The Lich Without a Soul Vessel

The first defender died before he finished making a sound. The mob roared and surged forward, and the remaining guards scattered.

Nobi raised his sword. "Our god is with us!" He went in first, and what followed below was something Evan could hear through the floor without needing to see it — screaming, tearing fabric, the sound of bodies. He shook his head and didn't get up.

It wasn't his concern. This had been coming with or without his arrival; Nobi had simply used him as a catalyst. Whatever Nobi became to his own people was Nobi's business. Evan was leaving in the morning regardless.

He rose. Shuang woke at the same moment, found herself clutching a magic core she had no memory of acquiring, and went rigid.

"When did I sign a contract with you?"

Her voice climbed into something approaching a shriek. "There's no way I signed with a lich!"

"You insisted on it last night," Evan said. "That's the only way you'd have gotten the Lion-Wing core."

She processed this and found it unacceptable. The flower fairy tradition, as far as she knew it, contained no precedent for a contract with anything dark-aligned, and she was apparently now the first one in recorded history. She looked at the core, found its spiritual residue gone, realized she had already absorbed it, and discovered that she had genuinely become stronger.

This made the situation worse, not better.

The contract was done. Contracts of this kind required mutual willingness to dissolve, and dissolving one carried a backlash to both parties — there was no clean way out, and she knew it. She looked at Evan and felt, against her own preference, something warmer than she wanted to feel. The contract's nature, working on her from the inside.

"You think you lost out," Evan said, watching her work through it. "You'll find out otherwise."

He meant it. She made a disgusted sound, rose into the air, and went translucent — not quite invisible, but close — before settling onto his left shoulder. The fight had gone out of her objection.

……

Nobi was waiting outside the door, transformed. A crown, a cloak, the bearing of someone who had been practicing a king's posture all night in his head and was now trying it for real. Two attendants stood behind him, and beyond them a guard unit equipped far better than anything Evan had seen the previous day.

"Honored guest." Nobi bowed slightly. "We had some disturbance last night. I hope it didn't disturb your rest."

He had stopped calling Evan master. This was deliberate, and Evan registered it without comment.

"I rested well," Evan said, matching the formality. "I don't know what happened during the night. I was planning to take my leave this morning regardless — I have a journey to continue."

"You couldn't stay a while longer?" Nobi's eyes carried relief rather than disappointment. He had needed Evan's reputation for the coup; now that it had served its purpose, having a lich Arcanist on the premises was a liability he wanted gone before any rival got the idea of recruiting the same advantage.

"Urgent business," Evan said. "I've enjoyed the hospitality, but I have to leave."

"Then I won't keep you. The promise stands — I'll see it kept." Nobi's position was new and fragile, and a god figure who had publicly granted him support and then conveniently departed was exactly the kind of asset a new ruler needed. Evan had no particular concern about whether the promise would be honored. The experiment's success or failure didn't matter to him much — he had simply wanted to know if it was possible.

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He walked west, back into the forest, with a reluctant flower fairy attached to his shoulder.

……

Shuang turned out to be useful regardless of her feelings about the arrangement. She could sense danger within a li in any direction, and flower fairies disliked killing on principle — in her private assessment, Evan was a lich, which made him a creature of slaughter by nature, and warning him away from threats was, to her mind, an act of mercy toward whatever he would otherwise kill. Evan didn't argue with her reasoning. The result was the same either way.

He had his own sense for danger as well, a feeling that arrived without explanation and had kept him alive more than once. Two days into the forest, that feeling kept rising despite Shuang's warnings staying quiet, and he grew increasingly careful.

Small Ling continued to follow at a discreet distance, unaware — or pretending to be unaware — that both Shuang and Evan could sense it perfectly well.

……

A presence arrived ahead of them like a mountain settling into the landscape.

Evan's expression changed before he consciously identified it. He had felt this exact signature twice before, and both times he had survived through cleverness rather than strength, and both times he had known, with complete clarity, that he could not beat the man directly.

Raphael.

Raphael felt him at the same moment and smiled. He had finally caught the lich somewhere that mattered. He pressed his hand against the red dragon's flank — Shur let out a cry and spread its wings, climbing, the weight of its presence rolling across the forest floor toward Evan in a wave that had physical texture.

Evan's expression didn't change, but something in him went very still. Raphael had crossed into the Black Forest deliberately, knowing what it cost to do so — Evan himself had only entered it by accident, lost and unfamiliar with the terrain. Raphael had walked in on purpose, certain enough of his own strength to risk it.

"Lich. Twice you've slipped away from me. Today you die." The voice carried across the better part of a li, amplified by something in the dragon's presence that made distance irrelevant.

Shuang's color went white. "We're finished. A dragon knight and a red dragon. What did you do to make this man hate you?"

"I didn't do anything. He's part of a group of fanatics who think killing me serves the Maker's will." Evan kept his voice level. The colder he stayed, the better his odds.

"Church people. Of course. I sign a contract with a lich and the Creationist Church decides to hunt us both." Shuang's voice was unsteady, but she didn't flee — she rose into the air around his shoulder, and points of colored light gathered around her body.

Evan lifted off the ground. Mages past third-tier could use wind to achieve flight, though even at Legend rank, magical flight remained slow and unwieldy — most mages preferred walking, and reserved short-range teleportation for genuine emergencies. He rose to meet Raphael's altitude, a li of open air between them, both reading the other for an opening.

Raphael's eyes found Shuang. "A flower fairy. With a lich?"

"I'm contracted to him," she said, with all the dignity her species could project despite everything.

Raphael's expression genuinely faltered. Flower fairies were as close to unambiguous purity as this world's bestiary contained. The idea of one binding itself to something like Evan didn't fit anywhere in his understanding of how the world worked.

Then a second presence rose from the trees below — Small Ling, wings spreading, climbing to form a triangle with Evan and Raphael in the air. Raphael's confusion deepened.

"Unicorn. Stand aside. I'll deal with you after I've killed the lich."

Small Ling ignored him entirely. "This lich is under my protection. You should leave."

Raphael's expression went somewhere between disbelief and vertigo. A flower fairy and a unicorn, both apparently defending the same creature he had come here to destroy. He looked at Small Ling again, confirmed it was a juvenile and not some shapeshifted threat, and found no explanation that made sense.

He gave up looking for one. His expression hardened, and the dragon's presence sharpened into something more focused, more deliberate. Whatever was happening here, anyone standing between him and the lich was now also his enemy.

Shur screamed and became a red line in the air, carrying Raphael forward. The dragon-lance in his hand blazed with light, and Evan felt the sword-intent lock onto him — total, inescapable, the entire weapon moving as though it had its own will, aimed and committed before the strike had even begun.

He understood, in that instant, exactly what a Great Knight's sword-intent meant. There was no angle he could take that escaped it. This was the thing itself.

Lightning fell from above and struck the lance-tip before it arrived.