Years ago, a wizard aspiring for lichdom named Acererak clashed with the elven paladin Kylanna, who was on the path to another kind of immortality. Their contest of might and magic resulted in the defeat of Acererak, who fled from his enemy before he could be slain. Long years passed, and though Acererak brooded over the setbacks Kylanna had imposed on his plans, he eventually attained his goal of lichdom and later transcended his physical form to that of a powerful demilich - whose name has evoked fear and awe ever since.
The past was never forgotten however, and in time Acererak avenged himself upon Kylanna. The elven champion had become a legend to her people, and a saint among the followers of the church of Pelor, and yet one day she simply vanished, leaving bewildered followers wondering at her strange and sudden disappearance. The most powerful divinations and miracles failed to bring her back or even point to where she had gone.
Acererak meticulously plotted his revenge for many years, shoring up every conceivable hole in his plan. He had extensively studied the Negative Energy Plane and the fractured, dead remains of a city named Moil trapped in a lightless demiplane. There he discovered many useful secrets and lost arcane engineering marvels. Using powerful magic, Acererak tore one of the trapped city’s towers from it and set it adrift in the Negative Energy Plane. The demilich transformed what he dubbed the Sundered Tower of Moil into a drifting, extraplanar prison, which sages and experts call a castle perilous. Acererak intended this castle perilous to hold his old enemy, Kylanna, and had a series of experiments and a variety of torture techniques lined up for the paladin. When he was finally ready, he made good on his plan and captured Kylanna and imprisoned her in the belly of the Sundered Tower of Moil.
Acererak soon bored of tormenting his foe since he had many other schemes to which to attend. The demilich created a simulacrum of his physical form and left it in charge of the tower to administer to the imprisoned paladin. But due to Acererak’s greed for power, he found himself eventually vanquished by powerful heroes that refused to stand idly by.
Years went by, and, left to its own devices and realizing that its master was no more, Acererak’s simulacrum made a startling discovery: By using the ancient arcane engines housed in the Sundered Tower of Moil it could siphon the soul stuff of living beings to create the substance to engineer its own soul—to become a real being, not just a shadow of its creator. The only problem was that the soul machine required a vast amount of souls to effect such a transformation. The strength of each soul was greatly reduced when channeled through the soul machine. No matter how diligently Acererak’s simulacrum studied the machine and the texts housed in the tower, he could not find a way to maintain the strength of souls during the process of siphoning them. Thus, the process was agonizingly slow, lasting many years, but eventually he accomplished his designs. The simulacrum became a real creature, a powerful lich like its former master, with all of the same schemes and machinations of the original and a few more, but at the cost of literally hundreds of living beings.
When the newly transformed Acererak attempted to leave the Sundered Tower of Moil, he found that though he had accomplished his original goal, the powerful spells used in his creation as a simulacrum included a few that bound him to the tower.
In the following years, Acererak learned a few other uses for the soul machine. Indeed, he discovered that with enough raw soul stuff stored up, it could transform or create a wide variety of life forms. But its goal was freedom from the tower and more power. With enough souls, it could transform itself into a powerful demilich like its predecessor. The process would take many years, but, if nothing else, Acererak is a patient creature.
Thus was set in motion a cunning plan to lure more creatures to the tower—adventurers and any fools that wasted their time still searching for Kylanna would come to the Sundered Tower of Moil where Acererak could snare them like a spider in its web and harvest their souls for his grand plan of ascension. Using the undead and living cultists the new Acererak had attracted under the pretense of being the physical manifestation of the real Acererak the Devourer, he started a few rumors on the Material Plane where the right ears would hear them. The scheme worked stunningly well.
Now, many years later, the second incarnation of Acererak teeters on the brink of his own ascension . .