The Lich King Reincarnates as a Baby

++Those unfamiliar with magic often have especially strong reactions to it. This is usually inconvenient, sometimes dangerous, but, on the other hand, is also almost always extremely funny.++

- From the writings of Isabel Vornholt, ‘The Great Lich’. 1,891 A.E.

A month passed, and though I did not need to take any drastic new actions or respond to any huge changes, that single month was one of the most significant that had occurred to me in a year.

My official profits from the oil business were not as great as they might have been. Fifty thousand, six hundred crowns. That was cut quite painfully down to ten thousand six hundred by my first payments towards removing my debts. What was left was reduced further by a good two thousand flat expenses in equipment, beds and other such things, plus the annoying extra cost of food.

Apparently, being so far from civilization left my idiot workers unwilling to walk to and from the nearest towns for nourishment. Setting up an arrangement to cart supplies to the refinery and sustain them ended up costing me another two hundred crowns each week.

On the other hand, just under ten thousand crowns was still a very significant sum. More than most would ever see in their lives. Indeed, so much more that I was careful not to make it clear just how much I was generating.

And that was without factoring in the counterfeit leyline-mine business.

Alira’s advice added some further costs to the process, but made it go smoothly. I took her with me for a flight to a local town and was able to set up a trade with several of the jewelers there just as she had suggested. Doing so was almost worth the rather awkward experience of carrying her with me and feeling her giggle and squirm with excitement mere inches from my ear.

All in all, the output of the mines was more variable. My story for now was that we had discovered a previously unseen chasm within it. This justified a few dozen arcane valuables each week, and selling them was adding another three thousand or so to my revenue.

From there, I simply had to let word spread and keep an ear out to make sure it was to my favour.

It did not take long before people started discussing my growing business. Most seemed skeptical it would last long, but none could deny the immediate surge of income or that things were running smoothly in the present. From what I gathered, my employees had relatively good things to say about the whole affair—though many had problems working with the Estalians of Sakhent’s cult, even not knowing that they were a necromancer cabal—while my business partners were raking in enough income to be more than happy about it all.

I kept things running, carefully tying off the process to ensure that the business was, with the added help from Alira and Sethira to oversee things, essentially self-sustaining. To my surprise, it was Sethira who first took me aside about it.

“What’s the plan here?” she asked me openly. Speaking like this, with a purpose in mind rather than simply wishing to antagonize me out of enjoyment, she seemed so very much more like she had when we first met each other. I could almost taste the intellect shining out from her deep eyes.

“To make money, use that money to influence Garamon and use that influence to purchase secrecy and material wealth that allows me to operate more freely in building power, then to use these funds for purchases of weaponry or land that aid in building up an alliance of creatures at odds with the Gods.”

She nodded. “As I thought. And how much are you willing to put stock in money?”

I thought about that. “More than I would like to be necessary,” I admitted. “Wealth is one of the driving forces of Garamon.”

She scowled at that, and started pacing.

“Wealth,” Sethira growled. “Not knowledge, not cunning or blood.”

I watched her annoyance and listened to her rant. Though we shared much in common, Sethira and I did, ultimately, come from very different eras. She was the child of kings and priests in her original life, before attaining lichdom. I was born to one of a thousand disparate tribes.

What she spoke of, traits of royal breeding and great learning, were as artificial to me as the off-shore accounts of Garamon’s most well connected millionaire.

Power was the true, ontological quality of a ruler. Power alone had survived my generation, then hers, then the thousand more spanning human history. Power could come in any number of forms, and did not care one bit whether it was borne from magic or money. It simply existed, and was used by those who wielded it to do great or terrible things.

Some things never change.

“I don’t like this,” Sethira sighed at last. “We should be accumulating all the actual magical power we can. That’s permanent, it can’t be taken from us once claimed.”

“We are gaining magical power,” I noted. “I am training every day, as are you.”

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I had pushed into the lower end of twenty three thousand vis as my maximum output now, Sethira boasted almost twenty thousand herself.

By the standards of the stupid, uneducated, mentally stunted, incurious, cowardly, snivelling, weak, pathetic magicians who called themselves the professional casters of Garamon, we were very impressive. But we were still not the most powerful, even among them, and compared to the average lich of any appreciable age we were rather pathetic.

Still, this was our power and we could call on it in public without drawing a swarm of Demigods to the sensation of necromantic mana. If I emerged as Lord Dread now, I would kill several, perhaps many of the God’s servants. And then lose.

Sethira understood as well as I did that secrecy was our only option, she was not stupid. She was just doing that odd, annoying human thing where she verbalised a bunch of impotent displeasure she felt at her current position purely for the sake of saying it out loud. Were I less familiar with her, I might have smelled weakness.

“We need to gain more magical power,” she pressed after a moment. “My ritual failed, or rather you failed to carry it out, but that doesn’t mean it’s our only choice. There are other entities to use. Perhaps binding Zameka has been ruled out, but we have infinite options.”

I did not miss the flash of anger in her eyes as she recounted my actions in Orapathaqi. For once, I could not blame her for it either. Agrian lived now because I had acted as I did, and I had sacrificed the power of a God to ensure that happened.

Did I regret it?

I had never once thought to ask myself that question since leaving the city. No, I did not. I could not explain it, could not justify it, but I stood by my decision, and knew that I would make it again one thousand times over if I was called to.

But I was faced with another decision now, one that was possibly more dangerous.

“What are you suggesting?” I asked Sethira.

“The Depths are big. Perhaps infinitely so. There are things in there that could help us. The world is wide, and the Gods of Garamon have made a great many enemies. There are beings of magic driven into obscurity who may want to work alongside us too.”

“What you are talking about is no more permanent than the financial power I am working to accumulate,” I pointed out. Sethira still stiffened.

“You can at least let me work on securing these alliances in the meantime.”

“I will,” I told her. “But not around Garamon, nor here. If you can pursue them far from anywhere associated with me, then you may do so.”

She was not happy. She was bitter, and angry, and vented these emotions through a painfully mortal tantrum that I could not help but observe in utter bafflement at how far beneath her dignity it was. But in the end she accepted that I was right, and I was able to leave her overseeing the oil refinery while I headed back to my family’s estate.

I would have preferred to travel alone, but unfortunately I did not have that option. Putting aside the other debts I had put myself in to raise the funds needed for the refinery, my father had contributed no small amount of money to the efforts. That meant that, once again, he had some say in what I did.

Which meant that my bodyguard, Blakely, would be coming with me.

Our first obstacle came before I even set off, naturally.

“I’m not flying,” he snapped.

“It is the quickest way by far,” I told him irritably. “We need to get there fast.”

“I’m not fucking flying,” he repeated. “It’s not normal, it’s insane. You’re insane. You could drop me, or crash, or the spell might stop working, I’m not fucking flying!”

I was so very tempted to kill him then, but I was, unfortunately, not quite rich enough to get away with such things yet. Besides, my father would be in a bad mood if I reported Blakely’s death to him, and that would make the Baron harder to deal with.

So I conducted a tedious, painful compromise instead.

Having made so many sledges at this point, I had become quite good at it. The basic aetheric structure took me almost no time at all, but, since I was being forced to avoid using my flight and delay myself anyway, I decided to take the time to experiment.

I modified my levitation spell matrix and spent half an hour tweaking it until I could have my sledge consistently hover, regardless of sudden changes in weight distribution or loads. After some careful prodding, even Blakely was willing to climb aboard, once promised that it would not lift more than five feet above the ground, and we were soon shooting off.

Travel on water was always faster for my sledges than travel on land. Water, after all, has almost no static friction, and it takes shockingly little force to propel even great weights to speed atop it.

Travelling in the air is even faster.

In moments we were as fast as a sprinting man, in moments more we were faster. By the time our velocity finally stopped increasing, I fancied there was no land animal in all of Arwyna that could match us, outside of those with mana in their bodies.

Cheetahs. I wonder if those still existed in Irucci, or if they had gone extinct. They certainly weren’t even half as fast as I was moving now, in any case.

Three thousand miles slipped by beneath me in only a little over two hours, though the journey felt considerably longer with Blakely trembling and cursing behind me. At the very least his constant whining reminded me that he was there. Not an insignificant benefit, at this speed he could fall from the sledge and simply be lost to me. Even if I estimated when he’d dropped down to a margin of ten seconds, I would have most of a square mile of ocean to search for him.

Before long Garamon was in the distance, its coastline recognisable and unmistakable ahead of me. I noted that I was quite far off to one side of it, having meant to head at the midpoint of the country and instead being a good five leagues to the south.

I would have to find some means of correcting that, navigational errors like this added precious minutes to my journeys and, more importantly, might well get me lost outright. When we were finally on dry land Blakely dropped down to his knees and started swearing.

“Never again,” he spat. “You hear me? Never again.”

I rolled my eyes at his antics and started work on my new sled, this one land-based.

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