spoiler:

A thousand years before Vaal and Vae’njaece had their first encounter, two beggars were busy with their work. They were employed by a mysterious necromancer who only required bodies in return for a fair amount of pay. Every day, the couple would head over to a cemetery and dig up a fair amount of bodies to be returned to the necromancer by nightfall.
On one dreadful day, the female beggar went into labor. Night was steadily approaching and their body count was hardly usual. The female beggar, experiencing mass amounts of pain, had barely dug up any, and the male, fretting for her, hadn’t done any better. The male beggar decided to stay with his wife throughout her labor. The process lasted throughout the whole night and when morning was approaching, the baby was still not born.
At daybreak, a hooded man emerged from the shadows and joined the beggar couple. Immediately, the male beggar stood up and told him of the previous night. He gave the hooded being the bodies and apologized for the scarce total.
The hooded man took the bodies away and left the way he came without a spoken word.
About an hour passed before the hooded man came back. The beggars were both surprised about seeing him, and asked why he had returned. He spoke not a single word.
Slowly, the couple started hearing voices. They started looking around, but no one besides them and the hooded man were there. As time grew on, the voices were getting louder. The female was the first to cry out. The voices had risen to a deafening roar. The couple could feel their bodies being torn apart from the inside. As they looked up toward the hooded man, their lives were slowly drained out of them.
The unborn child was summoned by the mysterious man and as the couple took their final breaths, he left with the boy.
As not fully human and not fully undead, the boy aged about a year in appearance every a hundred years. His face was covered in self-inflicted scars. He wore pitch black armor, scarred from years of use. His hair was the same color as his armor, and his eyes were multi-colored. One eye was blue while the other was brown.
After about seven hundred years of service, the boy decided that he was done serving the necromancer. He devised a plan for escape and using the skills the man had taught him, he vanished.
The boy left for a mysterious land between worlds and decided that when he was stronger, he would go back and rid the world of the necromancer.