The Lich Without a Soul Vessel

Two presences arrived while Shur was speaking, one carrying the unmistakable weight of dragon-aura, the other something fiery and bright. Evan turned and found a black dragon, deep matte color across its full length, descending. It looked down, registered two figures — one clearly dragon-kin — and folded its wings, settling into the shape of a large man as it landed.

The phoenix arrived from another direction, didn't land, regarded the scene from above for a moment, and turned away.

Evan stepped back, unhurried, his presence drawing inward without appearing to move at all. Caution was the only sensible position in a place like this.

The man looked at him. "Lich. Why are you in the Black Forest?"

"Passing through." Evan watched him in return. The man's true body held considerable power. It wasn't a reason to retreat, but it was a reason to be careful.

The man seemed uninterested in pursuing it further. He turned to Shur instead. "Lady. Would you join me as a guest? I have a place nearby."

Shur had nowhere particular to be. "Why not."

Both of them lifted into the air, returning to their true forms, and disappeared into the upper canopy without acknowledging Evan again. He felt no particular offense at this. They had no relationship beyond chance encounter. He turned his attention back to the unicorn.

Small Ling had woken, but its energy was visibly diminished.

"How are you?" Evan asked.

"It's nothing. I'll recover in a few days."

Shuang cut in. "It's not nothing. The damage went to the root. There's no danger to its life, but it'll never advance beyond where it currently is."

Evan went still. He put a hand on the unicorn's flank and pushed spiritual force gently into its body, and what he found confirmed Shuang's assessment — natural arrays throughout the body had fractured in multiple places, the structure leaking like a cracked vessel.

"Is there a way to fix it?" he asked Shuang.

"There's a way. You'd need the Spring of Youth, or the legendary Golden Apple."

The reference was old enough that Evan recognized fragments of it from Nicholas Andrew's memory: the goddess Avna, of the fallen old Selen pantheon, had once distilled the sap of the Tree of Life into a clear mountain spring, and anyone who drank from that spring kept their youth indefinitely. Avna herself had fallen, centuries ago by most accounts, though the legends held that she would eventually return from beyond ordinary time. Almost no one remembered her name anymore.

"These are legendary objects," Evan said. "Are you saying they actually exist somewhere reachable?"

Shuang's expression shifted into something more careful than her usual irritation. "Flower fairies keep this as a private secret. The Spring of Youth exists in three locations across the continents and islands. One of them is here in the Black Forest. It's dangerous — it's said Avna left it specifically as a marker for her eventual return."

"Where?"

"South. The Valley of the Fallen Goddess. Follow the stream upward once you're inside and you'll find it. It's full of danger, especially for a lich. Are you sure you want to go?"

"There's no choice in it. I'm not leaving Small Ling stuck where it is."

"You don't need to," Small Ling said. "I'm not in danger. Just limited."

"I'm going regardless. This happened because of me. I'm not walking away from it." His expression had gone past discussion.

Shuang, with deliberate mischief: "It's no use, Ling. Liches don't listen to reason."

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"I knew this lich wasn't bad," Small Ling said, mostly to itself. "Strange creature. What's your name, lich? I should know it, given how much I apparently owe you now."

"Evan. Evan Wang."

Shuang's attention sharpened. "Unicorns are supposed to be able to see straight through to someone's character. Is that true?"

"It's true, though not as dramatically as the legends describe. I can sense good and evil in a person. Not their thoughts." Small Ling considered Evan for a moment. "He's a good person. That's strange, and I dislike his smell, but his nature is genuinely kind. That's why I've been following him."

Shuang was still working through her own residual anger about the contract — the fact that she had no memory of signing it bothered her more than the signing itself. "Your gift is malfunctioning," she told the unicorn. "Or he's done something to your mind."

"This contract was your choice," Evan said, mildly. "I never pressured you into it. I'll tell you a secret — you have a split personality."

"What?" The concept clearly didn't exist in her vocabulary, and Evan didn't explain further, which left her irritated and slightly unsettled. Flower fairies didn't get sick. Sickness was for lesser creatures.

"You're carrying a great deal of resentment," Small Ling said to her, puzzled. "I don't understand why."

"Me?" Shuang's face went red. Flower fairies were supposed to be pure-natured, untroubled by negative emotion. Whatever this feeling was, it had to be the lich's fault somehow. She told herself this firmly, and the resentment subsided — though none of them noticed where it actually went.

……

They rested briefly and turned south.

The forest produced its usual hazards — magical beasts, venomous insects in significant variety — but none of it reached Evan, and he came away with several additional magic cores for his trouble. Shuang refused every one of them, which surprised him until he worked out why: that night, Dark Shuang surfaced and claimed several without hesitation, with open contempt for her daytime counterpart's restraint.

By midday on the second day they reached the Valley of the Fallen Goddess.

The valley walls were uneven — one side high, the other lower, the stone faces cut as cleanly as if sliced. Evan understood immediately what he was looking at: this had been a single mountain once, divided by something with power beyond any natural process. A faint residual force still moved through the place, carrying the unmistakable texture of life itself.

The valley wasn't wide — perhaps half a li — but a winding stream ran through its center, flowers along both banks, grass green and undisturbed, scattered trees offering occasional shade.

"This is the Valley of the Fallen Goddess," Shuang said, already drifting ahead, her energy visibly brighter in the ambient life-force. "No one knows exactly what happened. One legend says the goddess died here. Another says she left something behind as a marker of her eventual return, and whoever finds it becomes her chosen one."

Small Ling followed her in, visibly invigorated by the same energy.

Evan's expression didn't match theirs. The life-force in the valley wasn't ordinary life-force — it carried an extremity to it, a purity that pressed against him specifically, like something actively hostile to what he was. If anywhere in this world was built to reject a lich, this valley was a strong candidate.

He stepped in anyway. The divine energy in the air was faint, but unmistakably divine — purer than anything he carried in his own body, purer even than the concentrated death-energy that had felt, until now, like the cleanest thing he knew. This was cold and absolute in a way that suggested it had never been meant to coexist with anything mortal.

Shuang noticed his expression and made a small, satisfied sound. "I warned you. Liches are more vulnerable here than anyone else. Anything in you that isn't suppressed will draw attention. Pull it in."

He drew his presence as tight as he could manage. It didn't fully help. The divine energy moved into him slowly regardless, finding his body — which had been numb in the particular way that lich-bodies were numb, sensation mostly an inference rather than an experience — and produced, for a moment, actual pain. He turned his attention inward and found something unexpected: a thread of revival moving through tissue that had been still for a very long time.

He didn't know if this was good or bad. A trace of the divine energy had worked its way past his outer defenses, and the vast reservoir of dark element inside him reacted to it the way water reacts to oil dropped in a hot pan — a brief violent disturbance, and then the foreign energy was absorbed entirely, consumed and converted. What emerged from the reaction wasn't a return to his original state but something new: black light with a faint trace of green running through it, a quality his own energy hadn't carried before.

He didn't fully understand what had happened. He suspected it wasn't harmful. Whatever was happening confirmed something he had been circling for months — the elemental categories this world used weren't fundamental. If dark element and divine energy could fuse and produce something new rather than simply cancelling, then both were expressions of something underneath them, not the underlying thing itself.

He composed himself. His body was, in some small way, regenerating — something only divine energy seemed able to do, and only in this exact, narrow dose. Slightly more and it might have unmade him entirely. Slightly less and nothing would have happened. The valley had delivered exactly the amount that produced change without destruction, and he had no idea yet what that change would ultimately mean. His instinct told him it wasn't bad.

They reached the stream's edge.

The water broke open without warning. Something silver and fast came out of it, arcing directly at Evan.