The Lich King Reincarnates as a Baby

++One difference between the ancient and the modern world of magic is that now, more is done with less. A little knowledge of the world’s mundane rules goes a long way when influencing it magically.++

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

My father did not pause to see my reaction after giving me the news, just turned around and headed back for the mansion. “Come,” he called over his shoulder. “Hurry up, all of you, I’m preparing a feast, and we have so much to catch up on!”

As usual, he did not seem to even be aware that what he had said was causing me any kind of shock.

“Congratulations,” Agrian told me from the side. That brought my thoughts into focus as I looked over to glare at him. He grinned back, because he had never actually outgrown being a demon-child.

Walking through the Vornholt estate should have been relaxing for me, though the news I had received out in its courtyard left my mind the farthest thing from comfort. All I could do was think and speculate about what sort of moronic arrangement my father had planned.

The worst part was that he refused to answer any questions.

“Not now,” he sighed. “After dinner! I just told you because I know you’d be excited by the news, my dear, but there’s no need to derail our reunion just yet!”

He seemed to think it was some gift he had given me. In fact, he seemed incapable of even grasping how I felt about it. Like there was some mental block shielding his perception of reality that nothing as mundane as fact could penetrate.

Dinner was, as my father had promised, ready, and I felt rather isolated in not being very enthusiastic about this. Agrian rushed to the table, both Agrians in fact, and just as my father took his place at one end of it, and my mother just beside him, I noticed that it was not just the four of us sitting down to eat.

My younger siblings were there, as well.

Victoria I had spoken with already, sort of. The girl was barely capable of speech by the time I had left for the Winzorth Institute, and as I looked at her now I knew that she did not recognise me in the slightest. I smiled at her, however, because that was expected of me.

To my surprise, she smiled back with a great deal of happiness.

My other younger sibling, Qaigor, was rather different.

He took after our father, which was to say that he was a demon just like Agrian had been as a boy. He glared at me the whole time I spent seated at the table, except for brief moments he spent looking adoringly over at my older brother.

Agrian the Younger noticed these glances, too, and seemed to enjoy them a lot. I suppose he had never gotten to enjoy a fawning younger sibling before now, given the unusual circumstances of my ‘birth’.

Dinner was frosty, with the family all sitting and stewing in a far tenser atmosphere than usual. I do not actually believe I was the cause of this, either, because I got the impression that my parents had been having some sort of intense discussion just before myself and Agrian returned.

They kept glancing at each other, looking like they had thoughts building at the backs of their minds but did not wish to share them in front of their children. This was fine by me, because it was actually hard for me to imagine anything that would have been less interesting than family drama.

Though I did find myself thinking back to hearing my father strike my mother. Would that be repeated? Had it been, already? I would have to keep an eye out.

Dinner was more interesting, at least. I enjoyed food now. Thousands of years of not eating—uncountably more if you counted my time in the Depths—had left me almost forgetting what it was like, but this new body needed nourishment and I had quickly adjusted to it.

After a few accidental mishaps involving my tongue and teeth, that was. But those were all behind me now, and being reborn as a child meant that others did not even find my difficulties odd.

What we ate today was some luxurious roast, plated out alongside mashed and sliced vegetables with some sort of sauce made from animal fat. My father insisted on keeping a high-end cook as part of his staff, so it must have tasted good, but I barely noticed.

His news concerned me more than his food, and as far as I was concerned finishing this meal was just an obstacle I had to get past to hear more about whatever it was he had planned for me.

Even as I grew older and closer to adulthood, I realised, I was still, ultimately, at the mercy of other people and their plans for my life.

I chewed on that realization as I chewed on my food, but I did not have a new solution. The truth was that the way out of my situation had been the same since the moment I was born; become more powerful.

And I was already working on that, already making progress. Today I was more powerful than most adult magicians, and years from now, decades, I intended to have done much more than just gain magical strength.

It all just came down to my family. I finished my dinner, and patiently waited for conversation to taper off enough that I was finally able to speak.

“Father,” I asked, “what did you do?”

I could not, in my agitated state, think of a more diplomatic way to ask him. Baron Vornholt did not respond well to open challenges, especially not from a female source, so I managed to keep my voice soft and inoffensive. Barely.

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My father leaned back and took a sip of his drink, a notably full glass of wine. He seemed terribly pleased with himself, in a way that had me very strongly urged to hurl a magic missile at him. I had grown stronger now since he last met me, more than twice as strong in fact. If I hit him with one, it would hurt.

But it would not do much to get my way.

“I arranged a marriage for you,” he smiled.

“With who?” I asked, working quite hard to keep my temper from exploding.

“You do not know him, I fear,” he sighed. “But he is quite the luminary, let me tell you. His name is Cyrinda Liovicht. Know him?.”

“I do not.”

He took another sip. “Hm, I thought so. Well, not to worry, you’ll have plenty of time to get acquainted with him.”

“Who is he?” I asked, resisting the urge to throw myself across the table and start clawing at my father’s eyes.

“He’s the son of a fellow Baron,” my father said in a tone that showed he thought he was reassuring me. “And a fellow magician, like you, though he’s a few years older.”

“How much older?” My mother asked. “You never mentioned this.”

“He’s…Uh,” my father cleared his throat for a moment. “Seven years her senior. But he’s very enthusiastic about the arrangement, he thinks very highly of Isabel.”

Excellent, so I was now engaged to a pedophile. Agrian was laughing all the harder as he heard that, and of course my father saw nothing wrong with it, but my mother’s face twitched with irritation.

“I would have liked to have been told that Isabel was to marry someone so much older than her,” she said, though she did not look at my father as she did.

He turned her way, smiling still. “I did not see what was so important about it, she won’t actually be getting married for a good few years at least. She’ll be a grown woman by the time it happens.”

“This will happen in many years’ time then?” I cut in, failing to quite hide my dislike for the idea. My father sighed long and patronisingly.

“You will get used to this, Isabel, it will be good for you.” He reached over to his side and planted a hand down on my mother’s, and I saw her look over up at his face with the same old affection she always did. “Your mother and I were married under not-so-different circumstances.”

Yes, and you hit her when she makes you too angry, and keep her caged up like some pretty pet to decorate your home.

This was what he wanted for me, then. I looked at my mother, saw how she smiled and cowered and did nothing at all but what she was told to, and I took no time to decide that her fate was not something I would let myself share.

I had spent enough time imprisoned.

Dinner ended shortly, and Agrian and myself were finally given leave to head back to our rooms.

“But come to see me in my study later, my boy,” our father called after us. He did not have any business with me, naturally, and I was completely fine with that. I had no business with him either.

My room was completely unchanged from when I had last laid in it, except for the bed. That, fortunately, was now a full-sized one. The decoration around it was still plain but expensive, and I remembered with a start the lack of any book shelf inside. That irritated me. I had a good few dozen tomes borrowed from Winzorth, usually not allowed for students, but my connection with the Grandmaster had permitted it, and now it seemed I could not place them anywhere properly.

I settled for piling them by my bed, and making a mental note to find a more suitable resting place for them later.

With the whole of summer to be spent here, I would have plenty of time to go about customising the room more. For the time being, I had somewhere to be. I headed out and down the hall, moving fast and with purpose. My father had said he wanted to see Agrian later, and I could tell that he and my mother intended to have words with each other.

Just because my new body was rapidly closing in on puberty, did not mean I would by any means by stopping my eavesdropping habit now.

Father’s door was guarded this time, by two new men whom I did not recognise. I recognised their type though, more of his old associates from the army. Both of them looked at me politely and tried not to catch my eye, perhaps used to dealing with unpredictable, and often spiteful, noble children.

It was an amusing thought to picture how much more worried they would be if they knew what I was under this noble child’s skin.

For the time being, though, they were just inconvenient.

“Excuse me,” I told the men as I turned away from the door they guarded and flitted past them.

“Where are you going, young lady?” one of them asked. He to suspect something.

“That is none of your concern,” I replied without looking back. In my experience, a lazy deflection stopped most questions directed my way. It was growing more effective, rather than less, as I grew older. People expected dismissal from noble women.

Hurrying now, I slipped back to my room and tried the window. It was locked, but I had already perfected a solution to that problem years ago, and quickly had the latch undone without the slightest damage to its wider structure. Then I was climbing out.

My bedroom was on the third floor, and the floors of the Vornholt estate were each rather high up. I estimated that if I fell, I would be tumbling over forty feet before meeting the ground. A glance down showed me earth waiting to welcome me, not paved stone. That was something at least, and the fact that it was summer, and the sun had warmed and softened that dirt, was something else.

I still decided that falling to a potential doom instead of a certain one was not on my to-do list, and fortunately had quite a few new tricks that helped me avoid it.

Aether was something I had been practicing with a lot, and I used it now as almost an extra limb. Where I reached my fingers out for the wall, I would let semi-solid aether splash out to fall over it. Then, after allowing it to ooze around for a moment, I made it solid, giving myself a hook perfectly sunk into all the cracks of the walls and brickwork. This meant my grip was excellent as I shuffled along, but I was doing more than just that.

A new spell matrix, devised myself, saw that there was a constant wind pressing against my back, driving me towards the wall, making me much less likely to tumble away from it and fall. I was sending a pulse of mana out ahead of me too, using it to examine the texture of wherever I was about to step before I did so and let me avoid any unseen pitfalls.

None of these techniques had been created specifically for climbing, and all had other uses, but this was an excellent practical test for them. I only wished I could have employed more from my bag of tricks.

It was fortunate for me that my father’s study had a window, but less fortunate that it was almost on the opposite side of the mansion to my own. I had quite the climb to make. I knew that I could not have done this even a year ago, my limbs had been too small and my magic not quite developed enough to make it safe. Now, however, I was making full use of my longer reach and strengthened powers. I think I made quicker progress than a grown adult could have without magic.

When at last I reached the window I recognised, I pressed myself against the wall just beside it and extended my new listening device. Aether again, of course, but this time I pressed a limb of it down into the window’s mechanism to unlatch it from within, then carefully smothered all its moving parts as I gently nudged it upwards.

Aether covered the sound of hinges scraping, and I only needed an inch or so of clearance to slip the rest of my device in—the same funnel I had first made as a child, though this one much improved and with far better audio clarity.

“...She’ll be grown in a few years anyway, what difference does it make?” My father growled.

My mother was there with him, and I knew she was taking her time picking the right answer. Had he struck her again since that time I had heard them argue last? I felt an odd feeling as I thought about the idea, a rushing in my blood.

I listened closer.

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