Horance

Horance is a mage in Skara Brae with a pernicious and fateful history, first encountered innocuously in Ultima VI, before a calamitous turn in Ultima VII.

Age of Enlightenment
In his earlier years, Horance was kind-hearted with a passion for magic and writing poetry, and the people of Skara Brae initially felt safely protected by his presence. With the passage of time, however, Horance's mind began to deteriorate into a senile shadow of its former self. His sonnets became a "rhyming doggerel" and the only form in which he would speak, while his demonstrations of magic turned increasingly violent, provoking fear from his fellow citizens. It was in this state that he was encountered in Ultima VI, living as a recluse on Skara Brae's small satellite isle of Iver's Rounding and trading destructive spells with the Avatar.

Horance the Liche
Following the abolition of hostilities between kingdoms Britannian and Gargish, Horance had the Dark Tower erected upon the northwestern tip of Skara Brae and completely confined himself within its walls. The eccentric mage eventually descended into unmitigated madness from years of isolation, his existence becoming dominated by an obsession with discovering the secret to immortality. Though finally able to divine its formula, this ultimately came at the dreadful cost of his becoming one with a malevolent, power-hungry liche. In his new form, Horance began to raise the dead from their graves in order to do his ghastly bidding, which included abducting Rowena, wife of Trent the blacksmith. The unsuspecting woman was killed in the struggle and the distraught inhabitants of Skara Brae, guided by the cognition of town healer Mordra, composed a plan to destroy the liche with a distinctly formulated potion in an attempt to put an end to these horrors. However, the scheme went catastrophically awry through Mayor Forsythe's miscommunication of the concoction's balance of ingredients to alchemist Caine, igniting a colossal blaze that incinerated the entire island and, in a tragic twist of irony, left Horance as the lone survivor.

Age of Armageddon
With Skara Brae a literal ghost town and long able to continue his pursuits unchecked, Horance had become megalomaniacal by the time of the Avatar's ghastly reunion with him in Ultima VII. The liche lord effectively controlled all undead on the island and, with the Well of Souls, leeched the essence of its spectral townsfolk in a nightly "Black Service" to further his dark existence and fuel a bid to overtake Britannia. Armed with the Soul Cage and a correctly proportioned liche potion, however, the Avatar managed to comprehensively dispel the vile magicks corrupting Horance and freed him from their grasp. Upon the subsequent destruction of the well, the spirits it once held captive were released from bondage to their rightful destinies, with Horance vowing to remain in Skara Brae and restore the island city of Spirituality to its former beauty.

Trivia

 * In Ultima VII, Horance is armed with a firedoom staff.
 * According to internal documents pertaining to lead designer Bob White's iteration of Ultima IX, Horance was to be directly referenced in materials found strewn about the Dark Tower, at that time a location reprised in the game. The journals, written by those who had once been in his servitude, questioned the mage's sanity following his discovery of undead in ancient tombs beneath the Well of Souls.

Goods
His prices in Ultima VI can be found at: Ultima VI Magic Shops