The Lich King Reincarnates as a Baby

++Controlling a theocracy headed by beings with the magical power of small suns through economic dominance is sadly not feasible. What is feasible is controlling a vast sum of that same theocracy’s material resources, and that can cripple just about any society. Even the Gods need to pay their soldiers and equip them with marching boots, after all. And if I was not ready to cut them off just yet, being the one to profit from those expenses seemed like a useful start in any case.++

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

True to my father’s word, I remained in the Vornholt estate once more for six months while he gathered the funds we needed. I would be lying if I said that I hated all of my time there, but I was perpetually frustrated. Simply being there, surrounded as I was by social demands and endless requirements of my time, was a crushing limit on how much I was able to work with my new Demigod test subject.

Which did not mean that I made no progress.

Even able to spare only a brief few hours every other night, I was chewing away at the logical problems of my new studies and continuing to expand what I knew. There was always a period of near-exponential growth that came when I discovered some entirely new resource to study, a sprint of knowledge where I accumulated learning almost faster than I could have noted it down, assuming my memory was still mortal and fragile enough for note-keeping to be anything other than a security risk.

I was being denied that now. Forced by circumstance to waddle where I ought to have run. It hurt.

But I was making other progress anywhere, at least.

Victoria finally came to me on the third day when she found me practicing alone and asked if I would like to train with her. The girl seemed nervous, almost fearful as she did.

“If it’s not too much trouble,” she added, not meeting my eyes as she spoke.

“That is not how you ask someone for something,” I told her. Victoria swallowed, made eye contact and repeated. “Please will you train with me?”

“That is also wrong,” I sighed. “If you want somebody to do as you say, you must force them to do it against their will using your superior intellect and power.”

Victoria scowled. “I’ll get in trouble if I do that,” she frowned.

“That is where the intellect comes in,” I told her.

She got a thoughtful look, then walked away. Ten minutes later I was before my mother, being barked at for ‘rudely dismissing my little sister and making her cry’. Victoria was standing next to our mother, her face plastered with faked tears and beet red, presumably from having slapped herself to make it so. Only I saw the twinkle in her eye as I was ordered to practice with her.

It was an acceptably clever play, for a twelve year-old.

“Show me how much you have learned,” I told Victoria when we were alone in the training room. She did. I saw a wide spectrum of visible light, just falling shy of purple and red, and then felt a wave of heat and tasted ozone in the air. Victoria looked proud.

“Doctor Brown says I’m one of the best he’s ever taught,” she told me happily. “Do you think I’m better than Agrian and you?”

“Perhaps one day,” I told her. I saw no reason to crush her motivation with the truth, children were fickle and the real tragedy would be if she failed to meet even her own potential out of some misguided lack of heart.

“Is Agrian the most magically talented in history?” she asked me.

“That sort of question is impossible to answer,” I told her. “Most people with a talent for magic likely never got the chance to hone it, having never discovered magic. Many who did discover how to use it on instinct were…probably killed by the superstitious primitives they lived around. We can never know how many geniuses died without ever discovering their own talent, or what they would have done otherwise.”

She frowned at that, saddened. An appropriate reaction.

“What about you?” she asked. “Are you the most magically talented in history?”

“Yes,” I told her. “I am also the most magically talented person who could even theoretically exist anywhere.”

Victoria frowned. “How can you be sure?”

“I simply know,” I told her. “As a fact. It is ontologically true.”

The girl looked confused, halfway between doubt and the simple uncertainty that so many children had when confronted with a view they had no pre-existing frame of reference for.

Eventually she gave it up rather than asking further questions, focusing instead on our practice together.

Victoria having studied under Doctor Brown was obvious right away. The techniques she used to bind and control mana, the sub-instinctual habits she had formed in how she went about using it, were all as clear to me as if she had worn a sign with his name on it. I recognised them all from seeing Agrian’s spellwork without even meaning to.

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Time spent with Victoria was more pleasant than most of what I did at the family estate. My parents had both taken to parading me around other nobility just as they had in the past, an unforeseen consequence of my distinction at Orapathaqi. Where previously I was an embarrassment to the family, I had since become quite the opposite.

Even among Baron’s daughters, few could have a Demigod speak as directly and highly about them as Aryqatan had myself and Agrian.

These new meetings went better than most engagements. I was more of an outcast than ever, and I could keenly feel the uncertainty each and every person I was pushed up in front of brought into our meetings. They did not know what to make of me. Handled me like they might a frightened animal, or a vat of volatile reactants.

For my part, I did what I could to ease things.

Smiling girlishly and pretending that I was charmed, rather than violently angry, when people told me how pretty I was, had taken a lot of practice to acquire. Even employing this skill still made me furious, feeling diminishing and humiliating. Like I was degrading myself by playing along with these petty expectations.

Having my true power back, but hidden, was only worsening things.

Fortunately, I had a uniquely close motivation this time around. Now I knew that I was making steady, imminent progress. Every day I continued to humour my father was a day closer to the capital needed to start truly making waves in the Empire.

Besides, he did at least understand something about his own society. If he thought this farce would benefit our family’s station, he was probably right.

When I was not entertaining my family, or at least doing something to make them less inclined to antagonize me, my time was spent at the leyline, or more specifically entering my own artificial space from beside the leyline. There Nu’chista remained, growing less pleasant and more bitter by the day. Some people simply have no appreciation for scientific progress.

Then again, I was not making as much progress as I would have liked. Divine magic was not just different from mine, it was alien. Almost incomprehensible. I said ‘almost’ because I firmly believed that the universe was incapable of producing a mystery hard enough to withstand the sledgehammer that was my intellect, but that did not mean I would be bypassing this one soon.

Not soon. But eventually.

My current efforts were directed to finding out how to cultivate tissue samples, rather than how to replicate the magic naturally infused in them. I had already discovered that, for some strange reason, the divine energies infusing Nu’chista’s flesh would fizzle out from a section separated from the rest of him once his body had healed back the lost flesh.

This meant that I could not simply slice away pieces until I had enough tissue to work with, if I wished to create anything out of him. I had to find a way to make his body’s magic do as I wished, or at least to sustain the divine power trapped within his mystifying cells.

It felt like I was attempting to catch something slicker than oil in my fingers, watching it trickle out through the cracks.

Rarely will it be easy to tell when you are making progress with something totally and utterly unstudied. Whether I was floundering in the dark or shooting ever-closer to some breakthrough, I would only know in retrospect.

I passed months in this way, pitting my mind against the mysteries of nature and finding it repelled, for the time being. In-between long sessions spent training with Victoria or helping to improve Qaigor. I spoke with my mother frequently, who seemed more comfortable in my presence now than she had a year or so ago.

That was probably thanks to my having grown up. I was close to an adult now, and if she had never truly been able to control and talk down to me as she would have liked, the fact that I was now effectively full-grown and just waiting a few more years to turn twenty-one probably took the sting away from it for her.

To my surprise, though, I found myself wishing Agrian would return. I found myself wishing for that a lot. I could have told myself it was simply out of practicality, discomfort at being deprived of a useful instrument.

I could have told myself that, but I would know it was a lie. Self-deception was beneath me. What cause did Lord Dread have to hide from her own thoughts? Lord Dread feared nothing.

The domestic life was not to last forever though, because events had been progressing for the whole time, and true to my father’s word he had been focusing on acquiring the funds needed to further the next stage of my plans during them. This came to a climax one spring morning when he called me into his office for a private discussion.

I hid my excitement as best I could, but really sixteen years is no time at all to master something as unpredictable and disobedient as a human face.

“Port?” my father asked me. “Nevermind, I shouldn’t bother.” I ignored his evident affront at the reminder that I would not give myself organ damage for fun, then watched while he swigged down his own drink before I spoke.

“This is about the finances?” I asked eagerly.

“It is,” he confirmed. “They’re ready. The money is set up and ready to move. All that’s left is for you to head off with it.”

I tried to keep the smile from my face, still. “You are making the right decision,” I assured him.

“Am I now,” he grumbled. I sensed he was close to doing something stupid, like refuse me, so I spoke somewhat more hastily.

“Yes, you are. This industry will make our family. And our refineries will benefit from… a good deal of magical aid.”

His eyes met mine, and as I would have guessed he relaxed somewhat. The intricacies of breaking new industrial ground and trading in novel goods was less certain for him, and he could draw no confidence from promises of profit no matter how great they were.

But insider trading was an art baron Agrian Vornholt knew better than the lines on his own palm, and invoking that most ancient of crafts had taken this swiftly onto familiar ground. I could actually see his muscles relax in real-time.

“When will I expect to see returns on this?” he asked me. “This is all under my name, you know, I’ll be the founder of whatever company this turns into. I expect updates and reports.”

He wanted to feel in control. I saw no reason not to let him, for now.

“It is hard to say, but you should be seeing something come of this within a few months.”

Magic sped up things like construction so wonderfully well. Even that seemed too long ahead to my father, who grumbled into his port as I turned for the door.

“Isabel,” he called out. “Try to visit your home more often, will you?”

I paused by the door and considered how to respond.

“I will see,” I said at last. It was not that I disliked returning here, after all.

I just had many things to do, now that I was finally making a true move for control over the world.

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