When the Mikage Autocracy rose to power in Yakai, its mortal leaders made no secret of their allegiance to Siroth. Most worshipped him as the prime deity of their new kingdom, but some went a step further. They sought out the Shadow God himself and gave him their souls to become Demonspawn.

The warrior known as Michinaki was one such wretch. A skilled and deadly leader of the Mikage Autocracy’s armies, he showed no hesitation when confronted with the offer of Demonhood. He gave his soul and his freedom to Siroth, not then imagining that an altogether different form of imprisonment awaited him.

Michinaki led the Autocracy’s foremost army, the Legion of the Horned Skull, against the rebellion growing in Yakai. Many were his victories, and many were the traitors his forces slaughtered in battle or in the pursuits that followed, or nailed to posts on the side of roadways as a warning to others who would dare defy the Mikage.

Still, however, the tide of the war turned slowly and irrevocably against the servants of Siroth. The Legion of the Horned Skull’s victories became ever more pyrrhic, and the strength of the rebels grew as they learned how to fight the Mikage’s armies.

Eventually, perhaps inevitably, Michinaki suffered defeat. A rebel force led by a Dawnlands sorcerer known as Tymo succeeded in ambushing the Legion of the Horned Skull. All of Michinaki’s warriors were cut down in the bloodbath that followed, and Michinaki had every intention of sharing their fate and being sent to Anathraad as a result. Tymo, however, had other ideas.

Knowing that holding one of the Mikage’s foremost commanders prisoner would be a powerful sign of how far the rebellion had come, Tymo had Michinaki bound in physical and magical irons and fetters, which contained his physical strength and arcane power. The sorcerer, however, had been jaded by the long war and decided that captivity was too good for a monster such as Michinaki. He unleashed the full wrath of his sorcerous power on him, torturing him as assuredly as Siroth tortured those who displeased him. The green fires that he summoned burned Michinaki’s flesh from his warped bone and twisted him into an even more horrifying visage of pain and suffering. The arcane flames, born out of dark magic, burned Michinaki night and day, and his shrieks of pain echoed through the rebel encampment he was held in. He swore bloody vengeance on Tymo, but the sorcerer laughed in his face. At last, it was the Mikage who suffered and not the common folk of Yakai.

Michinaki’s torture may have continued indefinitely, had not a gentler soul intervened. Fearing that Tymo’s actions had passed from being justified into excessive, the sorcerer’s apprentice waited until the rest of the camp was asleep, then undid Michinaki’s bonds. Surely the broken, smouldering creature had learned his error, and was now no threat to anyone?

The opposite was true. As soon as the shackles were undone, Michinaki’s power was unconstrained. He snapped the apprentice’s neck and retrieved his sword, before hacking a path through rebel soldiers to Tymo’s tent. Tymo unleashed his magical fires at Michinaki but found they no longer hurt the Demonspawn. The flames, always rooted in dark magic, betrayed Tymo, instead obeying Michinaki as their new master and enveloped him without causing harm. The Demonspawn had passed through the inferno, and emerged stronger. Michinaki beheaded Tymo, bound the severed head in the chains that had once held him, and set it aflame with his new powers.  After he defeated Tymo, Michinaki fought his way from the camp and disappeared. Soon after, the Mikage Autocracy fell, but the campaigns of one of its greatest generals were not over. Michinaki was filled with the need for revenge. Even more, than before, he became known as a dire, cursed warrior, and he continued to hunt down and slay those who had defied the Mikage. Throughout it all, the Demonspawn carried the head of Tymo. Its silent, agonized expression showed that the sorcerer was somehow still conscious, forced to experience the pain he once wreaked upon Michinaki, and incapable of doing anything but watch the Demonspawn wage war upon the people of Yakai and their Dwarven and Sylvan allies.

Rumor has it that Michinaki no longer acts alone. Much in the same way that the rebels of Yakai slowly gathered their strength before striking, so it is now claimed that Michinaki draws the cursed and the dispossessed to him, forming a corrupt force of Demonspawn and mortal Mikage loyalists to rival his lost Legion of the Horned Skull. If such tales are true, more than just Yakai should tremble in fear.

This Michinaki lore is originally posted by Plarium in-game.