Once long ago there was an alchemist's apprentice. The boy was an orphan, a swaddled babe left on the doorstep in the dead of night, and the kindly old man took him in to raise as his own. As he grew the boy learned of science and theory, of course- but the alchemist also taught him love and compassion, justice and mercy, values to lay the foundation for the man he should become. They lived and worked together as a family and were happy.

But all was not well on the business side of things, and the arrival of a notorious sorcerer would change their lives forever. Late one night the boy heard his adoptive father in the shop downstairs arguing with the man over some ancient artifact, a powerful relic which the alchemist refused to hand over at any cost. There was a struggle- a scream- a silence. The boy rushed downstairs. His father lay dead on the floor, and a black-robed figure was waiting for him.

The sorcerer took his captive to the ends of the known world. Bound and drugged into slumber, the boy knew nothing of their journey out of civilization and across hundreds of miles of blighted wasteland. When he finally did awake he found himself in a crumbling castle high atop a mountain. They were in the sorcerer's home- and this is where the boy's old life officially ended, and the experiments began. The sorcerer's goal was achieving immortality. He had already done much to extend his own life, and boasted that he was some four hundred years old- but the old methods were losing their efficacy. He would now have to be creative. And every forbidden spell that came with a grave warning, every wretched potion too noxious for his own taste, he tested first on his new subject.

How long did this go on for? Months? Years? The boy- though he could no longer be called a boy- was warped beyond recognition, transmuted in body and mind. He had little chance of escape. There was nowhere for him to go, besides. Day after day there was nothing but pain and sleep, pain and sleep. It seemed the horror would last forever... but in his ruthless ambition, the sorcerer made one fatal mistake.

The thing he dragged up from the catacombs deep within the mountain was grotesque: an enormous red landworm, its scarred hide a testament to the thousand or more years these mythical beasts were known to live. The sorcerer would have liked to take its vitality for his own, but such an unholy fusion had never been attempted before-

-and besides, as he explained to his captive, he couldn't very well cut himself in half, now could he?

Against all odds, the former alchemist's apprentice survived the procedure. Such an innocent word to summarize the unprecedented combination of the maddest science and the blackest magic, but the deed was done: a man, more or less, from the waist up; a monster from the waist down. What was more, it had worked- even as he wept and shuddered at his new form, he could feel the worm's arcane energy giving him new strength.

It was enough. Enough for him to break his bonds that night and overpower his tormentor once and for all.

There was no great battle for the ages between them. There was hardly even a struggle. The sorcerer had simply underestimated the results of his gambit, and now he was being crushed to death by a solid ton of rippling landworm while he slept. But before he succumbed to the monster he had created, the sorcerer smiled and uttered one final curse:

"You will continue my work."

The next morning, the former apprentice opened his eyes. The sorcerer's lifeless body was growing cold beneath his coils. He was still in the castle at the top of the mountain, all alone at the edge of the world. But he was free, and he had everything he needed here: an enchanted garden bursting with fruit, a library to put every magician's guild combined to shame. He had rooms stocked floor to ceiling with rare spell ingredients and any tool for any purpose he might think of. Most of all, he had a job to do...

...and he had the rest of his life ahead of him.