The Lich King Reincarnates as a Baby

++I have always liked killing people with magic, it is the greatest possible expression of my superior power. One of the most painful things about my rebirth was how rarely I could do it.++

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

The money-lender was apparently called Wick. This was definitely not his birth name, and I respected him all the less knowing he had chosen it himself. Sometime in the past few thousand years, classic and respectable titles such as Lord Dread seemed to have fallen out of fashion. I would have to bring them back along with my new reign of terror.

For the time being, though, I was focused on accompanying Paula to sort out her familial problem. The woman had a distant look in her eyes that I had seen several times before. Usually in soldiers with a mission, this bottomless focus that sent her thoughts racing ahead of us both and over the horizon. I may have disappeared right then and she would not have noticed, because I was not the man named Wick. The man she was going to kill.

Or at least, the man I hoped she would kill. She had not actually affirmed her intentions to do that, and there were, I was forced to admit, other, more disturbing possible choices she might make.

“You will not do anything stupid, will you?” I asked her as we approached Yir. The city was not far now, another quarter-mile to its outskirts, with Wick supposedly being situated somewhere near the rim. We would be confronting him within half an hour, I imagined.

“Of course not,” Paula replied without looking my way. “I’ll only do necessary and smart things.”

The way she said that had a hint of mockery.

“Are you mocking me?” I asked openly.

Paula did not seem to hear me at first, replying only after another distant stare ahead. “...No.”

She was telling the truth, that much I believed. The woman seemed too preoccupied for mockery.

Buildings soon surrounded us, as small as any slums in Garamon but far less ill-repaired. The streets underfoot were not nearly as pitted by hard use and low maintenance, and the air reeked far less strongly of combustion and human waste. It was still far from a pleasant scent of course, I had grown accustomed to inhaling the filtered atmosphere of the Winzorth Institute, but I had spent enough time letting fellow apprentices pose as my suitors in similar areas of Laugrey that I was accustomed to it.

Paula, of course, did not even bat an eye.

“Used to come here as a girl to help sell my dad’s wares,” she noted. “Never alone. Always had one or two of my brothers with me.”

It was easy enough to guess why. A woman walking by herself loaded with jewelry? Thieves would risk their lives for a target ten times less valuable.

Wick’s ‘office’ was revealed to me soon enough, in all of its pathetic glory. If it was greater than the buildings around it, it was only by being twice as tall and three times as wide. The pitiable state of its condition was shared by all the others, and I saw no windows. Not even shutters. They had been punched in and bricked up long ago.

“In case the coppers came calling,” Paula grunted, noticing me eye the windows. The police of Laugrey were rather a new development, having been founded only a few decades ago. Those of Lachfel were newer still. I could not imagine a place as out-of-the-way as Yir having had them for more than a few years at most.

“They are not going to do that, are they?” I guessed. Paula grinned nastily.

“Probably not, no.”

I kept my smile to myself, but was nonetheless pleased. The last thing I wanted here was disruptions. Paula approached the door first and knocked, while I waited behind her. I got the distinct impression of being watched, and threw out a pulse of mana imbued with a hint of necromancty. Yes. Several figures, I could sense their directions and distance based on the feeling of vital energies moving through them. At least two had a strong current of life, the sort that I was used to seeing in warriors. This may not be as easy as I had hoped.

Paula knocked again, more irritably, more nervously. I wanted to tell her to calm herself, but that would only give away her nerves to our less-astute observers. She received her answer a few moments later all the same. The door swung open to reveal a large and hard-looking man on the other side. He stood at least as tall as my father, though seemed even broader at the shoulders and broader still at the gut. He was one of the warriors I had sensed, body pulsing with physical power.

“You here about the jeweler?" the big man asked. He had a voice like blunt razors scraping together.

A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

“Yeah, I’m…the one who wrote your boss from Laugrey,” Paula did her best to glare up at him as she replied, but it did not carry much weight. It looked rather like a kitten staring down the bulldog. The man nodded, stepped aside and ushered her in. I moved to follow, and he stopped me with a hand on the shoulder. It might have been a boulder for all my ability to move it.

“She stays,” he growled. It was now my turn to look up at him. I saw missing teeth, this close, and patches of skin fully scarred over where they’d been cut entirely away. This man looked like he had spent as much time knife-fighting as I had on magic.

“How much do you think you would enjoy life without the use of your eyes, legs or hands?” I asked him.

“She comes with me,” Paula added sharply. “Or I don’t come in at all.”

For a moment the man seemed unnerved. People had started to react like that to me, lately, which I thought was quite interesting. It was like their bodies could sense something their minds could not. I would have to account for it.

Today, though, it did not seem like this man was being daunted out of place. He just remained where he was, staring, before someone came up behind him and whispered something to him. My magic was quick and subtle enough now that I could form a listening tube between us that was invisible to his eyes only inches away.

“The boss wants them both.”

It was a simple phrase, but it changed everything. The big man stepped aside instantly and let me pass. I did not miss the nasty sneer on his face, it would have warned me what was coming even if nothing else had. Paula headed deeper into the building and I followed after, keeping an eye out as I went. There were more spells in my repertoire than there had been a few years ago, more of them combat-based as well, but that did not mean I was going to let my guard down. Magicians were only normal humans, physically. This new body of mine had swift reflexes, as quick as I could make them through training, but it was not superhuman, not even in the small way my old one had been.

Speed was still my nemesis.

Wick’s room proved to be just as repulsive as I expected. It was a bedroom, with the bed in question being a king-sized affair that was utterly out of place. Red sheets, linen, I thought. He was seated beside it in a bath robe, and from the moment Paula and I entered I could feel his eyes running up and down my body.

Not an unaccustomed sensation, since I hit the tail-end of puberty it had been more or less the basic experience I could expect from an interaction with almost any man, but that did not mean I cared for it one bit. That Wick was especially repulsive, with his nose messily cut off and clumsily scabbed over years ago, did not make things any better.

“You’re the jeweler’s daughter,” the man smiled. It showed oddly white, straight teeth. Perhaps his only good feature. His voice was exactly as nasally as that of a man whose nose had been messily cut off and clumsily scabbed over years ago. “Lovely to see you in person at last, we haven’t spoken outside of letters, have we?”

That explained Paula’s level of anticipation in coming here, I thought. She had already discussed something with the man and knew what to expect.

“I’m here about my father’s debt,” She said sharply.

“Oh I know.” Wick got to his feet, and I saw him fiddling with his belt buckle as Paula paled like her throat was cutflushed. “Let’s get started then,” he sneered.

“Alright Isabel, leave now,” Paula’s voice had a touch of finality to it. “Please, thank you for being here but I don’t want you to see this.”

I was not surprised, this was no more than the confirmation of my suspicions.

“No,” I told Paula, and Wick for that matterhim. The man looked up with a grin, and I was quite satisfied to see that grin turn into an aimless stare of horror as the invisible aether I had been gently coiling around his knees solidified, hardened and compressed inwards. Human bone was like dried bread compared to my magic, I barely even felt it break.

Wick lay there crumpled for a few moments, whimpering and staring at his legs as I withdrew my aether. They really did not bear much resemblance to human limbs anymore, I had to say. Twisted in multiple different directions at once. There was no bone sticking from the skin, simply because the bone had been powdered. In fact, I saw it oozing down his legs, turned into sludge as it soaked up blood like flour doused with water.

“You are in shock,” I told the man. “Let me fix that.” A touch of illusion magic fixed the connection between pain receptors and brain. His screams were music to my ears.

“What the fuck are you doing!?” Paula screamed, almost as loud as the maimed man, which I thought was rather excessive.

“Stopping you from being sexually assaulted,” I replied.

“That’s—”

—”Shut up,” I cut her off. “His guards are coming, prepare to defend yourself.”

The room was big, and there was only one entrance, with the door currently locked. That gave me ample room to back away and prepare myself. Even still, when the large man we had encountered at the building’s front door came exploding through the wood, he almost reached me before I could even react.

Almost.

He slammed into a spike of aether, made thick at its base and jagged at the tip, braced hard against floorboards reinforced with yet more aether. By now I could easily conjure more of the stuff than the volume of my own body, and when I hardened it with all my will it was tougher than stone. Warrior though he may have been, the man was clearly no match for my father, and I had left the Baron long in my wake. I heard a sickly squelch as skin yielded and guts tore, then a moment later was treated to the sight of my enemy suspended from the jutting spear as its end dug deep into his belly.

By the time that finished, another warrior had already moved past him to strike. His fist caught me in the temple with the strength of a dozen men or more, easily enough force to smash the skull into my brain and kill me on the spot. It was fortunate, then, that I had begun wearing a shield amulet since I first perfected one a year ago, and felt the hum of power as it intercepted his blow.

Not perfectly, I could not make it with nearly my full mana potency and much of the impact still hit home, but at the very least it was too little for a crippling blow.

I spun as I fell and threw out both hands, riddling the warrior’s body with tiny shards of aether propelled with all the force my mana could produce. They pierced his skin, shattering inside his body and riddling it him with tiny slivers of faux-matter that must have sliced his innards to ribbons. He fell with blood misting from his open mouth and hit the ground just as I did. I did not waste time from there, turning to the doorway as more men ran in and, now, trying out a new spell.

My magic missile was incendiary this time.

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