The Lich Without a Soul Vessel

The lightning came down before Evan had finished registering what he was looking at.

He was already moving — the moment the horn lit, he understood what was coming, and his body answered before his mind had finished the sentence. He appeared twenty cubits to the left, the black smoke already condensing in his hand, and threw the Spear of Hadir in the same motion.

The explosion was large. A small mushroom of disturbed air rose over the impact point. The unicorn screamed — a sound unlike anything Evan had heard from an animal — and the white light blazed around it in a sphere that held for a moment before collapsing. Its wings, which he hadn't noticed until they spread, were torn. It was still alive, which surprised him.

The creature coughed blood and looked at him with fear and something more intense than dislike.

"Lich," it said, in a voice that was recognizably a voice. "You are not welcome here."

"You attacked me first," Evan said. "Give me one reason I shouldn't take you apart." He kept his tone level. The unicorn was a creature of legend in this world — something associated with purity and divine nature — but it had opened with lightning, and he wasn't inclined to sentiment about that.

Two more unicorns came through the trees. Much larger. Adult bodies, the particular quality of strength that comes from full development rather than growth.

"Small Ling," one of them said. "Who hurt you?"

The injured unicorn's expression shifted — something Evan recognized, despite everything, as childlike. "Father, Mother. This lich hit me."

Evan looked at the two adults and quietly assessed his exit options.

The larger unicorn regarded him without evident emotion. "Lich. You struck our son?"

"He struck first. I returned it." Evan's presence had begun to gather, not ostentatiously, just the natural preparation of someone who has learned to have something ready.

The silence stretched. The adult unicorn looked at him for a long moment — then turned, and without another word led the young one back into the forest.

Evan watched them go until the trees had swallowed them completely. He stood there for a moment longer, not quite certain what to make of it.

Then he checked the sun, found his direction, and walked west.

……

He stopped on the far side of a ridge.

Something in the grass ahead. Not a magical beast — no elemental signature — but a concentrated readiness, the quality of focused attention that predators have when they are about to act.

Two snakes in the grass, facing each other with their upper bodies raised. One was grey-black, triangular head, the flat look of something venomous. The other was banded in gold rings, equally triangular, equally still. Both of them weaving slightly, side to side, tasting the air with their tongues, reading each other for the opening.

Evan stopped and watched.

The gold-banded snake struck — the body going rigid and straight in the same instant the head drove forward, the whole length of it becoming a single committed line aimed at the grey snake's vulnerable mid-point. The grey snake had been still a moment before. Now it was not: a single curve and twist of the body, minimal, precisely timed, and the fangs that had been aimed at a killing point found nothing. The grey snake's own fangs found the gold snake's vulnerable point instead. The body followed, coiling. The gold snake fought for a while and then stopped fighting.

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Evan stood very still.

He had been thinking about sword-work since Johann. This was — he wasn't sure it was the same thing, but something in the way the grey snake had moved reminded him of what he'd been circling around. The gold snake's attack had been clean and fast and fully committed. It had created an opening in the commitment. The grey snake hadn't anticipated the attack so much as created the conditions that made a particular attack likely, and then been ready for exactly that thing.

He drew his sword and stood with it for a moment, thinking.

Then he tried something. Let the sword-tip move slightly, the same ambiguity the grey snake's weaving had created — not pointing at anything clearly, not committing to any line. Then drove the thrust, the whole body moving forward with it naturally, the step happening because the thrust required it rather than because he'd decided to step.

Something extended past the blade. Not far, not long, barely there — a quality of intention that went further than the steel, a dim reaching sense of where the point was going that wasn't quite his thought and wasn't quite not his thought.

It was gone before he could examine it.

He didn't chase it. He had been here before, with other things: the first time sword-aura had appeared, the first time the nameless technique had surged. Chasing the feeling only drove it away. It would come back. He was certain it would come back.

He spent three hours working through what the snakes had shown him, translating the movement into forms, testing one thing and then another, until the material felt like his own rather than borrowed. Then he walked on.

Over the following three days he stopped twice more to watch animals fight. He didn't interfere. He stood to the side and watched with the attention of someone studying a text, and afterward he walked slowly and let the images replay in his mind, turning them until they became something he could use.

He had no idea that he hadn't yet left the unicorn family's territory, or that the absence of magical beasts in the area was their doing rather than coincidence.

……

Two presences ahead, in the forest. One familiar — almost certainly the young unicorn, Small Ling, which was apparently what the parents had called it. The other unfamiliar, cold and strange in a way that made the back of his mind pay attention.

He could have gone around. He nearly did. Then curiosity won, and he moved into the trees carefully.

The forest opened onto a stream. Two creatures faced each other across it, both with wings partially spread, both hovering a few cubits off the ground.

The unicorn was on one side, its injuries from three days ago still visible, white light guttering at the surface of its coat. Facing it was something Evan had never seen: a creature the size of a large bat, with two blade-arms like a mantis, membrane wings rather than feathered ones, and across those membranes — he looked more carefully — not a pattern but actual magical arrays, inscribed by nature rather than craft. Dark element, with fire and spiritual components blended into it.

The Shadow Moth. He recognized the type from descriptions in Nicholas Andrew's memory, though he had never encountered one.

The Shadow Moth registered his arrival before he'd finished moving into cover. Something in its sensory system — echolocation, he thought, or something analogous — had picked up his motion despite his efforts at concealment. He felt the probe: a pulse so faint it barely registered as sensation, but it had passed through him and he had noticed it, which was unusual.

The Shadow Moth's behavior changed. It became more agitated.

The fight had already been in progress when he arrived, and the young unicorn was losing. Evan's strike three days ago had taken more out of it than was immediately apparent, and it was fighting at significantly less than full capacity. The Shadow Moth's membrane arrays lit in sequence, generating a cold spiritual pressure that moved through the air as a visible dark haze, spreading toward the unicorn. The unicorn's white light burned at the edges of the haze where they met, and small arcs of electricity walked the boundary between the two forces — but the boundary was moving toward the unicorn, not away from it.

The unicorn's horn began to charge. The Shadow Moth opened its mouth in silence, and the air went distorted — the spatial sense that told living things where things were suddenly unreliable, the incoming lightning bolt striking something that wasn't quite where it appeared to be.