The Lich King Reincarnates as a Baby

++The throes of a disaster are often a good time to do something drastic. At any other moment, you would need to worry about making things worse.++

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

I was in prison.

A special sort of prison, where it was not located inside an actual prison building, and nobody present was permitted to directly refer to it as a prison. This did not, however, alter the amount of imprisoned I was. If anything it increased it. The euphemism was just another layer of captivity wrapped around me.

My cell was a large basement room near one of the central Orapathaqian buildings Nu’chista had seized to make the core of Garamon’s garrison and its organisation. This was a bad place to be trapped, for several reasons.

The walls were first among them. I could blast through just about any thickness of pure stone, given enough time, but these were more than that. I had sent experimental waves of mana through the material to verify as much, each one was lined by internal veins, or even whole plates, of something harder and denser. Not magical, at least as far as I could tell. My current guess was steel or perhaps bronze. Either of which would be enough to slow any attempt at punching through I could make.

Which brought me to my second problem, the reason I did not have unlimited time to create a hole in the first place.

Nu’chista was not especially bright, an odd number of Demigods shared that limited mental range, but he knew better than to leave me unguarded. And he knew better than to leave magicians on the job. Outside my cell were, by my count, at least five Godtouched and twice as many warriors of the second order.

He must really have suspected me, to tie up so many resources in guard duty.

I felt itchy. I felt hot and fidgety, like ants were crawling on my skin, like I was immobilised and unable to sweep them off. Which I was.

My apartment was being searched right now, and I could do nothing about it. Nu’chista had refused to see me and refused to call on Agrian, I could pass no messages out of my cell to make any desperate attempts at altering events from here.

I passed the time by practicing with my magic, both in raw power and with technique. I produced shapes of aether and tried different elemental effects at a time, looping through and around one another, conjuring substances as I threw them high and catching them with sheets of extraplanar water, any number of things I could think of to try, desperately, for a distraction.

None of it was working. There are drawbacks, after all, to lichdom.

There are also drawbacks to a biological body, and I felt at that moment that I was getting all of the worst of both worlds with absolutely nothing to compensate me for either. My nerves were worsening by the moment, to the point where I even caught myself making a mistake with my magic.

Me. Lord Dread, making an error! In magic of all things! I actually puked in my mouth at sheer disgust.

Pacing did nothing more to distract me than magic had, and just when I was growing furious and tired enough to almost consider blasting at the walls in a last hope to kill time, I was snapped from my ruminations by an unexpected racket outside the door of my cell. I stopped instantly and was still, listening for any crumb of vital information I could scrounge from the other side of the stone.

Several voices rang out at once, and destroyed any sound that might have made it through the thick cell. Fortunately I was not left waiting for long regardless. The door began to rattle and open. I stepped clear of it, not wanting to be reflexively shot should one of the idiots guarding it mistake my closeness for an imminent threat. Stupider things not only happened in the army, but did so with alarming regularity.

In fact, I observed a stupider thing happening right then. Bagran Voret waltzed his way into my cell like he had been invited, and though I was covered with grime from the fire at my apartment, and sweat from my flight to reach it, his eyes still wandered over my body in as repulsive a way as ever.

“Isabel, you’re looking lovely today,” he grinned.

“I would like to end this visit,” I called out to the guards beyond the cell.

Bagran scowled. “You’re locked up, suspected of treason, you smell like shit and you might get hanged soon. This isn’t the time to be a bitch.”

I was reluctantly forced to admit that he had a point. I had tolerated uncountable aeons of sensory deprivation waiting for the Great Setback to end, I should be able to withstand at least a few minutes alone in a cell with Bagran.

Probably.

“You are here for a reason then,” I sighed as I turned from him. “What is it?”

I certainly was not going to waste either of our time, and Bagran had already shown a tolerance for some level of bluntness. There were also other benefits to trying his patience. I may as well get him to speak quickly.

“Do you know what’s going on outside?” he asked, stepping closer. “What the investigations are, the ones aimed at you I mean? What the suspicions are?”

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I had an idea of course.

I also knew that Bagran was not necessarily here on friendly terms. In fact, given his reaction to my rudeness where he had previously stormed away, I suspected that Nu’chista had sent him in to gain my confidence as part of a subtler manipulation. It was the sort of clumsy attempt at subterfuge a brute like that might coin.

“No, I don’t,” Bagran replied, to my surprise. “Care to fill me in?”

I would have expected him to immediately tell me he knew I was accused of necromancy, to try and win my favour that much quicker. Instead he was feigning ignorance? Perhaps this was an improvisation on his part, he was, if nothing else, less idiotic than Nu’chista. Marginally.

“I am not fully sure myself,” I told him. “I believe I am suspected of treason, or something to that effect.”

“Treason, how?” he asked me.

I hesitated. “I do not know.”

Bagran sighed. “Well that’s bloody inconvenient, isn’t it? This is how they’ve always treated magicians, let me tell you. Ingrateful bastards the lot of them. We keep the whole of Garamon running and do we ever hear a word of thanks? Cunts!”

Even I was starting to doubt my paranoia at that. Bagran’s outrage, at least, was certainly real, but then I had already known how good he was at finding things to be outraged by.

I experienced it first-hand often.

Bagran’s flaring temper died down soon after, in any case. He tended to feel his anger fiercely and swiftly, and this time it withered even faster than usual. “Well, if we don’t know what you’re in for, it’s tricky to prepare a defense pre-emptively, but I have every intention of getting you off this ridiculous affair, trust me. I’ve already dispatched a letter to Garamon—bloody savages here haven’t even set up a telegram network—and I intend to have the best lawyers in the country stand for your defence.”

“I see,” I replied. “Thank you.”

My response was stunted. I did not think these lawyers were real, nor was I stupid enough to believe any sort of legal representation would help me. If anything Nu’chista would hear about the notion of an upcoming trial, panic, and try to eat my magic on the spot. Whatever interesting results came from him inevitably failing thanks to my distant phylactery, I could not imagine the Gods remaining ignorant of them.

It was looking more and more likely that my plans were crumbling. One of the mouth-breathers outside my door chose that moment to add fuel to the fire, striking opportunistically as tidings of ill-fortune seemed always to do.

“She’s not telling you the truth, eh?” he sneered. “Then I will, the little cunt’s in there for necromancy. She’s a corpse-fucker like all the savages she’s been pretending to kill.”

Another one chimed in, somewhat less contemptuous but infinitely more amused. His remark was aimed at Bagran. “You picked a hell of a woman to try and court, boy!”

Bagran’s face looked like it had been messily carved into the back of a corpse’s head using a blunt knife. It was difficult to imagine a greater mask of anger than I saw now.

“Is this true?” he asked me, his voice low and quiet. It occurred to me that this situation had just gotten significantly less infuriating, and significantly more deadly.

“No,” I said at once.

“She’s lying,” one of the jeering men called out. Bagran slammed the door with a wave of magic, practically vibrating with fury.

“Of course it’s true,” he spat. “You wouldn’t be hauled here with such excessive force on anything else. I heard they were searching your apartment, it’s on suspicion of finding necromantic contraband, right?”

I said nothing, suspecting that any counter-claims I made would just be twisted around into more fuel for the blaze of his suspicions.

Bagran was pacing again, this time his boots trudging down like hammer-blows onto the stone. At last he spoke once more.

“It’s true,” he whispered, more to himself than myself. “So the least you can do is tell me why you went and did this.”

He looked at me so earnestly that I was almost tempted to. I did not, of course. For all I knew even this was just some spectacularly good performance. I had nothing to gain, and a lot still to lose, by confiding in him with something as deadly and ruinous as the truth.

“I do not know what you are talking about,” I lied again. Bagran’s face twitched like someone had reached under the skin and started tugging on its nerve endings by hand.

Then all the anger went out of him, which only left me confused.

“I never had a chance, did I?” he asked.

“What?”

“I’m asking if you were ever, for even one moment, considering courting me,” he sighed.

“Oh.” I pondered that, and saw no reason to tell the truth. I did need all the help I could get, after all. “Of course I was, I was…playing hard to get.”

Bagran just laughed. “I know you met with the Duke of Wolsingham himself, I don’t need more lies to soften things. Bugger it. Fine. I’ll just have to admit to father that I wasn’t able to poach the finest woman in Garamon from under its finest warrior.”

“What are you talking about?” I asked him, but my sentence was promptly cut off when a magic missile smashed into the door and blew it fully off its hinges and out into the hall beyond.

Bagran’s second attack came before any of the warriors or Godtouched beyond could react to his first, and my instincts took over to start aiding his efforts as magic missiles flew, barriers came down and the air began screaming with arcane exertions. On my own I would have either lost to the group beyond my cell, or taken long enough defeating them for Nu’chista to arrive.

With Bagran’s aid, and the element of surprise, it was no contest.

We had the hall beyond cleared out in seconds, and Bagran himself barely looked winded by the effort. I had my questions.

“Why did you just do that?” I asked him, aware that we were now alone and he may do something that forced me to defend myself.

“Does it matter?” he asked. “You don’t have long, hurry and go.”

I hesitated. Curiosity is a lich’s greatest weakness. “Yes, if you want me to leave fast, answer.”

He groaned. “Because I fucking love you, alright? Happy now?”

Ah. Well, that was well-timed if nothing else. Perhaps I had been too harsh on him.

“Now wiggle that fantastic arse out of here before staring at it makes me lose control,” he added.

Having confirmed that the world was not ending, and that Bagran was indeed still a rat, I took my leave.

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