The Zabik Recordings

Among the lost artifacts of past Necromancer glory that are sought around the world, few are more important than the Zabik Recordings. The Recordings are a set of 29 wax cylinder audio recordings created in Krakow, Poland, in the late 1890s-early 1900s. With the nation of Poland divided between foreign powers such as Russia, unusual scientific societies arose under the innocent rubric of the “organic labor” movement—one of them was a native offshoot of Necromancy spearheaded by a medical researcher named Mateusz Bartek Zabik. Zabik and his acolytes had taken up old Swiss experiments in the electrical stimulation of corpse neurosystems and transcripts of Jewish occultism from Prague, and combined them with a fascinating new interpretation of Dragon Line esoterica smuggled out of China.

The result was a series of summonings carried in secrecy (and with very expensive bribery) in a corner of Wawel Castle in Krakow, where Zabik and his men smuggled the severed heads (and attached guts) of several reputed witches and spiritual mediums and—if the rumors are true—used an otherwise unknown method of channeling natural “Ley Line/Dragon Line” forces into those dead brains and lungs to temporarily reanimate them. The heads spoke semi-coherently, lapsing back and forth from clear question-and-answer sessions to a stream-of-consciousness narrative in multiple languages, some still unidentified. It was Zabik’s belief that the Ley/Dragon energy form of reanimation was superior to any other, if only it could be perfected, and that it linked dead brains to an infinite sea of aetheric knowledge known as the Akashic Record. He argued that if his experiments could be carried to their conclusion, mankind could be made immortal and all-knowing through resurrection from death.

Zabik and his followers were never able to complete their recordings, much less their experiments. Mistaken for political dissidents by the secret police, they were rounded up and imprisoned, most of them dying of hunger or disease within a few years. Before he could be dragged off, Zabik destroyed his equipment (and cadavers) and hid his wax cylinder recordings in various places. He died without revealing where the cylinders were, but the rumor of their existence reached the nascent Necromancer faction, who pounced on the opportunity.

But in the more than 100 years since the Zabik Recordings were created, only three of the 29 cylinders have been found, and none have been fully “decoded” by later researchers. They remain one of the most eagerly desired treasures of the occult world, and wherever the Necromancers learn of a possible Zabik Recording cylinder, they immediately seek it out at virtually any cost…