Previous
The Old Man; the spiritual guide of the damned. While most Necromancers (and related creatures) are vulgar and direct in the extreme, the Old Man represents an infuriatingly hard to trace influence on necromancy starting in the decades prior to the Hounds' first purge.
While it'd overstate the point to say there are facts about the Old Man, there are commonly held beliefs about him.
First, the Old Man is real. A real what is a subject for debate, but there's little belief that he's mythological or some excessively used metaphor. Enough Necromancers from different backgrounds have interacted with the Old Man to confirm that there is, actually, an entity of some kind called the Old Man.
Second, the Old Man only appears to interact with Necromancers. Some stories suggest normal people can't even see him, while others simply paint him as so seemingly generic and harmless that nobody else pays him any mind. Whichever is the case, there is no known case where the Old Man has talked to anyone other than a Necromancer -- all knowledge of the Old Man outside their circles is second hand.
Third, the Old Man is protected. Exactly how and where that power comes from is, once again, a matter of debate. People have tried to kill the Old Man, but it doesn't work. People have tried to capture or coerce him, and he simply walks away (one story says he "walked away" from inside a locked cell... leaving the cell still locked). Specifics vary, but they all agree on the idea that there is something obnoxiously sacrosanct about him.
Fourth, the Old Man knows a lot about necromancy. A lot about it. Stories vary over whether or not he performs necromancy, but there's wide agreement that he has tremendous conceptual knowledge about it. Some stories suggest this extends to knowing uncomfortable personal information about individual Necromancers, too.
Leading into number five, that the Old Man doesn't really do much with it, at least in a practical way. The Old Man is widely depicted as looking like a poor farmer, and the guidance he gives is the sort of personal and spiritual issues that normal people tend to use priests for. There's a few claims that Necromancers have learned an awesome spell or terrible rite from the Old Man, but far more widely held is the belief that the Old Man's gifts and lessons are always geared toward bringing to light an insight into the Necromancer's situation or self.
Finally, the Old Man appears to be ageless. Or, at least, he is a seeming Human that was already being called "the Old Man" over a hundred years ago.
Taken all together, there are three popular theories which try to explain what the Old Man is.
1) Voice of the Hegemony:
The Old Man is a servant of the gods. The Old Man is a spirit of the gods. The Old Man is a god. The Old Man is an Empath. The Old Man is a super-powered uber Empath with sprinkles.
There's no shortage of permutations to this one, but they all fall into the same mold: the Old Man is the voice of the powers of hegemonic "goodness." He is redemption and forgiveness, the good cop to the myriad bad cops. Most Necromancers who hold this view deride him for it, though the Redeemed have their own bizarre anti-antinomian belief in the Old Man as either a direct prophet of the divine or the wisest among the Redeemed.
2) Your Favorite Necromancer from the Past:
The Old Man is the Fallen Prince. The Old Man is Kigot. The Old Man is Emuin. The Old Man is the first necro-alchemist. The Old Man is Sidhlot with a slouch.
No shortage here, either. If there's any Necromancer on the planet that has a mysterious end, the Old Man's been accused of being him. And sometimes her. Necromancers who follow necromancy for some transcendental end, including the Philosophers, have a tendency to view him as the culmination of their work; the Necromancer who clearly "made it."
3) Crazy Dingbat out of Left Field:
Enjoyed among self-styled pragmatists is the idea that the Old Man really isn't anything more than he lets on: possibly a Necromancer, possibly not, but really damn good at pulling people's strings. It'd be by no means the first time some new figure jumped out of left field to become relevant. For those who hold this view, the only thing to fear about the Old Man is the insane amount of influence he seems to hold over people who believe he holds the keys to a great redemptive or transcendent secret.
-Armifer
"In our days truth is taken to result from the effacing of the living man behind the mathematical structures that think themselves out in him, rather than he be thinking them." - Emmanuel Levinas
