The Lich King Reincarnates as a Baby

++Defending my laboratories has always been a priority, and yet excessive protection can be a double-edged sword.++

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

Isabel Vornholt’s return had almost given Laiel a damned heart attack. He’d been ready for it, in some distant part of his mind, but the majority of his brain had just not really registered the possibility. How could it? If he’d let himself think about that, he’d never have mustered the balls to go about investigating her as he had. Would’ve just spent the whole time curled up in his room and whimpering.

It took all of his will not to head off and start doing just that even now. Laiel knew, intellectually, that he was in too deep. Knew that with Agrian Vornholt having already set eyes on him at Isabel Vornholt’s quarters, and his all-too-traceable campaign of gathering up eyewitnesses and noting down their accounts, she wouldn’t struggle much to both work out he’d been investigating her, and nail him for it.

Now she was back, that risk had gone from looming to imminent. Laiel was an idiot. He should just leave. What was a desertion charge to getting killed by some little shit noble? It wasn’t like he was important enough for Garamon to chase down, if he cut and ran from the army now, with all the chaos, he could be tens, even hundreds of miles away before anyone even thought to look for him. There were other cities in Estalia, and if none of them exactly liked pale men with Garamon accents, all of them would have work for a powerful magician.

Right. And he’d retire to live out his days in the lap of luxury with a busty brown woman under each arm and a third one’s mouth wrapped around his johnson. If Laiel was going to daydream, he might as well add a few Demigods to his imaginary harem too.

No. Estalia was never a pleasant place for former Garamon soldiers, and this most recent round of conquest would only have annoyed the savages even more. If they didn’t turn him over to Garamon for a reward, they’d just lynch him themselves.

Laiel took a hold of his nerves and quietly, dispassionately strangled them until they stopped bothering him. It was made easy by the simple fact that he didn’t actually have a choice. Not if he wanted to live. He was dreaming of desertion and a better life elsewhere because he was trying to find excuses not to keep pushing when things had already gotten so dangerous.

But it was all, still, only dreams. If he’d had options for a comfy life in Irucci then he’d have fucked off to claim it years ago.

Magicians were too rare to hide forever.

Laiel finished beating his own cowardly streak out of himself, and turned back to the matter at hand. He was working on a time limit now. That he was still alive and boasting all four of his limbs proved that Vornholt—both Vornholts, most likely—were preoccupied by the ongoing debriefings and investigations.

No overt suspicion had fallen on Isabel Vornholt yet, but Laiel didn’t think the army was stupid enough for her to be completely free of it. He certainly hoped not, at least.

He certainly hoped, if nothing else, that even this gaggle of morons was smart enough to keep pressing her for quite some time. Because while Vornholt was off to her latest interview, something Laiel had carefully made sure of already, he would have the perfect chance to poke around her apartment. Agrian Vornholt was the only possible hitch, and that boy had stormed off from her even as Laiel watched her leave Huit’s company.

Once more, he beat down his fears and made himself head off.

Fortunately, Isabel Vornholt’s rooms were quite far from the walls, which Laiel had already heard on reliable word was where the Demigod Aryqatan would be meeting Vornholt. That meant that unless Vornholt chose to rush back to her quarters, he had quite a lot of time to sift through them.

Laiel wasn’t as young as he used to be though, jogging the whole way was tiring even with a conjured wind at his back to reduce the strain. He was sweating badly by the time he arrived and took the few moments needed to conjure a drizzle of water and roll it over himself, wiping away all the bodily excretions. A sufficiently skilled magician could trace a man’s sweat and grime, if they put their mind to it. He didn’t know if any in the army had that particular knack, but when one was dealing with magic it was always best to be as ridiculously paranoid as possible. Assume you were facing every ability under the sun and you wouldn’t go wrong.

You wouldn’t even be that far from the truth, when dealing with an army this big.

The quarters were unchanged from before, and still a bitch to get into subtly. On one hand they were in a fairly under-populated area, which meant there weren’t many witnesses, but as high as the apartment was off the ground, and as hostile to any efforts at climbing its architecture was, the notion of subtly and sneakiness was really more of an abstract dream when it came to infiltrating. Laiel settled for speed instead. The smaller a timeframe he took to make it up, the less chance things had to go wrong or witnesses to spot him.

Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

Well, that was the theory. Turning theory into practice was always an exercise in guts under circumstances like this, though.

Laiel got inside easily enough, still deciding to hurry on the chance that a witness had given the alarm too silently for him to hear from so high. He looked around Vornholt’s apartment once and decided the place was…annoyingly nice.

Big and expansive, with rooms bigger than his own house back home in Garamon. It was neat and tidy as anything, too, which seemed to fit the girl’s personality from what he’d seen. No doubt she’d gotten her hands on these quarters as a reward for services rendered in the opening nights of the siege.

All Laiel could think of now was that it meant he had that much more ground to cover. He started searching by moving straight past the common room, where Vornholt would tend to receive guests, and going for the locked door leading to another section of apartment. Locks were promising, they meant secrets.

Locks also meant a barred way. Laiel tried his usual lockpicking trick, as well as about six others he’d picked up over the years, but none worked. The damned thing was enchanted; lightly, barely perceptively, but enough to foil any low-to-mid level magic put to gaining entry. He considered his next step for a moment and settled on force. It wasn’t like he had much longer before discovery anyway, in for a penny and all that.

Taking a step back and focusing his mana, Laiel studied the door. Big and thick, the wood looked like it would’ve broken a sledgehammer before yielding. He didn’t hit it with a sledgehammer, though, and his magic missiles punched a crater into it with every hit. He only took a dozen to have the door pried open and step in past it.

One glimpse, that was all Laiel got of the insides. All he needed. He saw instruments that had no use in a legal laboratory, samples of tissue growing in unnatural ways, dark energies twisting and coiling at the behest of dark sigils, a severed limb twitching like it was alive. He saw what could only be described as a cage. A binding of mana and gold limbs set up to hold something non-physical and powerful.

And then he felt the rush of magic in the air as something altogether new made itself known.

Laiel wasn’t an accomplished Conjurer. He could perform the bare basics, bringing forth non-sentient, inanimate matter from other planes when needed, but he’d never called on a thinking being. He knew how to detect one though. The momentary, telltale flash of power was just enough warning for him to engulf himself in a barrier of hardened air and conjured stone before the jet of magic crunched into him and sent him flying back into the apartment’s common room. The thing that had attacked him followed after.

The fae were easy enough to recognise, as varied as their shapes were. This one took the form of a young woman in a night-dress, recognisably inhuman only by her pointed ears, significantly more pointed teeth and vast magical power. Laiel had another shield ready in time for her next attack, but the mana, formed into a frigid winter’s wind, still drove him clean through the floor of the apartment and flying out into the street.

He hit a road, tumbled and felt the world rotate around him. There was blood in his mouth and tears in his eye, then Laiel came to a clumsy stop against the far wall of a neighbouring building and the pain only got worse. He forced himself to his feet just in time to leap aside from a follow-up attack that simply obliterated the section of wall he’d been standing in front of, and by the time his enemy had another even half-prepared his own magic missile was hitting home in its chest.

The fae went flying back into the apartment, taking a notch out of the wall it shot past and dragging bricks inside with it. Laiel wasn’t naive enough to believe that it was anything more than delayed.

Options. He needed options, needed to know what they were more specifically. Did he stay and fight? Fuck no, that was a lucky shot he just landed and he wasn’t betting his life on getting more.

But Laiel didn’t have a choice, the fae was screaming back out of the rubble and twisting towards him like a diving falcon. He didn’t shield himself again this time, just flung his body from the path of its attack, feeling ears throb and skin tear with the force of it, and retaliated at once with another spell of his own, this time a shackling matrix that bound the fae in chains of conjured vine and great boulders that dragged it down. He rushed to the apartment.

It was faster than him by far, no way he’d outrun it. That only left one option. Laiel flung himself painfully up from ground level through the broken wall and rolled into it, then made a beeline for the forbidden room his new adversary had emerged from. It must’ve known what he planned, because another blast of mana racked the building and almost caved in the full roof, throwing Laiel off his feet. The fae thundered into the room in time to get a faceful of molten rock, then, while the winter-spirit was responding rather predictably to the sensation, Laiel crawled his way back over and stared into the laboratory.

There, at the far wall. A glowing sigil that he could practically feel calling out to the fae. Laiel put a magic missile right through it just in time to keep from being obliterated as the fae readied another attack. It disappeared into the ether with a scream of hatred.

The apartment was crumbling around him. Fires had started, though they didn’t seem to be spreading. Laiel lay there and waited to regain his strength, knowing that people would already be rushing towards the scene. There was no way anyone important had failed to take note of the destruction and magic he’d just wrought.

He had to leave. Rolling onto his knees, then standing, he shot a longing look at Vornholt’s exposed lab. Instinct told him to snatch some evidence with him to take away, but he knew that having it on his person would only incriminate him if he couldn’t prove where he’d found it.

Laiel leapt one last time from the apartment, barely sparing the mana to cushion his fall. He disappeared into the alleys nearby and did so feeling, for the first time in several days, something close to optimistic.

Even if he didn’t present the laboratory evidence, it was going to add a lot of weight to his collection of eyewitness statements.

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