The Lich King Reincarnates as a Baby

Book 3 Chapter 49: Vulnerabilities

++Were there signs? Of course. There are always signs. Hindsight will make a seer of anyone. But it was not until after that battle that the cracks started to really show in Vornholt’s stories.++

- Commentary by Maria Voret. 1,938 A.E.

Qaigor blinked, waiting for it to fix itself. It didn’t. The eye. His eye. One of his two eyes. Half of the things he needed to see, half of the only ones he’d ever get.

It still didn’t work.

His body was fine, that was the shocking thing. He could move, think, act. He could run and fight if he wanted to. His legs were still strong and steady, his arms, if anything, stronger than ever, still pumped with the thrill of fighting. He could feel the blood caking over him, a testament to just how many lives he’d taken. To how fierce he’d been, and how great his performance was.

But there was none of the pride he should’ve felt, just that glaring, gaping emptiness in one half of his vision. He could feel the sobs coming on and was helpless to resist them. He could feel the blood and jelly dried over his cheek where it’d dribbled out. He blinked and went cross-eyed and stared and did everything he could think of, and none of it let him see even a pin-prick from the mangled organ.

He finally broke down entirely and burst into tears outright. One side of his face was soon wet where they built and rolled down his skin, warm, salty water carrying the sadness out of him and letting it drizzle out.

But the other side was dry as ever, because even the tear duct was damaged beyond functionality. Qaigor couldn’t even cry properly anymore. That only made his good eye sob all the harder.

Around him, people seemed to take note of his distress, but none of them did anything.

Qaigor was confused at first, not understanding what was happening. He sat there and sobbed and croaked and wept and waited for an adult to come over and help him, for a servant or a maid or…but there weren’t any here. These people weren’t Vornholt servants, at most they were his sister’s employees, and with so much devastation all of them had their own disasters to deal with.

Father had never told Qaigor about this part. The people carried off on stretchers, the moaning wounded being given ineffectual treatments, the reek of spilled blood and…was that shit?

It was disgusting. It was harrowing. It was hell. And Qaigor was sitting in the middle of it all, not sure what to do and not able to move, locked in his own sobs.

Distantly, he saw, from his good eye, that Isabel was still setting upon the enemy with that savage handmaiden of hers. Qaigor still couldn’t believe his sister was able to fly sometimes, and what was even more shocking was how natural she made it look now. A falcon wouldn’t have dived as surely as her, an eagle wouldn’t have cruised with half her confidence, an owl would be no keener in picking out prey scrambling along the dusty ground below her.

And when she struck out with magic, it was always an affair. Explosions bigger than a house erupted out one after another, scarring the terrain as surely as that blade had scarred Qaigor’s face.

Oh Gods, now the eye was hurting.

***

Agrian’s leg had been steadily hurting more as he lay there. He was familiar with the phenomenon. Now that the fighting was over, now his body was done flooding itself with killing fluids made to dull pain and heighten activity, he was feeling all the built up agony he’d been impervious to during the battle.

Apparently, there was a lot. And it all started with his damned leg. He risked a look down at it, his first good glance since losing the damned thing.

Bandages covered the point where exposed leg meat had met empty air, already drenched through with blood and starting to go brown as it dried. The cut-off point was just under his knee.

It was, in fact, probably a good thing that Agrian couldn’t see the particular wound anymore, because it’d been a damned grizzly sight when he’d glimpsed it before. No blade had severed his limb, no neat, sharp cut, it’d been a magical blast, and that meant ugly, jagged skin flaps and a terribly uneven point where the meat of Agrian’s body had simply surrendered to the energies erupting over it.

The thought that dominated his mind as he looked back to it was that of a sausage being ripped in half. But it wasn’t a sausage, it was his leg. A part of him.

Now a part of the dirt, feeding worms and rotting. Never again to let him move.

It was a relief when he heard footsteps approaching and turned over to see Isabel. A relief, and a shot of agony. Agrian didn’t want her to see him like this, crippled and useless. He felt shame burning his face and agony burning his leg, and he once again imagined that magical blast coming just a foot higher and ripping through the big artery in his thigh.

“You did well,” Isabel said idly as she looked around, lip curling as she apparently did not find what she was looking for, before conjuring an aether stool under herself to sit on. Agrian was dimly aware how impressive it was to perform magic so casually after the intensity of combat she’d just crawled through.

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Dimly. The pain kept most of his thoughts from registering too hard.

“I should bloody hope so,” he muttered. “More than ten warrior kills, fuck knows how many common mercenaries, and I sacrificed a leg. If that isn’t ‘well’ then I suspect you could’ve won this with half the men you did.”

He paused at that, licking his lips. “What happened at the end there?” he asked. “What sent the enemy fleeing? It was…something powerful.”

Agrian couldn’t sense magic. What he could sense was the earth literally shaking when something countless times stronger than him smashed people into paste against it. He was almost surprised not to find great chasms opened up around the refinery, so intense was the fighting.

But Isabel was implacable as ever.

“I do not think you want to know the answer to that, do you father?” she asked.

Agrian hesitated. “...No.”

Isabel remained seated there, silent. She wasn’t even looking at him. Agrian felt angry at that, a ridiculous rage washing through him. She was sitting there just to ignore him? Or was it to taunt him?

The rage didn’t last. It was like that hole in his leg was a leak, and all the anger his body mustered just bled right out of it.

“...I’m sorry Isabel,” he said at last. “For everything.”

Isabel said nothing.

“I should’ve been better,” Agrian continued. “I should have—”

“Shut up,” his daughter said. He choked off mid-sentence, and only then did she finally turn his way. “I hate this,” Isabel snapped. “Everyone does it. It is pathetic. Do you think I care to hear you cry about how you’ve wronged me? It does nothing for anyone except yourself. Self pity is the lowliest form of indulgence there is. If you don’t like something, change it. If you cannot then shut up and stop bothering me.”

Agrian was still speechless by the time his daughter stood up, and he thought she might leave it at that as she began walking away.

Instead, Isabel paused and turned back to him. Were her eyes more sympathetic? Probably not, that just seemed like wishful thinking.

“It is not me you should be apologizing for, in any case,” she told him coolly. “As I told you once, several years ago, I was never your ‘little girl’ and your influence on me has always been limited. Consider where the damage you dealt actually lies and start there.”

She headed off, and suddenly Agrian’s leg didn’t feel nearly so painful.

No, not compared to what he’d just been told. It was a damned dream measured against that.

***

I never liked discussions with my father, but as far as those tedious affairs went my most recent one had been somewhat tolerable. Perhaps losing that leg would make him easier to deal with from now on. I had half a mind to take away the other and see if it led to further improvement.

Then again, I also had half a mind to try and replace it. My research with Nu’chista had gone far, the studies I had made of the chimera farther still, and quite by chance feeding Nu’chista’s leg to the creature had given me yet a new insight on the cultivation of living, magical tissue.

It was an interesting thought. Experimenting on my father. Making life with the creature that had given new life to me.

But it was also a risky one. Ultimately, if Baron Vornholt miraculously regrew his leg, questions would be asked. I would not be able to answer them, my current power was not nearly enough to restore such damage to him. So my father would remain a cripple for my disguise to hold. Perhaps one day in the far future I could give him a new leg, when I was already acting openly.

All hypothetical for now.

What was not hypothetical was that Qaigor had survived the battle, but apparently done so only at great cost to himself. I heard about that long before I saw my brother again, despite making my way straight for him.

He was seated alone, staring out into nothing in particular with one eye. The other was a ruin. It still sat in his socket, though had been clumsily gashed open by a slash that also marked the length of his face. The scar on his skin might fade, but the sensory organ was lost forever.

The boy flinched as he caught me in his recently-retracted peripheral vision, then he stared up with his good eye streaming tears.

“Isabel my…my eye…” he practically whimpered it out. I stepped forwards and wrapped my arms around him, feeling him hug back and appreciating that the boy had the presence of mind not to shatter every rib in my torso as he did so. Even still, breathing became difficult.

“I am sorry,” I told him while he sobbed against me. He was oozing optic fluid onto the fabric of my clothes. The stuff reeked worse than sewage. I continued embracing him anyway.

“I don’t want to fight anymore,” Qaigor told me, whimpering. “I want to go home Isabel. Can you take me home?”

I broke contact and knelt down before him. “I will,” I told him instantly. “But I am going to fix your eye first.”

He stared at me, seeming not to comprehend. “You…the magicians said you can’t do that,” he replied almost accusatorily.

“The magicians are skilled here,” I said evenly. “But they do not know what I am and am not capable of.”

The boy was far from reassured, I did not think anything shy of regaining his eye would do that. And that was why I would keep my word.

***

Sethira watched, and she listened, and she considered.

Lord Dread. An old thing, but in some ways such a juvenile one. The poor creature. How many millennia had it spent denying itself the sensations of basic humanity?

It was hard to say what might happen now that she seemed to be succumbing. Sethira couldn’t have guessed herself, and that made this an unknown variable. Unknowns were what ruined plans. Unknowns were unacceptable.

Sethira would have to keep a very close eye on this.