Maleskari

Maleskari was the Demon Lord of Death and Undeath, an especially powerful Ordainer who resembled an enormous armored skeleton. He wore a skeletal face mask which was identical to his own face. One of the most powerful Demon Lords known to exist in I.C.E. Age history, other demons often swore fealty to him without question, or perhaps impersonated him. He was a mastery of necromancy. Maleskari was reintroduced into Elanthian history for Bonespear Tower, which he supposedly rules, though the green blur witnesses reported bears no resemblance to him. The tower would presumably become his body if he was fully manifested. The tower door cryptically asks, "Who's he?"

Many adventurers came to believe one of the three "soul-stealing blades" had Maleskari trapped inside, but it was actually a slayer demon of the Black Hel. The blade was found on the coast of southwest Jaiman, and sold at auction by Rowena Dekdarion, niece of the Master of Defenses for the College of Karilon. The "dark saw-toothed scimitar" was initially owned by the legendary cleric Maruko Ashimine of House Phoenix. It passed through the hands of Thalior, Harcourt, and Kree.

Behind The Scenes

Bonespear Tower includes a number of subtle I.C.E. Age references, such as Maleskari and the eidolon, which is a ghost from Greek mythology but also the archaic precursor of Idolone. The courtyard includes a memorial marker to GM Kygar, who passed away in 1998, whose character race was a Dwarf. He was the principal designer of The Broken Lands, the Lysierian Hills, Teras Isle, among other things, and was the lead designer and product manager of Modus Operandi. Foggy Valley right outside the Bonespear Tower area originally had giant fog beetles likely for the same reason. The height difference on the door writing could reflect a recurring number. What it probably represents is the writing of something the height of an Ordainer, responded with writing at the height of a Dwarf. This would be alluding to the immortality premise behind The Broken Lands, which involved the malevolent transmogrification of lifeforms. Maleskari had a Terrorite demon lieutenant, as well as Demon Scourge retainers who rode night mares, and most demons would obey him.

[Ruined Courtyard]
A small simple marker has been placed here, and it sits within a tiny garden that stands out amidst the decay of the courtyard. A few timeless roses bloom within the patch of soil, eternal in their grace. There is something clearly magical about this spot.

>look marker
It is made of simple fel wood.
There appears to be something written on it.

>read marker
In the Common language, it reads:
In loving memory of Kygar Illustari, whose vision fills this tower.

The spectral image of a dwarven mage fades into view before you. The grim dwarf looks you straight in the eye and while his lips do not move at all, you know that he has just told you to turn back and leave this place, never to return...clearly not as a threat, but as a dire warning. Shedding a single tear, the mage turns from you as he slowly fades away.

When the explosion at the top of the tower happened, the way up the hill was finally cleared. Adventurers encountered servants of Maleskari, which included not only beasts like the waern, but massive pyrothags as well. The tower itself moved. Within the tower the demon was able to summon bursts of flames and ice spirits. Consequently, the mutual presence of pyrothags with fire sprites and fog beetles on Teras Isle is probably not a coincidence, being implicitly related to the beast in the Glaes Caverns. Similar to other such areas, the tower was exposed to powerful corrosive acid, as evidenced by a melted door. Maleskari was an ice oriented Ordainer, who had the ability to immolate themselves in flames or cold, exploding the blast out from themselves in an unnatural wind. When a demon is summoned without being controlled or mastered fast enough in Rolemaster there is an "impact" backlash on the summoner scaled by the power of the demon. It is impossible under ordinary conditions to control an Ordainer. When Bonespear said he had trapped the demon in a barrier, what he would have really meant is that the tower is the demon, and the anti-magic field surrounding it has stopped it from moving.

The Bonespear Tower story brought the premise of binding demonic into weapons back with the idea that a badly warped "huge misshapen sword" was the key to Bonespear trapping Maleskari again in a more harmless way. The slayer demon scimitar from the I.C.E. Age had claimed to serve Maleskari. However, it was implicitly a servant of the dark goddess Orgiana, which gives it an unusual relationship with Ordainers. It is worth noting that the lost village of "Velaskar" from the Shadow Valley story, which was next to a dormant Terrorite demon, is strikingly similar to Maleskari with the suffix becoming an Iruaric pluralization. It is speculative but not implausible to point out that Bandur Etrevion represented himself symbolically, with the point of ascension, as a demon lord of undeath and would have ruled over destroyed Velaskar.

This strange mural in Shadow Valley may be a dual reference to the Terrorite, a serpent demon, and Maleskari the more powerful enormous skeleton (there is also a portentous dragon mural):

[Mine Tunnels]
The walls are covered with silvery glowing moss, each patch shaped into a strange symbol.  The absence of glowing moss along the ground is almost as distracting, as the effect of glow above and black dirt below feels odd, as if there were no ground to stand on here.
Obvious exits: northeast

>look symbol
The symbol looks a little like a skeleton key, the top semi-circular with three dots for eyes and nose, below them a row of markings forming a mouth and a long jagged stroke downward representing the teeth of the key.

There is a recurring pattern to the surrounding creatures about Foggy Valley. These are transformed hybrids of men with other living beings, which was to a large extent the theme of Uthex Kathiasas. Vesperti were elf-bat hybrids designed to be anti-magical, like the dark vorteces, with later lore establishing their plane shifting talents. Their creator "Vespertinae" contains the Iruaric suffix for "past." "Vesperti" itself is Latin for "in the evening", which would refer to their bat wings. Pra'eda is Latin for game taken in a hunt, or the plunder and spoils of war, and are wolf-men things. The Shan are also wolf-men, Gaelic for "wise", or Chinese for "mountain" (or "hill" next to the hillock.) Waern are undead canines with green eyes, an old Scottish word for defense of a fortification. They also contain the Iruaric word for "thirsty", loosely meaning "one who acts as the thirst for souls" as a composite glyph, though this is probably coincidental. Dybbuks are soul transference possession spirits in Jewish mythology, which is paralleled by the temporal premise of The Broken Lands. The inscription at the top of the tower door is a mezuzah, which roots the humanoid mezics, who are most likely Maleskari cultists. (Bonespear said his student had scattered and would probably try to help the demon unless they had come to their senses like him.) Fenghai are likely an allusion (if only by name) to the chimerical so-called "Chinese phoenix" fenghuang, the female analog of a dragon, which parallels the "spirit born of death" premise of The Broken Lands. It might also play off the "feng shui" of harmonizing things with their surroundings, involving the "qi" concept, which is relevant because of the ki-lin (the kappas being another eastern borrow.) Unlike Shadow Valley and The Broken Lands, there does not appear to be a Lovecraftian allegory, but various aspects of the tower can be taken as reminiscent of Ghostbusters.

External Links

• Elanthian Times, Volume II Issue 3
• "The Epic Adventure of BoneSpear Tower" - Lord Truekillr