Lev the Cyromancer

Not much is known about Lev, who lived 1000 years before the events of the campaign, but what is known had been intended to be preserved over time as a warning to never let the power he controlled fall into the wrong hands again, but as time has passed, even that has been mostly forgotten.

Lev was believed to have been the son of Nir, a wealthy Merchant. While aboard one of his fathers vessels, the ship encountered a sudden typhoon and was shipwrecked on an icy island. Years later, a survey mission found an unconscious Lev on edge of the island, emaciated and covered with an inch of ice, holding something to his chest. When they touched him, the ice cracked, and Lev emerged- quite alive, although half starved, and possessing a certain chill about him.

The survey party fed and clothed him, and restored him to his father, who no longer recognized his son- the once carefree and optimistic youth had become a distant shell of himself, obsessed only with the tome he carried with him, a crudely stitched together leather tome that had a constant sheen of frost about it. After a year of trying to restore his son, Lev's father cast him out, and Lev traveled north. Securing a shipping vessel that would take him as north as possible, he learned as much as he could of cartography, then killed the crew and took to sailing the ship himself. Not requiring sleep anymore and possessing an unnatural strength, he had no difficulty sailing, and the northern winds seemed to favor him.

He finally arrived at the northern glacier patch, and began expanding the Cryonomicon. The vast tundra served as a perfect laboratory for his experiments in ice based magic, and outside of the occasional wildlife animal, he was completely alone in his research.

Years passed, and as he began filling the Tome with his research, he began to see a grander pattern within it, one that saw this plane not as it was, but what it could be, a beautifully pure plane of ice, and given the grand geometry he had discovered, it was not only necessary, but inevitable. He began to put all of his energies into this work, with the book seeming to guide his hands and mind, to the point where all the pages had been filled to the brim. He never questioned who the previous owner was, just content that it was his now, and his duty to fulfill the will of.

On the Winter Eve of that year, he unleashed the full force of his powers, triggering an ice age. Within weeks, most of the land was covered in feet of snow, and the death toll was immense. This continued for months, with what few people surviving eking out a scarce life near frozen lakes, resorting to ice fishing to survive.

It was only through the intervention of the High Wizard Oltan, Lemrean of the Western Forest, and the mysterious traveler who called himself Gregor that Lev was defeated and cast into a planar gate, then sealed away. Shortly after, the snow melted, and the ice age was over, and humanity proceeded to fill in most of the gaps, starting the age of man. The Cryonomicon was recovered, and many copies were made, but after several weeks in the High Wizard's library, it vanished. Without the original copy, the ensuing copies appeared to lose their magic, and outside of value as a collector's item of historical document, were ignored. Copies are still made of the Cryonomicon, as any other historically significant tome, but most people outside the field of Arcane History recognize it's name or have even seen a copy.

After the Tiamat Incident, Lev was weakened, and left his throne, where Geiger took advantage of his absence to alter it, lessening the impact of future ice ages. Lev announced that it was a component of a lock that kept the 'Ur' out, a race of void beings, then a member of their cult appeared and announced their coming. He was then vanquished, revealing his hideous insectoid nature, but at that point Lev appointed Casey the new Cryomancer.