The Lich King Reincarnates as a Baby

++Isabel Vornholt’s appearance was not only unexpected, but unpredictable. The effect it had on my family can be truly appreciated only with the combination of clear hindsight and intimate familiarity. Fortunately, I possess both.++

- Commentary by Maria Voret. 1,938 A.E.

Agrian had been doing pretty good for himself, all things considered.

The bar for 'good' wasn't especially high since he'd started studying necromancy. At this point, in these circumstances, 'good' meant that turning into an insane mutant would take decades, rather than years or months. He was surprised to find that, thus far, his esoteric learning had brought no adverse effects whatsoever.

Not as surprised as he’d have been two years ago. Back then, he was still following the ‘kill necromancers on sight’ school of philosophy. Say one thing for Agrian the Younger, say he had a penchant for sledgehammer solutions.

This wasn’t that though. It was him opening his mind to new ideas and accepting the risk of being changed in the process. It was unnatural and painful and left him feeling perpetually pissed off.

And it was all necessary. After Isabel had gone and bound the most powerful, evil being in history, Agrian hadn’t really had much of a choice. If his little sister was damning herself, he was prepared to do the same if it meant knowing for sure what the damage was.

But apparently she wasn’t, and he wasn’t, and all the necromancers Garamon had killed over the years hadn’t been. So the burnings and hangings and beheadings were all…what, unnecessary?

Following that train of logic to its station, that would mean the people carrying them out were no more than murderers. But they were doing so at the behest of the Gods.

So were the Gods murderers?

That thought was painful. It sat heavy and sharp in Agrian’s head, weighing itself down on his mind. It didn’t especially matter what he was trying to do. Studying healing magic, working construction to pay his tuition off without needing to get a job for someone powerful enough to be a guaranteed arsehole, pretty much any task he found left his mind pricked by the idea.

If the Gods were murderers, then did that make murder right, just because they said so?

Or, perhaps less disturbingly, were the Gods simply not running Garamon anymore? Was the Empire of the Gods so corrupt that its own sovereigns now stood absent from its system, watching from the outside as an infinity of evils were committed in their name?

The problem with Gods, of course, was that they were very distant things by nature. Agrian just couldn’t know one way or another which, if any, of his theories were right.

He couldn’t exactly walk up to the Spire of Heaven and knock, say; “Hello my Lords and Ladies, I’ve been having a few existential growing pains of late, so I just thought I’d pop around and clear some things up with you. Eating babies, yay or nay? Oh, and while I’m here, why did you tell me to go to Estalia and murder a bunch of people? And could you give me a heads-up about who’ll win the rugby next week?”

Absentee Gods were not necessarily evil Gods, they just didn’t give you any way of being certain they weren’t.

This, and other concerns, stung Agrian, but none of them were pressing. Grim existentialism was far from pleasant, but in a life Agrian now spent helping more people and doing more good than ever before, it wasn’t really that much to complain about. Not urgently at least.

Of course, this didn’t remain his only problem for long. Nothing that manageable could.

It was a cold morning when Agrian was called on by the Grandmaster, but not at Winzorth. The old man sent him a personal invite to his own home. This was odd enough, though not really unexpected. He’d been talking about retiring for years now, all this did was confirm that it was finally happening.

Actually seeing the place was a bit stranger. Agrian considered himself harder than most to dazzle with wealth, a fortunate consequence of growing up in a bloody mansion, but one look at the Grandmaster’s home told him that he had simply not been properly accounting how well paid the job was. If buildings needed food, the Vornholt estate would’ve been a light snack for the Grandmaster’s mansion. The whole thing was built of the unnaturally-fused stone that showed off magical construction, with a garden almost as large as the Winzorth Institute’s grounds and walls that looked rather like they’d been designed in case any low-level warriors needed a convenient place to commit suicide via jumping.

There were a ridiculous number of groundskeepers at work tending to a ridiculous number of plants. Agrian thought he’d seen the Grandmaster’s obsession, then he was escorted into the main building and realised that, no, actually, he simply liked flaunting his wealth. It was actually hard to find even a single object within the corridor Agrian was guided through that wouldn’t fetch at least a hundred crowns at some pawnshop.

The building was big enough that it took him a while to walk through it. He was even reminded of the army, and felt his old marching muscles start to loosen up as he finally reached the door to the Grandmaster’s office.

“You will wait for—” Agrian cut the servant off by just barging in. As far as he was concerned, summoning him out of the blue like this removed any rights the Grandmaster might’ve had to enjoy that summons being answered on his own terms.

The old man was not in an office, though. He was laying back on a bed, covered in three blankets and looking so thin and weak that Agrian thought for a moment he was staring at a corpse. Rage flashed in the old man’s features. Rage and shame.

“Out,” he croaked. It was clear he was speaking with a good deal of anger, and what, to him, must have been an impressive volume, but his words were made quiet by the simple failings of the old man’s body and lungs. Agrian headed out, and was back through only a few minutes later. By then the Grandmaster was sitting upright and had some veneer of strength to him.

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It made no difference now though, Agrian had already glimpsed behind the curtain.

“You…wanted to speak with me?” he asked awkwardly, more to give them something to talk aboutthan out of actual interest.

The Grandmaster continued glaring for a moment, but he seemed to cool off after another. Or perhaps simply hid his rage and humiliation.

“Yes. I received this…” he lifted up a note from his side, held in a shaky grip. Agrian realised the whole arm was straining just to support its own weight.

“What is it?” he asked quickly.

“A telegram,” the Grandmaster replied.

“I can see that. From who?”

The Grandmaster smiled. “Why don’t you guess?”

Agrian felt like he’d just been punched. “Isabel?”

“Got it in one.” The Grandmaster chuckled at that, then he coughed into a handkerchief. Agrian was genuinely surprised, and more than a little relieved, not to see blood staining the fabric when he withdrew it from his mouth. “Seems like she’s…she’s…” the old man’s lungs had started rattling since the cough, and his frustration was clearly mounting. “Oh, bugger it, just read the damned thing yourself.” He flung the telegram across the bed, and Agrian gingerly picked it up. Doing so brought him closer to where the old man lay.

He caught a strong, pungent whiff of death smells. Sickly sweet body-rot and surrendering flesh.

Agrian took the telegram back to read it fast, suddenly wanting to get out of here sooner rather than later.

Fortunately, Isabel wasn’t one to mince words, and telegrams were a format that encouraged that even more. It only took him a few seconds to scan the whole thing, then a few more to be sure.

“She’s being attacked,” Agrian said outloud. “And she wants my help?”

“Yes.” The Grandmaster seemed amused, damn him. He always seemed amused. “Seems your little sister’s pissed off some very powerful people.”

“She said the Vorets.”

“Some very powerful people.”

Agrian read it again, just to be even more sure.

“She says they just want to destroy her refinery?”

“That sounds about right,” the Grandmaster wheezed. “Killing her is the last thing they want.”

Agrian was about to ask why that was. Then he realised, and found the thought rather too disgusting to voice.

“So that’s it then? Isabel’s not in danger herself?”

“Well, if she’s ruined by this and still refuses to marry into them, I’d imagine their next move would be to find some way to kill her so that ridiculous talent is never turned against them.” the Grandmaster explained. “But otherwise, no.”

“Fucking hell!” Agrian snapped, tossing the paper aside and finding his hands balled into fists. “I was fine here. I was doing well, I was…” he was ignoring the world and hoping it’d keep ignoring him. But that didn’t make him feel any better about this.

“We don’t get to choose our family lad,” the Grandmaster shrugged. “If we did, I’d have been Grandmaster ten years younger than I am now, and certain plans would be going a lot differently.”

Agrian was too distracted to know or care what he was getting at, his thoughts were still with Isabel and the new pot of boiling water she’d gotten into.

“She wants me to go and help her. To fight,” he said. He wasn’t really sure why he was saying it out loud, it wasn’t like the Grandmaster cared.

To his surprise, though, the old man responded. “Will you?” he asked. There was an intensity to the question that surprised Agrian and forced him into a straight answer.

Would he?

Isabel was being faced with an end to her ambitions, but…what did that matter?

Agrian had seen actual poverty, first in Orapathaqi, a nation looted by his own, and then in the streets of Garamon itself. He’d spent enough time in the world now to realise how nice it was to Isabel and him compared to ninety nine out of every hundred other people living in it.

Nobody was threatening Isabel with that. Nobody. What was happening, ultimately, was Isabel had been born in a mansion and endowed with a talent to essentially print money in whatever easy job she wanted, and that hadn’t been enough for her.

Now she was asking Agrian to make his way across the ocean and kill Gods-knew how many people in her defence to ensure that she could live out the greater ambitions she’d formed around that life.

A year ago, before he’d trekked across Garamon, Agrian probably would’ve done it. A year before that, before he’d seen the state of Orapathaqi, he definitely would have. But now?

“No, fuck that,” Agrian spat. Surprissed by the rage in his own voice. “Isabel can fight her own battles. If someone tries to kill her, I’ll be there. But I’m not slaughtering people just so she can make more money.”

He’d seen enough of that for a fucking lifetime.

The Grandmaster cackled like he’d heard the funniest thing in his life, then coughed again. This time there was blood. “Oh, bugger. Well that’s a problem for later.” He tossed the handkerchief aside and plucked a bell from the side of his desk. He continued to speak as he rang it.

“You’re not worried about what might happen if her refinery is pilfered and searched?”

Agrian must’ve been slow, because it took him a moment to realise what the old man was getting at.

“You think she’s…shit, you can’t believe Isabel has more illegal magic stored there.”

The Grandmaster just looked at him, and Agrian swore. Of course she did, she was Isabel.

“If you’re not there to fight for her, she might well end up in a military prison instead of with the Vorets,” the old man told him.

He was right of course, and goading Agrian on. It was obvious why; the old man wanted Isabel to remain independent for his own reasons, and he knew Agrian could help with that.

But if Isabel alone was arrested, the Vornholts may well survive. If Agrian was found to be defending her too…

“I can’t go,” he said at last. “Fuck.”

“I’ll tell your sister you aren’t coming then,” the Grandmaster chortled.

Agrian frowned as realisation dawned. “Wait…you are going?”

The Grandmaster’s grin couldn’t have been wider if someone had grabbed his lips and manually stretched them apart. He reached to the bedside table and drew up another slip of paper, identical to the one Agrian’s sister had addressed to him.

“Thought you were the only one whose help she wanted?” the old man asked. “Ha! Pity she didn’t ask ten years ago, I’d have shown those inbred cunts what a real prodigy looks like. Still, I suspect I’ll make a nuisance of myself for them even now.”

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