Mannfred von Carstein

Mannfred von Carstein has outlived the death of a world and every attempt on his existence since, mostly by ensuring someone else was standing where the blow fell. The Mortarch of Night is the dark mirror of vampiric nobility: cultured, sorcerously gifted, coldly brilliant — and constitutionally incapable of loyalty. Allies are ladders. Oaths are ambushes that have not happened yet. Even his Legion of Night fights in his image, all feints, false retreats, and knives arriving from directions the enemy had marked safe.

Astride the dread abyssal Ashigaroth he is a terror on any battlefield, but his true genius is for departure; no net, mortal or divine, has held him long. His curse is that Nagash's has. The Great Necromancer keeps his treacherous Mortarch the way a jailer keeps a clever prisoner — punishing each betrayal, finding him too useful to unmake — and Mannfred tells himself that every scheme buys ground toward freedom. Eternity keeps declining to agree, and the cleverest creature in any room he enters remains, always, exactly where Nagash left him.