The Pale Emperor is the penultimate step, and its ritual works not with the body and not with the Afterlife, but with human memory.
To ascend, one must achieve that your name becomes a synonym for death and the afterlife: that the majority of sentient beings of your domains remember and utter it. Not to conquer, not to kill — to become that word by which people call death.
This ritual is indicative of the entire path. The previous steps obtained power over the dead, this one obtains power over the living's perception: death in people's minds must look like you. Hence the vulnerability of the position — it rests on others' memory, and memory belongs not to the bearer.
The composition is extremely sparse and therefore expressive: nine drops of water from the river Styx — a tributary of the River of Eternal Darkness that appeared in the Afterlife — and the corpse of an angel without an otherworldly characteristic. Only two positions, but each of those that cannot be bought or bartered.
The potion is described as perfect pallor and perfect silence: neither another color, nor another trace. The characteristic is a throne built of pale bones: not a weapon and not a crown, but a place on which one sits.
