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Event Build: Butcher of Windhelm

Tags: #Mods  #Imperial  #roleplay  #Character Build: Mage  #Character Build: Spellsword  #Character Build: Necromancer  #Hasir  #Event: Occult 
  • Member
    September 18, 2019

    I've always wondered about Callixto Corrium, a.k.a 'The Butcher' who you meet during the expanse of the Blood on the Ice quest in Windhelm. What was the motivation of why he practiced necromancy? Did he kill those women for fun or was there some alterior motive? How did his wife Lucilla die? All these questions and more will hopefully be cleared up in this build.

    Who was I before I became 'the butcher' as everyone knows me today? I was a kind, peace loving man with a family on the wealthier side of Windhelm. My parents, Marium and Dennis Corrium, lived a few houses down the street from me. My parents are real close to death's doorstep as my mother has yellow fever and my dad, though advanced in age, tries to take care of her, he even knocks on my door and asks me to pull my own weight to help my ailing mother.

    I periodically would go over of my own volition to help. One day, though, when I went over there, a woman, who I did not know, was helping my ailing parents, healing the blisters she gets from the fever, keeping her stamina up, that sort of thing. I would go over and sit by their bedside for weeks watching their health slowly decline On a cold winter night, They passed in their sleep. I buried them in the graveyard a short ways from our house. A few days after, the woman that was at my mother's deathbed, Lucilla, and I were married right in my home, we did not want the fuss of a big wedding.

    Weeks after our marriage, I came home from working in my shop of curiosities and found Lucilla in bed with blisters all over her body, the same ones my mother had before she died. I sat by her bedside for weeks, praying for her to get better.

    "Lucilla, what happened? How did you contract yellow fever?" I asked distraught.

    "Callixto, I was coming home from the market with a bag full of goods and a homeless man asked for some change and when I denied him, he went crazy and attacked me, look."

    She showed me the scratch marks on her arm, which had begun to fade to a baby pink color. After two weeks of praying, a voice answered my prayers.

    "So you wish to save your sister, eh?" The voice asked. "Take her to the secret room of the house behind the strange cabinet."

    "How do you know about that?" I asked, "It's secret for a reason, no one should know."

    The voice grew weary, "Look, do you want to save your sister or not? I have other deals to make."

    "Y-yes...anything to save her from this horrible fate." I answered "I'll bring her into the room."

    I carried my wife's corpse downstairs to a cabinet, I opened it, slide the alse back panel out of the way and laid her on a table that had various types of necromantic tools on it.

    The voice was silent for a time. When it did speak, however, it was very calm, "I can keep your sister from death, even heal her wounds, but, at a price." The voice formed into a well-dressed man in the corner of the room. I suddenly became confused.

    "Who are you?" He asked looking at the man.

    The man spread his hands wide, "I am Clavicus Vile, granter of wishes and of pacts. Though to complete most pacts I will need a small sacrifice." The man looked at Callixto with hungry, flaming red eyes.

    "Fine," I said, defeated, "What do I owe you?"

    Clavicus Vile smiled wide, showing pointy teeth, "I will require a goat slained in this home at the storke of midnight. When that time comes, slay the goat, draw a pentagram, in goat's blood, around the object you wish to save, in this case, your sister and then utter these words: Death comes not here, away, away cruel fate, lift my sister up, let her be whole again." The daedric prince watched as over the next few hours, I went out to the fields near Whiterun, slayed a goat, brought the carcass home, drew a pentagram with the goat's blood and uttered the ritualistic prayer. 

    For the longest time, my sister lay there, lifeless. I wondered if anythiing had happened, something did happen, a fire sprang up around her and burned away her skin.

    "You bastard, you said this would work!" I yelled at him.

    "I didn't say it would bring your sister back." Vile laughed, "It was fun to see you blindly do anything for love, even to the point of looking foolish." 

    Enraged, I ran at the deadric prince, who vanished before I could touch him.

    I cannot believe the filthy swine would betray me. All alone in the secret room, I began to devise a way to bring my sister back to life. To do that, though, I needed to kill people to gain the much needed ingredients. I saw a book of necromancy sitting on the table, I opened it, scanned the table of contents until I found what I was looking for, I turned to that page. Above the ingredients listed, it gave a wrning: Not all corpses can serve all purposes, for resurrecting male corpses, kill men and utilize their bones and organs, the opposite is true for resurrecting a female corpse. 

    Name: Callixto Corrium

    Race: Imperial

    Standing Stone - ritual and atronach. I chose the ritual stone for this because you will have to raise nearby undead in order to distract others from interfering in your dark deeds of resurrecting Lucilla. I chose Atronach stone because you will be casting spells, so, might as well have the magicka needed for the spells.

    Role: Necromancer, he is trying to bring his wife's spirit back into this world by using one of the women he has locked away in his basement. If one vessel refused to accept the spirit of Lucilla, he will try again and again until she is brought back from the dead

    Weapons: Necrocross, Drainheart sword

    Apparel: Necromancer's Robes, Necromancer Amulet

    Shouts: any necromancer-style shouts like drain vitality, marked for death, become ethereal, soul tear and summon Durnehviir

    Spells: any necromantic spells like dark guardian, plague, summon wrathman, summon mistman, summon boneman and summon arvak, it might be a good idea to throw in some flesh spells, like ebony flesh, iron flesh and dragon flesh, as Callixto is wearing light armor and is a glass cannon

    Major Skills: Alteration, Conjuration, Restoration

    Minor Skills: One Handed, Enchanting

     

    Alteration - Callixto must rely heavily on mage armor spells since he is otherwise unprotected

    Conjuration - Callixto can summon undead to ensure no one gets in the way of him achieving his goal

    Enchanting - the butcher utilizes various devious enchantments: Paralyze, drain health and drain stamina and drain magicka, to name a few, to achieve his nefarious plan

    Light Armor - Callixto does not care for cumbersome plated armor, that will only slow him down and distract him from his goal of trapping beautiful women's souls. no, instead he chooses light armor

    One Handed - Callixto uses the drain heart sword and necross to gain subjects for his dark arts

    Restoration - When wounded, he uses this skill as Callixto has no soul and as such cannot be weakened easily

    He obtains Necrocross early on as this weapon will make his slaying man and mer easier. also, he uses the ritual stone from the Aurora mod because it alsos him to reanimate corpses until his executes an offensive action. This stone also enables him to swap health with another npc. Another good stone to use is the Atronach stone because it enables him to transfer half of his health to magicka, the downside is he can't regenate magicka except by ending combat, als his spells are stonger. There a muliple abilites from the Ordinator conjuration perk tree to help with killing enemies. Callixto uses the Unique Corpses mod to permanently attain female parts to resurrect his dead wife.

     Callixto forsakes the main quest and dragon priest quest as he is neither dragonborn nor a hero. Against bandits, he uses plague to force them to feel the pain he feels daily. That spell rapidly attacks their health until they lay dead it the dirt. If they are felm, he uses plague on them to kill them and then he carried them back to Hjerim.

    Against mages, Callixto uses his summon spells to encirles them with death and then he summons durnehviir to finish them off. If they dodge the undead dragon or survive the undead onslaught, he uses marked for death to first weaken their armor and health and them pummels them with his drain vitality shouts, making them even weaker. then he uses his become ethereal shout to enter the world of death and then stabs them in the back with his sword. If he is facing femal mages, he kills them with his sword and brings them back to Hjerim. 

    He takes care not to harm the innocent, male or female.

    After escaping Riften jail, Callixto A Daedra's Best Friend, Barbas and follows him to Haemer's Shame to obtain a very special mask, one that will hide his features and enable him to barter and life the life of another person. Once the mask is in his possession, he goes to the shrine of Azura, kills the necromancer inside her star and has it tainted to become The Black Star. Once these tools of the trade and the required souls are in Callixto's possession, he returns to Windhelm, to the house where he and his late wife got married and attempts to ressurect her spirit and force in to inhabit one of the once beautiful woman that he had cut down before their time and dragged into the room behind the suspicious cabinet. I guess you can say he really got Blood on the Ice this time.

    Blood on the Ice - the quest is required to roleplay the butcher as the player progresses in this simulates the butcher's slow but inevitable descent into madness, at the end when Hjerim is purchased, the butcher goes inside and goes fully manic with unholy desires to bring his wife back. To that end, he may either go fully insane killing anyone who gets in his way or brutally kill every young women (non-essential, of course) that he comes acrss, drag their bodies back to Hjerim and perform unholy experiments on them in his unhealthy relationship with both necromancy and the hope that his wife's soul will, somehow, inhabit a new vessel.

    A Daedra's Best Friend - Callixto requires a mask so he can do his foul deeds without being recognized as the person who did them. This particular mask can not only hide his face, but allow him to take on a different personality and it also enables him to gain better prices while partering.

    The Black Star - Callixto may not pray to or even admire the teachings of, the lady of twilight but he seeks not her aid but will see it to the end as he requires a soul gem that will never break or bend no matter how many souls in put in its crystalline shell. Also, his research requires him to trap countless ouls, only female souls will work.

    Constructive Criticism 

  • September 19, 2019

    Glad to see that you've finished the build Hasir, I like the interesting changes to the backstory, it shapes everything togheter a bit more than the original write up and feels a lot more natural. Just so you know, because this is an event build it should be labelled Event Build: Butcher of Windhelm rather than Character Build, just makes it more obvious in the activity feed as an Event Build.

  • August 19, 2020

    Wasn't Lucilla his sister?

  • August 21, 2020

    PaternusTacitus said:

    Wasn't Lucilla his sister?

    Yes, she was, Calixto mentions her in his in game dialogue, impossible to miss and she's mentioned again in journal 3, found in a chest on the second floor of Calixto's house, accessible by taking his key when you kill his sorry ass (can you tell I've done this quest a gazillion times, gotta have that juicy amulet!). Actually, that she's is sister lends an even creepier vibe to this entire quest, so I don't quite understand this change in backstory. To me, and I apologize sincerely if this comes out harsh, but builds should be subject to feedback and you ask for it in the bottom of your build, it just makes the lore feel lazy to me. But I guess wife is more "natural" than possible incestuous relationship with sister. I DID actually rather enjoy the idea that a pact with Vile sort of starts him on this whole journey. I like mods in games, but you need to do more explaining of mechanics that stem from the use of these mods. As far as I know you can easily recreate this build in vanilla. 

    How did you handle the whole Doppleganger thing when doing the quest? Is your character the REAL Calixto? Is he a fake? 

    Very sorry, you got grumpy Lis today, but Lis always means well. You had an interesting concept and I've toyed with bringing Calixto to life as a build on several occasions, so when I see it done, naturally, I tune in. *gives hugs and coffee*