The Lich Without a Soul Vessel

The remaining skeleton soldiers gave Evan little trouble. Each thrust found an eye socket, each soul-fire went out, and the bones scattered behind him as he moved.

A disturbance in the distance made him pause mid-thrust. He turned and saw a red streak moving at tremendous speed — a dragon, and on its back a rider with a lance blazing with crystalline red light, trailing fire across the air behind it like a comet. The rider drove the lance toward a single figure below. Even at this distance, the force of the approach was palpable.

Evan's stomach dropped. A dragon knight. Church insignia. How had one ended up inside the demi-plane?

Duke Windsor's anger was immediate and total. A dragon knight of the Church — of all people, the Blade of Gabriel himself — had appeared out of nowhere, and one of Windsor's people had already made the worst possible response. A Vampire Viscount had taken flight without waiting for instruction, apparently believing that longevity-species superiority was argument enough.

Raphael didn't even seem to find the threat serious. He raised his lance, Shur accelerated, and the two of them became a single red arc of motion. The Viscount exploded into a mass of bats. The bats lasted barely a second before red light pierced every one of them and they burned to ash.

Windsor's roar was not grief and not fury — it was something older and colder than both. Every skeleton in the area was swept flat by the pressure of his aura alone, soul-fires extinguishing before the bodies fell. He rose into the air, dark-gold runes blazing across his wings, his face showing what it actually was rather than its usual human approximation, claws extended, the space around him compressed by his presence alone.

Raphael's expression shifted from contemptuous to alert. Even Shur pulled back a length in the air. "By the Maker — a dark creature. An impure thing. Today you are cleansed, and your cleansing will be my testament."

The zealotry in his voice was genuine. He leveled the lance.

Windsor's eyes had gone blood-red. "A small serpent. An acceptable offering. Great ancestor, I make sacrifice."

His outline blurred. A fraction of a second later the air cracked with a sonic boom, the sound arriving long after the movement had already happened. It wasn't magic — it was the body, moving faster than the eye could track.

Raphael had moved at the same moment. The lance traced a circle, the afterimage still hanging in the air when the real weapon had already moved, runes blazing sun-bright, the entire sky going white for an instant. They separated. The exchange had happened too fast for Windsor's remaining people to follow. The sonic wave washed over everything below.

Both of them were still. Both wore the same expression. Then both spoke at once: "Good." The tone said completely different things. Windsor's jacket had split across the chest. Blood showed at the corner of Raphael's mouth. Windsor had the marginal advantage.

Windsor's expression went flat. He pointed at Raphael. "Ravages of Time." No incantation — at his level, he didn't need one. The words were the spell.

Shur reacted immediately, recognizing the magic and pulling away from its range. Raphael's armor radiated holy light in response, and the lance tip gathered that crystalline red-white into a single directed point and drove it toward Windsor.

Windsor's wings carried him sideways out of the light's path in a single motion. Shur took a breath, opened its throat — Raphael pressed with his legs, and Shur understood, surging upward. At the apex the dragon folded its wings and plunged back down, and rider and dragon became a single diving impact, the lance extending the line of it, red light running the length of that line, the whole thing striking with the force of everything the pair of them could bring to bear.

If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.

Evan happened to look back at exactly that moment. The distance was considerable and he still felt the weight of it. He thought about Nicholas Andrew's choices with a strange kind of retrospective respect.

Black light erupted around Windsor as he deployed something that wasn't in any taxonomy Evan knew — the Duke's body became the center of a concentrated darkness, the space around him for dozens of cubits going slick and lightless. His speed doubled at least. The two forces met. Time seemed to stop for the length of a breath. Then both were thrown in opposite directions, tumbling, and landed somewhere beyond Evan's sight.

He turned back toward the tower.

Both of them were out of his league and he knew it. The skeleton soldiers between him and the tower were a different category of problem — significant but manageable, especially now that the cavalry was cleared. He had also noticed something useful in his position: he had landed closer to the central tower than anyone else in this demi-plane, which was probably not a coincidence given that he had apparently been the one who opened the passage.

He moved toward it.

He didn't entirely dislike the situation developing behind him. From a coldly practical standpoint, both Raphael and Windsor at their best represented problems for him — the Church knight was an enemy by definition, and Windsor's power, even in its diminished state, was a level of force that didn't leave Evan feeling comfortable. If both of them came out of this badly damaged, that was not the worst possible outcome.

Hours passed. Skeletons, more skeletons, the terrain between the crater and the central mountain. He crossed it all and arrived at the base of the tower to find it larger than it had appeared from a distance. Thirteen stories, seamless dark stone rising from the volcanic rock around it, the whole structure sitting in the middle of four lava streams that flowed outward from the summit like the cardinal points of a compass. The sulfur smell was heavy. Most of the ancient lava flows had already cooled and solidified — whatever the mountain had been in the past, it was quieter now.

He began chanting and built a bridge of bones across the nearest lava stream, the white arch rising neatly from one bank to the other. He was about to step onto it when he heard something behind him.

He turned.

The red dragon had landed badly, one wing working at reduced efficiency, moving with the care of something managing pain. Raphael lay forward along its neck. His face was the color of old ash.

Evan looked at him. One thought arrived without ceremony: now would be the moment.

Raphael raised his head. His eyes found Evan's and didn't leave them. "You have killing intent."

He said it and waited.

Evan straightened and inclined his head with something approaching courtesy. "I do. You're injured. I'd be a fool not to consider it."

The two of them regarded each other across the lava stream. Shur released its pressure — a deliberate demonstration rather than an accidental surge — and Evan found it clarifying rather than intimidating. A dragon maintaining full suppression didn't telegraph its limits. This deliberate release said the dragon was working through injury and had chosen to make a show of force rather than have none at all.

Raphael lifted the lance slowly and leveled it without effort, as though the weight meant nothing. Evan drew the rapier from the cane. He had no illusion that the blade alone would be enough, but presenting as a swordsman rather than a necromancer was still useful — it kept Raphael uncertain about exactly what he was.

Evan stepped into a gliding pace and drove the blade forward. Raphael's lance moved — almost lazily, the tip splitting into three afterimages simultaneously, completely sealing every angle of approach. Not a counterattack. A denial. Evan found himself reading nothing but closed doors in front of him and stepped back, landing on the bone bridge.

Raphael's follow-up didn't come. His injuries were real.

Evan let a smile show. He pointed forward and began the incantation.

"Undead Calamity."

Raphael's head came up sharply. "You're a lich?" He was genuinely surprised, studying Evan's face and build — nothing like the skeletal wraith a lich should be. He reached for his spiritual sense to probe and found it too depleted to give a reliable answer.

Evan didn't confirm or deny. The black smoke was already rising.

Then something went wrong.