Solemnikatica

The Solemnikatica is a Nikatic book written by Setnik Albath in approximately A.Y. 3251. Though only 54 years of age, Setnik claimed the book was the columniation of his life's work, and he died not long after.

Description

The Solemnikatica is written entirely in poetic verse and is around 750,000 words long . The various chapters and stanzas primarily take the form of conversations between repeating characters identified by non-repeating three-letter names. Most often one character is telling a story or explaining a concept to another, who then asks questions. Written originally in Endu, if taken as a fiction, it would be considered a masterwork of Necromancer Neo-Classical literature.

However, the Solemnikatica is by all accounts not fiction.

Creation

The Solemnikatica is an example of a Nikatic text, that is a book written not by a living necromancer but dictated by undead shades to a summoning necromancer. The practice of creating such books was primarily performed by the Grey Temple necromancers, who used magics effectively amounting to torture on summoned shades to extract information. Though some nikatica were written by Green Temple, the practice became reviled during the Necromanic Wars and was abandoned then after. The Solemnikatica is therefore one of the last examples of this dead art.

The Solemnikatica is different from other nikatic texts insofar as it does not have a single author. In the book, shades are identified by 3-letter names. Setnik claimed to have spoken with "1,001 shades" but the actual number is difficult to determine. The commonly agreed-upon number is 999, but some versions of the text appear to have as having as many as 1,500 shades. Some interpretations of the text hold that some of the speakers are not shades at all, but demons or other dark creatures.

Contents

Most summaries of the text frequently use words like "vile" and "wicked", and it is true the Solemnikatica is not light reading. The book speaks on a very wide variety of subjects and shifts fluidly between them, but # of themes are commonly agreed upon by scholars of the text:

• The nature of magic
• Philosophy and theosophy
• Forgotten epochs of history