The Lich King Reincarnates as a Baby

++My great grandfather, Aravon Voret, is perhaps one of the most unlucky men in history. In any other century he would have enjoyed great prominence and social power. Instead he was born during the tenure of Archmage Aadan Farah, and thus denied his chance to attend Winzorth under a Voret Grandmaster. Then the world was introduced to Isabel Vornholt, and his prospects became more limited all the same.

Still, there were other Vorets, my own grandfather for instance, who benefitted far more than him.++

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

I threw everything I had at Aravon Voret. Call it a testing blow. A magician-killer hidden inside an aether construct, wrapped in incendiary aether, hidden by another layer of hard aether and set to harden itself upon exposure to the air. I left a conjured trail of acid after it for good measure and ensured that it zig-zagged the last few paces to my enemy to throw off any defence he might have mustered.

Whatever barrier he used, it apparently accounted for each one of those spells.

Aravon Voret stood unscathed as the dust cleared around him, looking up at me. We just paused and stared at one another for a moment.

He was a man in his middle age, tall but stocky, which surprised me for a Voret. He had a whiskered face and greying hair but still seemed close to the prime of his body’s youth.

And of course, as a magician, his magical prime would always be the precise moment he was living in now until the day he died.

I felt a thrilling rush as I locked eyes with him and prepared to see what he would retaliate with. His power was undeniable, I could see it clinging to him like smoke around a fire. Now I just waited to see it used.

Aravon Voret’s magic coiled around him, and I was given a moment’s forewarning before he took to the air. Of course he did. Bagran the Idiot could fly, after all. And though that boy was more talented than his patriarch, the disparity in experience was decades wide.

I turned and started gaining altitude, extending my senses to track Voret as he tore after me. If there was one advantage to the raw magnitude of his magic—which I considered to be easily double or triple my own—it was in sheer velocity. He outstripped most of the Winzorth Institute’s professors, despite being ten years their junior, and I could imagine him beating Bogern to become the next Archmage all too easily.

I could imagine him catching me more easily still, because that power was propelling him through the air at a truly ludicrous speed. My initial plan to gain altitude and kill him far from sensory range of the others as Lord Dread was dead in the water.

Voret closed like a cannonball. Faster than sound, faster than me. I decelerated and readied a great wall of aether as I turned, hoping to trick him into splattering himself against it.

No such luck, the magician fired a shot of hardened aether right into my wall that exploded midway into it and sent fragments flying in all directions. I had seen dynamite used to blast apart boulders when clearing the way for my refinery, and the speed of debris from that had been nothing compared to this event. Even my shield was strained as some pieces struck it, faster than bullets.

Lightning coiled around him, thunder rolling and clouds thickening. He took all of a second to turn the very skies against me and send screaming bolts of plasma arcing through the air.

Fortunately, his lightning was to Nglaru’s as a mewling infant was to a mortar shell. I threw out a layered aether wall pinching vacuums between hard material and let the conductionless barrier break his attack apart, then flung it at him for good measure. He seemed surprised, if nothing else. Surprised enough to catch another magician-killer directly to the chest.

And once again, it fizzled out against his shield.

He shouted something that I could not hear over the wind and distance, and his hand came up bright with burning aether. He threw it at me. I conjured a new shield, layered again to keep the heat from reaching me, but this time his projectile exploded on impact. My barrier was several feet ahead of me, and even still it sent me spiraling back from the blastwave. If my personal shield were not designed to defend against such shockwaves I knew my body would have been turned to chum. As things were, I still found myself disoriented.

I flew fast and aimlessly, accelerating as I waited for my own vision to clear. If I remained stationary, I would lose. That was the difference in power between myself and my enemy. Fortunately, the distance between us was large, and a human body was a small target on the scale we were fighting in. I reoriented myself just in time to see several aether-guided missiles tearing my way, then sent out a handful of blades to cut their guiding strings and slip between them. Voret was already gaining in altitude and building up another fireball by then. I resolved not to let this one impact.

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Mines trailed behind me, drifting, magical clumps of energy held aloft by conjured gasses and charged with all the mana I could pump into them. I heard their detonations in my wake and risked a glance behind me.

To my surprise, Voret was actually reeling. I took the chance and flung two magician-killers at once, striking his shield from different angles. Each was an experiment, wrapped in magical energies designed to catch and flake away when struck by other mana in the hopes that they would disarm whatever protections he had in place to keep his barrier from crumpling. They saw mixed success, my projectiles at least struck his shield and I enjoyed the sight of flailing limbs in my adversary as he realised his defences were being seen through.

I pushed my advantage with two more magic missiles, disguised to feel like magician-killers, then swooped down into one of the storm clouds my enemy had summoned and began scraping it for power. The lightning answered me just as easily as it had him, and by the time he turned away my distraction above, I had enough electrical energy gathered to strike him with a bolt as wide as my own arm. Even I had to look away from the impact, for fear of being blinded by the sheer light produced.

And even that was not enough to end things.

Voret emerged with nothing more than a few burns marring his features and a new vigour to his motions. More lightning coiled, then dispersed as I raised my vacuum-shield and gave way to solid shots of aether that rammed into my own barrier faster than bullets.

Faster than bullets, and harder than my aether. It was like trying to stop machine gun fire with a wall of corrugated iron. Each projectile punched through, sending chunks of aether backwards into my personal shield and precipitously draining its charge. I was running out of options, there would not be a better time than now to pull out my final ace in the hole.

The staff I had made for myself as Lord Dread emerged with a sound like temple bells; pure theatre. The power it held was not. With one wave of the great device I saw thick knots of magic uncurl and wrap around my enemy, seeping into his shield and flooding it with dismantling magical energies.

Normally a spell effect as complex as this, made to attack mana directly and tear it out of shape, was far too fiddly to put together mid-battle. This was true even for me, because the limiting factor was my own control over magic rather than my ability to sense it. That was what the staff was for. The whole enchantment made the process automated and thoughtless, activated with only a thought on my end. It did not matter how complex it was, because the whole system responsible was already set to do it ahead of time.

And it was devastatingly effective.

Aravon Voret’s defenses were made with genius, experience and a power that, in another few decades, may almost be approaching that of a Demigod, but it was simply not designed for an attack like this. My staff left his shield hemorrhaging power into the air. If it were heat he was giving off, rather than mana, it would likely have burned the skin from me where I flew. As things stood the dozen yards between us was a small gap indeed, and made sure that my next attack hit home. A magician-killer that ate through his weakened shield with barely enough power to clip his shoulder and jar the man. He spun in the air, started falling, then arrested his descent and shot back up.

I did not even see his retaliatory missile, just felt it explode through my shield and send me flying.

The frictionless skies let me soar dozens, even hundreds of paces before drag force finally started to slow me to a halt. By then Voret was on me again, appearing above and shooting me with another missile, this time driving me downwards. I oriented myself just in time to start decelerating before the ground met me, and I punched right down to make a crater in the sand.

My shield dispersed the impact and slowed my deceleration, but I still blacked out and tasted blood in my mouth. I wheezed, I gasped, I choked on my own vitae and spat it out to cling against the inside of my own shield. I was hurt.

I was hurt.

I could feel the pain running through me like something molten injected into the veins. It was setting my nerves alight, making the muscles twitch and spasm. My vision blurred and my ears rang, I still tasted blood. I felt like my lungs were refusing orders. Breathing was impossible, and the lack of it left my innards howling for oxygen. I lay there writhing on the ground.

So this was pain. This was real, deep pain. No wonder my test subjects had always whined so much, no wonder there were so many tales about the horrors of battling undead. I recalled distant memories of sling stones breaking me and knew that this was that again. Was I dying?

I did not think so, but I would not be moving fast. Voret descended from above me, a smirk now playing across his features.

“Powerful,” he said. His voice was deep and smug. “Exceptionally powerful for a woman of your age. But still just a girl in the end. You shouldn’t have tried to fight me.”

I wanted to retort, and my mind had a veritable arsenal of counters to his hilariously delusional bragging, but I could not physically spit any out. The words sat stagnant in my guts as the organs churned around them. I needed life. Something else’s life. Either that, or a great deal of time indeed to recover.

I did not, in the end, get life, but I did get an opportunity. Sethira must have been waiting just beyond sight of our battle, because she chose the perfect moment to make her own attack. I had just started to sit up, just left Voret tensing back into readiness and just distracted him by snatching his gaze down towards me. My fellow lich’s assault came totally unobserved.

She smashed him from behind with a magic missile so intense its target would have felt it coming a mile off under any other circumstances. Voret was engulfed in an explosion powerful enough to make vapour out of stone, and he went spinning from sight before hitting the ground and digging a long trench. Sethira was by my side a moment later, helping me to stand.

“What took you so long?” I growled.

“I wanted to get the measure of our opponent before I helped,” she lied. Her actual reason was to get the measure of my own powers, even now she was preparing to move against me.

But I had more pressing concerns than that right now. Voret was already recovered.

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