposition was Vecna, who would grow more unhinged and spiteful as their battles raged on. But after every battle and every war would the lich king slowly realize this was all for naught. Valdreg would simply be too powerful and beloved for his throne to be beseeched. Vecna would have to find another way to usurp Valdreg, and potentially use the fabled Eschaton for his own benefit whenever it comes. So Vecna would continue his wars from the shadows, forcing his liches and demonic forces to do his work as he researched a way to return to the mortal plane and defeat Valdreg.
=== A Susceptible Patron ===
His attempts to return to the mortal plane were unsuccessful, with the Forgotten Realms being sealed off so securely that not even Valdreg or the Khor Agul could find a way out. But he discovered a potential way for him to return permanently, in the form of patronage. If he could find someone in need and offer them a contract that bound them to his power, he could use them to aid in his return to power and glory. And in the Mediterranean land of Patrída, he heard the cries of a young satyr weeping over the body of his sister. Appearing as a god from the Hellenic Pantheon of the region, he offered to revive the satyr's sister so long he be his acolyte when the time came. The satyr, whose name would be Dyokyros, would agree to the contract and Vecna would become his patron as a result.
Vecna saw Dyokyros as a perfect acolyte, because he was so naive and gullible to the lich's true intentions. He wouldn't ask much of Dyokyros, waiting until he absolutely needed his aid to begin enforcing his side of the offer. Dyokyros and his sister Zia would travel to the High World for business purposes, but Vecna could sense that something was different in this uncharted region. The longer Vecna remained Dyo's patron, the more aware he became of what was out in the mortal plane with regards to potential threats and assistants to his cause. But once Dyokyros became a seemingly permanent member of the High World Guardians, Vecna began to realize something that was being whispered amongst the Khor Agul; Valdreg had found someone to aid him in the mortal plane. Not only that, but Vecna realized that the longer he remained in the Forgotten Realms the weaker he became. Should he not find a way to finish his ascension, Vecna would become a mortal trapped in the Forgotten Realms.
=== Dyokyros the Undying ===
With this realization, Vecna would ask Dyokyros directly to fulfill his debt to the lich. Vecna could sense not just Valdreg, but a minor deity named the Angel of Bone that he encountered in the Forgotten Realms. He could also sense that his missing hand and eye were seemingly intact as well, and have persisted across history as ancient artifacts that have been in the possession of countless bloodthirsty kings and mages. Dyokyros would agree to these terms, but he didn't truly feel the drive to fulfill the offer until Zia was killed in Gromwell from a bomb placed by tyrant Uvar Myslevian. Seeing Zia's death as a necessary way to push Dyo towards a darker, yet necessary path.
To celebrate Dyokyros' newfound darkness, he adorned him in acolyte attire his followers would wear during this time as a mortal, and gave him the title 'Dyokyros the Undying'. Dyokyros would indulge in darker tendencies during this low, such as impulsively strangling his ally Gully or killing Father Driscoll, and this delighted Vecna. What didn't delight him was the Guardians attempting to bring him out of his darkness, believing that empathy and kinship is a weakness in order to succeed. Especially with regards to his ascension, he didn't need Dyokyros listening to his friends and dissuading him from his true purpose.
When Dyokyros begrudgingly spent two days helping a hag return to her home in the Feywild, he was met with a possessed Heinrich Thorton controlled by the Angel of Bone. The Angel of Bone wished for a brief alliance between him and Vecna so they'd be able to kill Valdreg's host, to which Vecna agreed to. Vecna knew that he could easily kill the Angel of Bone, but the possibility of another deity helping him with Valdreg's severance from the mortal plane couldn't have been brushed aside. A brief alliance would form, and so Dyokyros and the Guardians would travel to Windurstein, where the keys of Vecna's ascension would be.
=== The Windurstein Incident ===
At Windurstein, Dyokyros would finally find the Hand of Vecna, but not the eye. As it turns out, Eve Linfree would have the eye in her possession prior to being captured by Rivelle knights. Valdreg would possess Eve's body and kill almost all of the Rivelle knights holding the Guardians hostage, but Vecna would be sent into a panicked frenzy. He asked Dyokyros to give him his body so he would be able to kill Valdreg's host body, and the satyr agreed. Gleefully, Vecna regained control of his acolyte's body and severed his left arm to attach the Hand of Vecna. Brimming with a newfound sense of self and power, Vecna began battling Valdreg throughout the academy buildings with the assistance of the Angel of Bone. 
Powerless to stop the massacre, the Guardians would require the assistance of Valdreg in order to defeat Vecna. Gloating in his new body, he would force Dyokyros to watch the entire massacre unfold with no control of his own body. Even with the combined forces of the Guardians, they couldn't do much to stop his ever-growing power. All he needed was his eye and he could finish his ascension to pure godhood. But as he killed Guardian alumni Laihan, the dragonborn warlord blasted him in the face with his fire breath, rattling Vecna enough to where Dyokyros could fight his patron within the confines of his mind to gain control over his body again.
Even if he would die upon reclaiming his body, Dyokyros didn't care so long as he protected his friends from Vecna's horrors and freed himself from his will. As Vecna desperately pleaded with Dyo for mercy, he would be met with Dyokyros' wrath as the satyr banished Vecna from the confines of his mind back into the Forgotten Realms he tried to escape from.
While Dyokyros lived past his injuries to fight another day alongside his closest friends, Vecna would be forever trapped in the Forgotten Realms to wander the demon-infested plains. His powers gone, his chance at returning to the mortal plane forever tarnished. Echoes of his name and essence would fade from time, as would his body become victim to the savagery the Forgotten Realms withheld. Forever trying to overcome mortality and ascend to godhood would be the ultimate irony that befell the lich, his unquenchable ambition being his biggest downfall.