Vazreth Sythrox was a thread-binder of Chaal Nazzerox, and for a while the best the necromancer-state had at the fine end of the craft. Most of the empire's work with the dead is bulk labor. A shadow is clamped back to a corpse, the corpse stands up, and it carries grain or carries a spear until it falls apart. Vazreth worked the other end. He stranded souls and shadows mid-transit to make specters, the precise cut that most thread-binders tear, and he had a particular reputation for taking a wight worth keeping out of a shadow that lesser hands would have wasted on a common skeleton.
That reputation is what sent him up the river, and the river is what finished him.
A masterless wight-lord had been standing in the northwestern Crimson Coast for some years by then, a Winter Elf named Mylanor who had died in a succession war and risen out of the River of Wights with too much of his old cunning still caught in his shadow. He commanded the lesser dead of the upper water and answered to no one, because no one had raised him. To the lich-king Xynoth Azkonor this was two intolerable things at once. A wight that gives orders is exactly the kind of officer Chaal Nazzerox is always short of, and a wight that gives orders to no master at all is precisely the thing the empire cannot allow to keep existing free, lest the example spread. Xynoth sent his best binder to settle the question the empire's way, by clamping the elf to a proper leash and walking him home.
Vazreth went up the River of Wights with the working prepared. Binding an existing wight is not raising a fresh corpse. It means reaching through the Nethereal overlay in Deoric, finding the hold the shadow already has on its body, and seizing that hold for yourself, and the working takes its price in your own life whether it closes or not. Against a mindless wight it closes. Mylanor was not mindless. He had four centuries of buried cleverness in him and he felt the thread reaching for his shadow before it arrived. He let it half-take. Then he turned it.
What came back down the river was nothing. Vazreth died on the bank with his life-price already paid out and no leash to show for it, and the river did to him what it does to everyone who dies violently in its reach. His shadow stood back up among the lesser wights of the upper water, no caster needed, and it now takes the orders Mylanor gives. The thread-binder who went to put the wight-lord on a leash is part of the wight-lord's standing host.
The binder Sythrox went up after the elf at the turn of the season. The leash he carried was sized for a captain. Neither of them has come back down the water, and the elf still holds the upper river. Mark the working a loss and the binder with it. — a tribute-clerk's muster note, copied in the lower-river stations of Chaal Nazzerox
Inside the empire he is remembered, when at all, as the one who proved a point nobody wanted proven: that the dead who rise on their own can be worse than the dead a binder makes, because there is no caster to kill to be rid of them. The craft of clean specter-stranding that he refined outlived him and is still worked at Chaal Nazzerox. The man is a wight on the Crimson Coast.