In life, the frost-mage Ethreain (not yet a Lich) had used the menace of destructive ice to enchain whole kingdoms. His subjects, supported by a small number of distracted magicians, eventually grew brave enough to trap him. Armed with a sufficient amount of charmed rope to fasten him forever, they tied the frost mage to unyielding weights and plunged him in a bottomless pool. It was not. He only fell for a year or so before an outcrop snagged him. There he rested, dead but decomposing, until the geomancer Anhil thought to authenticate the legend of the assumed bottomless Black Pool. Anhil’s plumbline caught the ropes that fasten the drowned magician, and up he dragged an unexpected prize. Thinking that by delivering the dead undead, he could question the Lich about the properties of the pool; he removed the bindings and initiated a simple rite of revivification. Even the descendants of Ethreain’s enemies were long forgotten by time, so there were none to warn Anhil against naïveté.