The Lich Without a Soul Vessel

The divine force discharge was small in volume but a hundred times denser than anything Evan had encountered in this valley's other creatures, and the quality of it hit him with disproportionate force. He was thrown backward, his body taking the impact like a blow from something solid, and a thin trail of phosphorescent flame escaped his mouth rather than blood — the lich's body responding in its own register.

He stabilized himself mid-air, sword-aura scattering around him, and on landing he threw Grand Disintegration without hesitation, the black smoke rolling toward the water elemental's remains. In the same instant Shuang's body flickered with dark striations, and Evan felt the spell strengthen unexpectedly — he understood immediately what had happened. The flower fairy's amplification.

The remaining divine shell around the guardian's core shattered. The body dissolved into mist.

"At last," a voice said, rolling through the mist as it dispersed. "I'm finally free. Sabu is free at last."

What emerged had two horns, black wings folded behind its back, fingernails like claws, and goat's hooves where feet should have been. The face beneath the horns was unsettlingly handsome, eyes burning a faint green. The Disintegration spell reached it as it fully formed, and the creature's own radiance flared in response — it grunted, slowed for a fraction of a second, and the spell simply ceased to exist.

Evan's stomach dropped. This wasn't a water elemental. Whatever it was, the life-signature it carried wasn't flesh and blood — something closer to pure spirit, with an evil that spread outward as it stabilized.

He pushed through the discomfort still echoing in his body and began the incantation for Spear of Hadir, though he no longer needed the spoken form for most of his spells — he used it now, deliberately, buying time as the black spear condensed, trembling, light bleeding off its surface in continuous streams.

"A lich, a flower fairy, a unicorn. What strange company you keep." The thing's green eyes held something cautious. "I won't waste effort on you."

It turned, looked at the stone wall with open hatred, and began retreating.

Evan kept the Spear ready and his attention fixed on it. He had never heard the name Sabu before. Whatever this creature was, its presence carried genuine weight — though something about its movement suggested instability, the aftereffects of long confinement still working through it. He decided that as long as it didn't attack, he wouldn't either. Picking a fight with something he didn't understand, against an enemy not even confirmed human, seemed like poor judgment.

"How were you trapped here?" Evan asked.

"Ha. A lich, attempting to breach the goddess's half-plane." Sabu's eyes showed nothing, though its body kept retreating. "The goddess has fallen. Go ahead and try, if you want. I'm done here."

A black opening appeared behind it as it spoke. It smiled and began to step backward into the void — and in the last instant, lunged at Shuang.

Evan's spear was already moving.

Shuang screamed, her body pulled involuntarily toward the creature's grasping hand. In the same instant, Small Ling's horn flared and a net of lightning materialized from nothing, crackling, catching the dark smoke and the skull-shaped shadow that surged forward to meet it. Shuang froze for a moment in the net's effect, then her wings beat once and she was free.

The Spear of Hadir detonated. A mushroom cloud rolled outward, a massive skull-shape forming inside it, lunging at Sabu's retreating form. Sabu was already half through the opening. From within the cloud, his voice carried, furious: "I'll be back. Remember this."

The shockwave threw all three of them backward. The black opening had already vanished, but the spatial disturbance it left behind hadn't — it spread outward in waves, like ripples through water rather than air.

The waves reached the stone wall and the wall rippled in response, dissolving into a passage. Everything nearby — Evan, Shuang, Small Ling, the stream itself, loose stones, all of it — was pulled toward the opening. For a long moment the world disassembled around them.

Then it settled.

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The stream flowed where it had flowed before. The damaged ground sprouted fresh grass at impossible speed. Within seconds, nothing remained to suggest anything unusual had happened at all.

……

Evan steadied himself and took in their surroundings. This half-plane was small — perhaps a few dozen li across. He had now encountered two such pocket dimensions in less than a year, which struck him as either remarkable luck or evidence that this world had more of them than its inhabitants generally suspected. The air here was clean in a way that suggested genuine isolation — a small island floating somewhere outside the ordinary world, divine energy present in the air at one or two times the concentration of the valley below.

This wasn't the goddess's true divine realm. Just an ordinary half-plane, built for some specific purpose.

They had landed on a low hill, the terrain visible in every direction. On a facing rise, partially hidden by flowers and trees, a temple showed one corner of its structure. Beyond their landing spot — flat ground covered in grass — the slope descended through scattered flowers and butterflies into denser forest at the base.

"The temple," Evan said. "That's where the Spring should be."

They descended without a path, the grass soft underfoot, butterflies and unfamiliar insects moving through the air around them with apparent indifference to their presence.

Evan stayed alert anyway. The divine energy that had touched him earlier had left a trace of genuine sensation in his skin — still far less than a living person's, but more than he'd had before, and his lich-senses, which compensated for that deficit through something closer to soul-perception, remained sharp regardless. He watched a butterfly land gently on a flower and extend something that looked like a feeding tube, drawing nectar — except it wasn't only nectar. The flower's life-force was being drawn out with it, and the flower wasn't entirely passive about this: as its nectar ran low, it released a faint perfume that left the butterfly visibly entranced, its own vitality beginning to flow backward into the flower it was feeding on. The flower grew more vivid. The butterfly grew, briefly, more beautiful too — a borrowed, temporary beauty, purchased with whatever time it had left.

Across the slope, another butterfly reached the end of its borrowed time and drifted down from the air, falling with the same strange beauty. The moment it touched the ground, an emerald-green spider flickered into motion, wrapped it in a transparent bubble, and absorbed both bubble and contents in one smooth motion. Evan had never seen anything like it.

None of the local insects showed any interest in them directly, which he was grateful for.

They reached the forest. From the hilltop it had looked unremarkable; up close, the trees rose like layered fortifications, the canopy a continuous green ceiling, even the bark itself carrying a green tint instead of brown. Shuang flew ahead happily through the understory. Evan and Small Ling moved beneath the canopy.

Then his chest tightened with a sudden, specific alarm.

He looked up. His eyes went wide. "Don't get close to that tree!"

He had the sword out before the warning finished leaving his mouth, already moving, sword-aura flaring around him. The tree — which had looked like any other tree a moment earlier — moved. Branches extended like the arms of something with many limbs, reaching toward Shuang from every direction simultaneously. She screamed as the branches closed in around the space where she'd been flying.

Evan's sword reached her a fraction of a second ahead of the branches, the aura cutting through several of them cleanly. The tree made a sound — something like pain — and pulled its remaining limbs back fast. The severed branches hit the ground, and where they'd been cut, something that looked like blood, deep red, ran from the wound.

He cut the path clear with several more strokes and fell back. Shuang flew straight to Small Ling's head and buried herself in its mane, still visibly shaken.

They studied the tree from a safe distance. Nothing else grew within several dozen cubits of it. The ground beneath was littered with the remains of things the branches had caught — insects, small animals, and one larger shape that had clearly been there for some time, its desiccated body still held fast by woody tendrils that had grown into the corpse itself. It looked, at first glance, like a monkey. On closer inspection it had a tail unlike any monkey's, and the proportions were wrong — taller than Evan, the skeletal structure clearly humanoid despite the tail.

A man-eating plant. Thriving, well-fed, and now openly furious about the branches it had lost.

It didn't pursue them directly — they were outside its reach. Instead its canopy flickered with points of light, like rain falling in reverse, the light gathering on one specific set of bones beneath it. Evan noticed then that the ground around the tree's base held many skeletal remains, several still mostly intact. The light converged on the tallest one — humanoid, with the tail, clearly not human but not quite anything Evan recognized either, half again his own height.

The bones rose, swaying, green light kindling in the empty eye sockets — a quality not unlike the skeletal soldiers Evan summoned himself. It opened its jaw in a silent roar, and its hand closed around a fallen branch from the tree above — a club, easily twice the thickness of an ordinary cudgel — and came at Evan's skull in a single committed swing.

Evan didn't dodge. The sword-light gathered and the strike went directly for the empty eye socket — the construct's core, almost certainly — arriving before the club did, refusing to block or deflect, attacking the one point that demanded an answer.

He had read the weight in that swing immediately. A direct block against something carrying that much force, with a rapier, would lose regardless of skill. The only answer was to attack first.