“IT’S ALIVE!” Doctor Torvik howls at the top of his lungs as lightning careens between the towering pylons on both sides of the ancient room—once used by the Erilar to power the Citadel with Valhalla’s titanic storms, yes, but now they have been claimed for a far greater purpose—the creation of LIFE ITSELF!

To raise a horde of mindless corpses, as his father did? Bah! Child’s play! That doddering old fool, with his shamanic arts and his cape of feathers. He believed Torvik’s obsession with science was foolish, but science is the way forward! Always the way forward!

The creature stirring from its promethean slumber upon that great stone table is not a simple skeleton, like the Esenwein’s crude marionettes. Neither is it like the many undead horrors that Cyprien forced him to raise after the fall of the Nine and the beginning of the Ninth Age, the dark age, the age of the dead. No! His masterwork is ALIVE! Not a rotten cadaver given a semblance of motion, but a scientific marvel with all the thoughts and faculties of a man!

“You see this, Cyprien?” Torvik screams, and lightning leaps from his staff as he calls into the boundless dark of the Citadel’s upper ceiling. “I am a god! A GOD! And you are nothing!”

Oh, if only Cyprien were here to see it. Or Ulginesh, or Chardris, or any of the others. How they mocked his craft the day they found that he had been collecting the remains of their foes for his experiments; how they reviled him as they robbed him of his Crimson Sigil and cast him out from the Nine. But they will see. They will see now.

He returns to the golden-skinned creature that lies chained to the table, breathing its first breaths.

“What,” it says—IT SPEAKS! IT THINKS!—“is my name?”

“You,” Torvik says, smiling as if to his own son, “are my Masterpiece.”

Dr. Torvik Morinstein is available in the Dr. Torvik Morinstein and His Masterpiece army expansion. Pre-order now for an October release!