The Death Relic called out to a man named Sanadin, who was dying of a slow but fatal disease known as "the rot". The disease caused him to decay while alive. His sight and other senses were deteriorating as the responsible organs began to fail, fingers withered and began to fall off and speech was very difficult with the bloated and unresponsive tongue of a corpse. This made Sanadin the perfect candidate, as noone could be closer in affinity to this aspect of the Void.
He found the Relic hidden in a treehollow by the river north of Darcborough but reached it too late. With his dying act he reached for the artifact and with his last breath brushed it with his gloved hand, knockit it from its perch. Both toppled into the river. The essence had begun to transfer itself to its target host, and when contact was lost continued to pour outward, mixing with the water of the river.
Over the next two weeks the inhabitants of Darcborough became ill, increasingly so with time, until the first deaths occured. Within a month, everyone in the village was no more. These were the first zombies. Those that died early clawed their way out of their graves, the rest rose from the places they had fallen. Aimlessly they shuffled around the village, repeating the most common activities of their recent lives repetitively , moaning the fringe of torment their dead bodies could still perceive. For those that were greedy or malicious in life, a hunger for living flesh became their only driving force, and those pets and livestock that had not yet fallen to the essence of death were swarmed upon and eaten alive.
Malek's vampire scouts, while seeking survivors of the troll exodus, came upon Darcborough and soon warriors from every village in reach gathered to purge Darcborough of the undead infestation. The roaming essence of death lingered and moved downriver, partially taking to the air and becoming an unseen tumor on the world, threatening the fate of Darcborough to any it encountered.
Malek himself found the empty crystal Relic of Death by the body of Sanadin, and devised a plan to draw the essence back to its intended host. The dead man was so badly decomposed that salvaging the corpse in its current state was unthinkable, and so pieces of the dead were borrowed. A new body was fashioned for Sanadin from bits of himself and parts taken from other corpses to fill the gaps. It was an awkward looking creation with stitchlines running up and down its surface.
Together with the mummies, the vampires raised Sanadin to the clouds to be struck by lightning, believing this in combination with the mystic element of the pyramids would reanimate the dead man. It worked. The essence of death that had passed into the lifeless body before becoming seperated from the rest became active and Sanadin opened his eyes. He was not a zombie, his consciousness intact. He became the first Golem, a patchwork man.
The rogue essence of death did not seek him out, to the dismay of Malek and those that aided him, and the knowledge of the damage it caused was much for Sanadin to bear. He shuffled off into the wilds and was not seen for many years.
When Sanadin resurfaced he brought with him knowledge of the Void, which he had gained from sifting through old ruins of white towers. He found a way to create more Golems, that this power lay within him as part of his gift from the Void. He knew that there was another way, that Golems could be created by stitching together the deceased of those that had fallen victim to the Roaming Death before their awakening as zombies. Using the method only available to him he created only a few and kept thems as his close followers.
Followers of Sanadin were typically those who wanted resurrection from death badly enough to pay the price of living on as grotesque giants. Sanadin chose goodly men and women to whom the completion of their life's work was more important than their own desires. Just as the werewolves and vampires had done, the golems realized they were an important new addition to what is required to surivive in this new and darker world.
Golem construction became more sophisticated over time. Later golems were not the shuffling giant monstrosities that their older kin had become. Still, it is impossible to oversee the nature of a golem, the crisscrossing stitches and mismatched bodyparts never fail to give them away. No golem could pass for human, no matter how precise the patchwork had become.
Over time the ranks of golems grew. Grievers who had lost loved ones sought out Sanadin with increasing frequency, begging him to raise their lost friends and family. Wanting to ease the world's sorrow in some measure he granted these requests. The golems were very quick to discover that many of these new golems were outraged at their new forms, resentful of what they had been forced to become. Most of these ended their own lives in short measure. Sanadin learned from this, and decreed that no golem was to become of anyone who had not themselves requested resurrection before their death.
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