Once upon a time, in (what is now, but what was once not) the Kingdom of Dis, the Group of Seven (so-called due to seeming influence of certain group members, there were actually many more participants in the GoS, some of whom history has forgotten willingly, or not) decided it was time to forge something new based on something that was old.
Beg, Borrow, Steal, was the GoS philosophy du jour. What they would synthesize from the past would come to leave its stamp upon the world. And when a stamp is upon the world, the people of that world can only adjust themselves to it according to their own temperaments. Rare is the time in history when so few individuals are so supremely leveraged to bring about so much change, so swiftly, and by such (relative) primitive means, for good or for ill.
The problem at hand, as the GoS saw it, was one of property, whether land or chattel or both. Many of the Group wanted to expand their interests towards the West on the little island they found themselves upon, which their current Monarch found to be unnecessary. Still others were concerned about losing their hold on their chattel slaves; the latest intriguing rumours from the Monarch's court far across the ocean suggested that this was (paradoxically!)1 going out of style.
It helped that several of the Group's members were necromancers. The term is meant quite literally, they would take the spirits of the dead and give them a new sort of quasi-life within a framework of what the group was trying to accomplish. Some of the sorcery was quite local from lifting from still-present indigenous populations. Some of it went deeper into the past.
To say that the Group was ultimately successful in their endeavors would be a titanic understatement, and there is much historical documentation that modern day necromancers thump their thumbs upon like a latter day bibble in a travelling evangelical's tent. A compounding of sorcery that works its rhizomes into every nook and cranny of modern life, like kudzu.
Here in the present, Yule, Shalako, Soyal, the Winter Solstice, fast approaches. The darkest night before the dawn of the shortest day, the days then growing through the new year like a luminal fruiting mushroom body, and with that growing light comes opportunity for better decisions to be made, perhaps this go-around with a little less necromancy and a little more justice in the here-and-now. Will enough people have what is needed to throw off the bindings?
((to Group members))