Reikenor the Grimhailer

In life Reikenor was a sorcerer-king of towering talent, and he spent all of it on a single project: not dying. Decades of forbidden study, libraries of grave-lore, other people's souls burned as research material — every road his genius opened led downward into Shyish, because all magic that bargains with death is practiced in death's own house. Nagash let the work ripen, the way a spider lets the web fill, and when Reikenor finally reached for immortality he found the Great Necromancer's hand already closed around his.

Yet Nagash wastes nothing, least of all talent. Rather than simple torment, Reikenor received employment: he is the Grimhailer, death's own reaper of sorcerers, dispatched wherever magic is used to pick the lock of the grave. Necromancers who freelance, wizards hoarding stolen centuries, priest-kings buying forbidden years — Reikenor crosses the realms on his spectral steed to collect them, and his scythe Fellreaper ends arguments that decades of wards were built to win. He remains a master sorcerer himself, and pays for his workings in the only coin he has left: burning away his own essence in corpse-candle flame, spending himself a sliver at a time. The man who would not spend his death now spends it endlessly, and Nagash finds the arithmetic pleasing.

The cruelest refinement is that Reikenor was left his mind. Alone among the greater gheists he remembers everything — his studies, his reasons, how close he came — and so he understands his prey perfectly, because he was his prey. At the head of his Condemned he runs down each doomed magician along paths he once mapped himself, and those who have heard the Grimhailer speak before the scythe falls report the same quiet words: that he understands, that he once agreed, and that it changes nothing.