The Lich King Reincarnates as a Baby

++Tales of magicians calling on powers beyond their own control are dime a dozen, and for a good reason. It is so much easier to conjure magic than it is to fully bind it.++

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

The ground split apart, and something the size of a dragon erupted from it. Skeletal and many-limbed, it took a moment to register to me as a great amalgamation of many undead, long-since fused together. More emerged next to it. Were I still in a human body, I would have groaned. I recognised these beings.

But there was no time to reminisce now. The entities were shambling towards Sakhent and myself like creeping artillery barrages, and we had only moments to resist them. Fortunately, however, liches tend to know what other liches are thinking. Both of us recognised the best course of action would be to throw up aetheric walls to buy a few moments.

As Lord Dread, my aether was stronger than it could ever have been as Vornholt. To measure it in multiples of steel would be simply redundant. I could weave a section no thicker than a human hair and watch as sustained cannon fire failed to even scratch it. The wall I had erected now was thicker still, several feet in depth. I fancied that there were few natural forces on the planet able to so much as scratch it.

These undead were certainly not natural, and when they smashed into the wall I saw cracks emerge instantly. Little hairline things, but with so many attackers they were adding up fast. So many glowing attackers, bodies glaring out a sterile blue light and moving with strength that should have been impossible even for my own servitors.

“HOW DID YOU INFUSE THESE BEINGS WITH SO MUCH POWER?!” Sakhent demanded.

“I DID NOT,” I replied. “SOMETHING HAS OCCURED IN MY ABSENCE TO STRENGTHEN THEM.”

I could not imagine what. Undead that are reanimated and controlled with necromancy naturally strengthen over time, the magic that animates them being active enough to grow more powerful passively. That would explain a great spike in their strength over time, but it did not explain what I was looking at now. I remembered the servitors that these conglomerations had once been and they were not nearly strong enough to boast this kind of power after a mere few thousand years.

Any two of them could have overwhelmed Aryqatan. Three would have proven a match for even Nu’chista, and I doubted the strongest Demigod in existence could stand against as many as five. There were half a dozen attacking us now.

I had my magic back, but none of the artefacts I had made to bolster my natural strength. Without tools to enhance myself, I was still far from the heights of my combat abilities. Were Sakhent not here with me, even I would be doomed.

As things were, our barrier continued to hold as the undead struck it with mountain-chipping force. The very chamber, large enough to fit a sizable portion of Lachfel within it, shook and shivered with every resounding blow. We had only moments before they punched past the aether, and Sakhent wasted precious seconds by turning for the exit.

Of course, it was sealed. Sealed entirely, a solid face of flat metal where once there had been a doorway.

“YOU HAVE THE SECURITY MEASURES OF A SYPHILIS-RIDDLED GIBBON,” Sakhent roared.

I ignored his petty mewlings and focused on more practical matters, cutting in as I felt his mana building.

“YOU CANNOT BLAST THROUGH THAT SURFACE, THE CORRIDORS WILL HAVE BEEN REARRANGED BEHIND IT.” Not everything in my laboratory was made of enchanted metal, but enough was that even liches of our strength would take some time to tunnel free. This was, after all, meant to be a shelter from the Gods themselves.

Besides, even mundane steel can resist my power in sufficient thickness. Sakhent would be somewhat easier to block.

The aether gave way at last, and several inhumanly fast undead rushed towards us like bullets. I caught the nearest one with a pillar of aether shot up from the ground, impaling it high into the air, and washed the room with a wave of indiscriminate, magical healing.

It was the antithesis of the dark energy that sustained reanimated undead, and I saw them all slow and wither as it struck them. But they did not die.

Sakhent’s own attack came next, great strikes from his abyssal limbs that reached out scores of feet to bludgeon the enemy down into great, house-sized craters in the steel floor. Even this, they weathered.

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Yes, I was certain something else had happened here. The undead were too powerful even to be explained by a ten thousand year absence, and they were glowing.

“WE MUST FIGHT,” I declared as I stood my ground and built my mana. Sakhent concurred.

Individually, we would have been doomed, but we were the first and second greatest lich in history. As a pair there were few things in all of existence—short of a God—that could withstand our might. These petty mutations were certainly not on that list.

We slowly backed away and circled around the room, eating up the ground with our long strides. Sakhent was easily twelve feet tall, and I was actually a foot or two taller. Both of us oscillated between offence and defence, guarding the other with low-level, hasty magic while they prepared more determined and devastating attacks. One by one we wounded, wore down and killed the skeletal constructs.

They were reduced in number to only three when the next attack came. A ceiling erupting inwards this time, with an even greater mass falling through it. This newest creature glowed, just as the others did, though it was a thing of roving flesh and popping blisters rather than dry bone. I felt its squelching movements through the ground and saw it sweep one skeletal construct right up into the air, holding the struggling thing in a single grip before tipping it down into its mouth. A few moments of chewing and grinding and the construct was gone.

Sakhent and I turned to each other, wordlessly lowering our mana outputs and backing away. There were other exits to this chamber and I started leading us to one by memory. But the new flesh creature was so very fast that it finished eating the two remaining skeletal constructs before we had even taken five paces. Then it turned on us both.

“A CHIMERA,” Sakhent noted, right as it lunged for us. We put up another aetheric wall, just as thick as the last. The chimera smashed through it, exhausting its momentum but still landing on the same side as us, crouched and ready to pounce again. I washed it with necromantic energies to sap its strength, and found that it had the vitality of a Demigod. Perhaps more.

It readied another pounce as Sakhent stepped forth, drawing out a long, curved scythe with a blade as black as night. I saw souls dancing along its edge, tightly constrained and screaming as they hungered to feel the cold metal run along living flesh. Sakhent’s weapon flashed as the chimera lunged, gouging a long slice across its side before the lich was struck by its tackle.

Faster than Nu’chista.

Faster than Nu’chista, and in this environment we could not move around nearly as well. The chamber was large, but it was filled with jutting pipes and other obstructions, all magically charged in a way that made teleportation slow and difficult. I did not even attempt it myself, just threw up a lone wall of aether as the chimera came for me, waiting for it to impact before I loosed a disintegration spell as it emerged.

The magic certainly hurt my enemy. I saw skin flay and peel away, turning to dust floating away in the air as blood misted up from below, but the chimera did not even slow in its lunge. My personal shield flashed and exploded with energy overload on impact, while my physical body was driven hard against the metal wall behind me. I teleported free just before the mouth came down to close on my head.

Mana flooded out of me with the spell. Teleportation is draining at the best of times, using it here had tenfold the normal cost. I was not even able to re-cast the spell before the chimera located me, whirling around and pouncing again.

By that point, Sakhent had recovered. I saw death magic as dense as steel slam down atop it, pinning it for a fraction of a moment before the chimera burst free. I threw my own power into reinforcing his, adding aether bands to bind the magic down on top of the chimera, then layering it with as much arcane death as I could manage. A normal creature would have been aged out of existence in less time than a bullet took to leave its barrel. The chimera, hopefully, would be held off long enough for us to slip away.

“WHICH WAY?” Sakhent demanded. I just started moving without bothering to answer, letting him see the direction I was headed before mustering up the mana to teleport again. My entire laboratory was warded, preventing me from bypassing walls or even machinery, but I was able to clear a good hundred yards and bring myself flat against a far surface, then turn to move around it.

Sakhent followed fast.

We heard the chimera escape just moments behind us.

But we were rushing through my laboratory. This place, old and untamed, now taken over by all of the strongest magics from my first reign and unbound as my rule faded away, but I still knew its layout with a superhuman precision, and I knew exactly where we had to move.

“THERE ARE OTHER EXITS,” I explained as we went. I lifted myself off the ground, risking flight despite the tight conditions. I would not escape on foot. Sakhent did the same.

We did not see the chimera again until turning our first corner, but I noted that it was gaining on us even with us both flying several times faster than we could have run. It really was a remarkable creature, one I would have to study myself when possible. As best I could tell, there were dozens of unrelated kinds of magic trapped within its flesh, churned around and feeding off each other. Had one specimen escaped, only to devour and absorb the strength of many more?

That could not be stable. However soon it would die, though, I could not bank on it happening in less time than it would take to destroy my body.

Sakhent and I continued tearing down the corridors. In many ways it was a testament to my own genius that such a creature had emerged through my long experimentation, though any magician knew that the things achievable with time and long preparation far outstripped the things achievable under one’s own power.

I was not feeling much pride in my accomplishment now, though. Only rage and humiliation. Was I to be laid low by my own creation?

Not if I could help it.

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