The Lich King Reincarnates as a Baby

++I made remarkable progress in remarkably few years following my reincarnation. I would make yet more even after that.++

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

The Demigod was deeper in the ground than he would have been if a thousand labourers with pickaxes and dynamite had spent the better part of an afternoon burying him on purpose. I almost regretted how hard he had impacted, the sound of shearing stone had utterly obliterated the noise of his spine cracking.

But it had. I could tell by the spasms in his legs and fingers, nerves were going haywire as they waited for signals that would never come. Oh, he would heal from this. Eventually. Demigods recovered not only quicker, but cleaner than normal humans, but with Nu’chista’s power major spinal damage like this would leave him paralyzed for at least a day.

I would not require a full day to do what I had planned next.

“How…how are you here?” he asked me, somehow seeming calmer now that he knew he was beaten. Perhaps total defeat, inescapable and undeniable, had quenched the flame of panic and fear that was animating him so strongly before. Perhaps he was rational enough to realise there was no point in agitated fire now that it was already over.

“DOES IT MATTER?” I asked him. “I AM HERE. THAT IS A FACT. YOU CAN DO WITH IT AS YOU CHOOSE. OR RATHER, YOU HAD THE OPTION TO DO WITH IT AS YOU CHOSE. YOU CHOSE POORLY.”

He did not even seem to register my barb, not even with a flinch. I saw tears in the Demigod’s eyes. Fear and despair and silent, impotent hatred that shone just as strongly as the old anger had.

The Demigod’s head fell to one side and he grimaced, like he was in great pain.

Ah yes, most of his organs were currently leaking out of the various holes in his side. He probably was in great pain. It had not taken me long, reclaiming my old form, to let it slip my mind how organic flesh reacted to damage.

It did not matter much now, in any case. What counted, what was important for my plans, was that he was helpless. I did not need him to be in pain, only unresisting while I began my work.

The pain would come naturally, much later.

“You’ll lose, you know,” the Demigod groaned. “You must know. How could you think otherwise? You may be strong, you may be impossibly strong, but you are still, in the end, nothing more than a human.” He spat the word out at me like a slur.

It was petty, but that attitude actually drew my gaze over to fall on his face a moment. That arrogance. I had always hated it. Always loathed it. To see these pathetic children—these simpering, loyal dogs with the power of civilisations—daring to look down on me.

It demanded an answer.

“ANY HUMAN IS STRONGER THAN YOU,” I told him. “FROM THE MOMENT WE ERUPT INTO THIS WORLD, WRITHING AND WET WITH OUR MOTHER’S GORE, WE ARE STRONGER THAN YOU. WE HAVE THE STRENGTH TO LOOK UPON OUR SURROUNDINGS AND WONDER. TO THINK AND FEEL, TO QUESTION AND EXPLORE. WE HAVE THE STRENGTH TO SEE HOW THINGS ARE AND DREAM THAT THEY MAY BE DIFFERENT. YOUR GODS ARE THINGS OF STAGNATION, THEY FIGHT FOR THE PRESENT, AND HOPE TO KEEP IT FROM EVER CHANGING. I MAY NOT DEFEAT THEM TODAY, BUT THEY WILL LOSE. TOMORROW, A THOUSAND YEARS FROM NOW OR A MILLION. THE FUTURE IS MORE POWERFUL THAN ANY PANTHEON.”

He was silent for a long moment. I had hoped to see fear, perhaps even my namesake—dread. He expressed neither. After a few seconds the Demigod returned his gaze to me with a new heat in his eyes.

“No. You will die and you will fail. There have been a thousand upstarts like you, and all have fallen. I only wish I could live long enough to see you realise it.”

My mandible bone shifted, and the rolling darkness that clung to me rippled in a way that mirrored the stretching skin and muscles I would have used to make a smile.

“YOU HAVE NOT WORKED IT OUT YET,” I observed. “THAT EXPLAINS YOUR ODD COURAGE. BRAVERY IS SO HARD TO DIFFERENTIATE FROM AN IGNORANT LACK OF FEAR.”

The Demigod’s face spasmed, almost like a new wave of pain had run through him.

“Figured what out?!” he spat.

“THERE HAS NEVER BEEN AN UPSTART LIKE ME,” I told him. “YOU MAY, IN FACT, SAY THAT I AM THE UPSTART BY WHICH ALL THE OTHERS WERE INSPIRED.”

The realisation dawned on him with all the weight of a terminal diagnosis. He sobbed.

Good. I would have been bothered to work on an ignorant subject. There was very little point to a notorious and universally feared reputation if your defeated enemies were too ignorant to attribute it to you.

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My mana reached itself down into the earth and began working, scouring through the sandstone with waves of energy that left the very substance of the rock—those imperceptibly small components modern chemists called ‘atoms’— to slip apart and behave as liquid instead of solid. I drew them up, stretching and twisting the material, working it like I was molding wet clay until I had several spires of stone protruding up around the Demigod and caging him in, all coming just shy of touching at the centre above him.

It looked like a vast, skeletal hand was engulfing him from below. It looked like my hand. This pleased me.

And it frightened the Demigod. He had clearly been waiting for a deathblow this whole conversation, now, though, he started to suspect something more was coming. Recognising the features of ritual magic as it was prepared before his eyes. He must have healed slightly in the brief conversation we already exchanged, because he began rather energetically sitting up.

“What are you doing,” he growled. “I won’t let you—” he wheezed as a magic missile thudded into his chest, a shaped explosion that would have sliced through so many feet of steel like it was wet paper. The Demigod lay back with steam coiling off his chest.

“SILENCE.”

He was not in a position to argue, though clearly wanted to. More spires rose up to join the others, then a crisscrossing network of glass formed beneath them as I melted, then directed molten silica to slide up around the jutting pillars. The patterns I produced were complex enough to almost leave the term ‘three dimensional’ seeming an insufficient description, making a contrived network above the Demigod. Perhaps fifty spiders constructing webs in the same volume, without any of them being aware they were not alone, would have produced a similar structure. A natural one, though. A mindless and instinctive one, formed through the basic necessities of natural law.

My working was the most deliberate and in-depth artifice I had ever made, perhaps the most that anyone had ever made.

It was a spell matrix modelled with physical matter.

Nu’chista must have felt the magic rolling through it once the actual body was finished, I saw his eyes light up with primal fascination as much as fear. So there was some human curiosity in there, after all. Buried deep and quashed beneath the overwhelming, doglike loyalty.

“YOU ARE BEGINNING TO UNDERSTAND.” I observed. “TO UNDERSTAND HOW LITTLE YOU UNDERSTAND, AT LEAST. I DO WISH YOU WERE A MORE KNOWLEDGEABLE OBSERVER. PERHAPS KINAKI, YOUR GOD OF MAGIC, WOULD UNDERSTAND SOMETHING OF MY CREATION HERE. THE BASICS AT LEAST.”

He stared at me in disbelief. “You think you know more than the Goddess of magic? That’s ridiculous.”

“HOW CAN I BE RIDICULOUS, IF ALL THE PEOPLE WHO RIDICULE ME KEEP DYING IN AGONY?”

There was more power flowing into the device now, building like pressure behind flood gates. The banks of a river just moments before it burst. This was an enchantment. It was an enchantment greater in scale than any other I had worked on yet, but it was still, ultimately, an enchantment. It was magic taken by will and burned into physical matter, made permanent and self-sustaining.

As I was, as Isabel Vornholt, I would have required months, even years to muster this much strength, chipping into it a little more each day and slowly nudging my petty strength into obedience. Lord Dread did not have that limitation. My strength was more than a hundred times what it had been, and my skill was scarcely less advanced than that. I stood there, focusing with my unyielding lich’s intellect, and achieved in an hour what would previously have demanded a sizable fraction of a human lifetime. By the time I was finished, the Demigod Nu’chista was bound. Bound and more.

I felt his power smashing against the walls of his cage in a futile, panicked effort to free himself. He was actually hurting himself by using divine magic as such an ineffective blunt instrument against the greater, more sophisticated cage of my power. Like an animal chewing off its own foot for freedom, not realising the shackle that bound it was fastened halfway up the thigh.

Not realising that he would never be free again.

“What is this!?” he demanded. “Some execution chamber?”

“IT IS YOUR NEW HOME.”

He laughed. “You think the Gods won’t find me here? I’m in the middle of a city you destroyed, you imbecile!”

“YOU ARE…INCORRECT.”

I waved a hand and called on perhaps my most powerful spell, feeling space rend before me and collapse in on itself, expanding around the newly-made cage and drawing it out of this reality and into another. A miniature realm of my own making. The Demigod had just long enough, with his inhuman mental agility, to realise what was happening and cry out, whether with alarm or disgust I could not be sure, before he was snatched away from sight and I was left to stand there alone.

I looked around me slowly, soaking in the sight of Orapathaqi.

Destroyed streets, flattened buildings, air that seemed now to consist mostly of rolling clouds and swirling pillars of dust. At places the city was painted with spilled blood, at others there were human shadows burned black against sheer stone where they had been vaporized in an instant by magics beyond any mundane technology. Everywhere, there was ruin.

This was the future. This would be the fate of many, perhaps all, human settlements before my work was done. I would battle with the Gods in every place they were found, and I doubted those places would fare even as well as this.

This was the death rattle of a beaten Demigod, how much worse would be the demise of Maketa? The demise of Nglaru?

I made myself observe, study and truly understand what I would be bringing about. And I considered something. Could I simply live out a life as Isabel Vornholt? Could I simply exist peacefully, then retreat from the world? One day my mortal shell would likely age and die, but did I need to continue as a lich on Arwyna after that?

I could leave. Make my way through the stars, journey to some distant world and make it my own. Construct my lair and my laboratory and my vast libraries, perhaps even bring a few humans to begin my own population. With the power of Lord Dread, it was impractical and optimistic. With the power Isabel Vornholt might add onto that by the time she died of old age, it was distinctly possible.

Were there still meat on my face, it would be contorted into a smile. A mocking one. That idea had no appeal to me, not even a scrap. Peace and tranquility, isolation and obscurity? It was ludicrous, and had all the temptation to me now as a glass full of hot sand to a man dying of thirst in the desert.

No. One moment of introspection and I knew my doubts were non-existent, just as they had remained non-existent through countless aeons in the Depths. I was Lord Dread, the Lich King.

And now, after so many millennia, I finally had a Demigod test subject.

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