The Lich Without a Soul Vessel

Evan gritted his teeth and teleported again. The spatial wave rose and he reappeared close to Boniface — closer than Boniface had expected. Boniface hadn't known Evan's reserves were nearly empty. He only knew that every time he moved, Evan appeared behind him with what felt like impossible precision, as if he could sense the destination before arriving. For a lich who had died twice by Evan's hand, that was enough. He teleported again, burning through the last of his own reserves, and this time something went wrong.

The wave rose. But instead of snapping him a li away, the space around him tore open.

The hole was ragged, growing, sulfur pouring out of it in waves. Strange silhouettes moved inside — shapes that didn't belong to any creature native to this world. The opening pulled at everything near it, and Boniface went in with the debris — branches, undergrowth, loose soil — all of it streaming inward before the hole began to contract.

Then it turned toward Evan.

He saw it immediately and moved, cutting a Z-path through the trees, keeping the hole off his center as it tracked him, shrinking as it came. It made a sound like something exhaling and then closed entirely, leaving a field of torn-up ground and scattered timber.

Evan stood still for a long moment, breathing through the adrenaline equivalent that a lich's body still apparently produced. His eyes swept the clearing. Nothing came back through. Whatever the hole had opened into, it had taken Boniface with it and sealed behind itself.

The others arrived running. Emma, Shel, and Carpenter, all out of breath.

"Where is it?" Emma managed between gulps of air.

"A spatial tear opened and took him. Is everyone alright?"

Emma put a hand on her chest. "You're fine? Good. I was going to warn you — I should have warned you before you left. This area is spatially unstable. Using teleportation here is dangerous. It can trigger exactly what you just witnessed." She caught her breath. "You used short-range teleportation several times just now and you're still in one piece. That lich wasn't so lucky."

Evan went quiet for a moment, thinking about how many times he'd jumped in the past hour.

"The instability — how widespread is it?"

"It's not widely known because so few people can teleport in the first place. You have to be at Arcanist level at minimum, and at that point you're rare enough that most areas don't bother with warnings." Emma straightened. "Centuries ago, when the Emperor Caivan brought his campaign from the Taerxi continent into Nabos, there was a major magical confrontation here between his forces and the local Druids. Neither side won outright, but the Druids weakened considerably after that, and the Creationist Church established itself here shortly afterward. This area was at the center of the fighting. Magic saturated it for months. The spatial fabric apparently never fully recovered. Rifts open irregularly, and nothing that gets pulled in has ever come back."

"So there should be warning markers."

"For who? Only Arcanists can teleport, and Arcanists are rare enough that signs would be pointless for most travelers." She paused. "There's a mountain region to the west, the Gaer Range, where it's much worse. Extradimensional creatures appear regularly. The school has a permanent forward post there."

Evan accepted this and let it settle. "This counts as pollution," he said, half to himself.

Shel looked up. "What's pollution?"

Evan realized he'd said it without thinking. "A term I made up. It means when natural conditions are degraded by magical activity, producing persistent harmful effects."

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The three of them found this novel and then moved past it. Roslyn and Thomson were likely already at the earlier position, waiting. They headed back.

Evan walked with the group and let them talk. He was fairly certain the situation with Boniface was resolved, at least for now. No creature had ever returned through one of these rifts. He didn't know what that meant for a lich whose soul vessel was somewhere else entirely — whether Boniface would reconstitute eventually, or whether this particular end was more permanent than the others. He didn't know what dimension had been on the other side.

He filed it as open.

......

What Evan didn't know was what was happening on the other side of the rift.

Boniface landed in darkness and sulfur, surrounded by floating debris — branches, roots, clumps of earth, all the loose material that had been pulled in alongside him. The sky above him was yellow-brown shading to dark red at the horizon, without sun or moon or stars. The light came from the sky itself, diffuse and unhealthy. The ground beneath the small hill he'd landed on was bare and dark.

He took stock. His body had taken multiple broken bones from Evan's strike, but liches didn't feel pain in any conventional sense — only touch registered, and that only dimly. He located each break by spatial awareness rather than sensation, worked the fragments back into alignment methodically, then applied a Bone-Knit spell to fix them in place. Functional again in minutes.

He looked around. This wasn't anywhere he recognized.

"Well," said a voice behind him. "A lich. Much more interesting than the last one."

Boniface spun, already shaping a spell. What he found was a figure hovering off the ground — two horns, a narrow face, pale cold eyes with something moving behind them, scaled forearms, four-clawed hands, inverted goat legs. Black smoke drifted from behind it like a banner. The moment Boniface laid eyes on it, something in the center of his chest went cold and wouldn't go back.

"My name is Oomani," the figure said pleasantly. "I have a proposal. I give you power. In exchange, you spread my name in the world above — make it a name that stops tears and turns laughter into fear. Let all who hear it know to dread me. If they dread me, they will eventually reverence me. Do this, and I grant you permanent existence."

Boniface recognized the name. One of Solomon's Seventy-Two. He turned the offer over. An infernal lord for a patron — that was a different kind of security than anything he currently had.

He stood for a long time with his expression cycling through things he didn't have words for. The Oomani waited, still, unhurried. It had already seen what it needed to see: the hunger, the resentment, the particular way that someone who had converted themselves into a lich looked at power. They converted because they refused to die. They refused to die because they needed something badly enough. That something was always leverage.

"What do I give up?" Boniface finally asked.

"Nothing you'd miss. Sign the contract. Everything else follows."

The contract materialized — a sheet gleaming gold, the text dense and formal. Boniface took it and read it carefully. Front to back, then back to front. He turned it over and checked the reverse. The terms were straightforward, the language unambiguous, the obligations balanced. He read it again. Still nothing.

He thought about Evan. He thought about the next attempt. He thought about what having one of the Seventy-Two at his back would mean for every attempt after this one.

"I'll sign."

"Good." The Oomani smiled in the way of something that has been told no too many times and appreciates the change. "I just wanted a representative in the world above. It really shouldn't have been this difficult."

Boniface took the pen. The moment the signature was complete, the gold drained from the page. What replaced it was red — deep red, the color of a threat — and the text it revealed was not the text he had read. He understood what the contract actually said in the time it took him to read two sentences. He didn't finish reading it.

"You used magic to conceal the real terms."

"I did," the Oomani said agreeably. "When have you ever heard of a golden contract? You saw what you wanted to see, because you wanted to believe it was possible to make a reasonable deal with me. Even children know better than to trust a devil." It tilted its head. "How are you, my servant?"

Boniface lunged for it.

The pain arrived before he'd covered half the distance. Not physical pain — something that reached past the lich's body entirely, into the soul beneath it, into the part that the soul vessel housed and protected but could not shield from a direct claim. He went down clutching his head, folding inward, making sounds he hadn't made since he had a living body.

The Oomani crouched beside him. It put one hand on his face, almost gently. "Why fight it? Being my servant isn't beneath you. I'm a generous principal." It patted him twice. "Don't think ill of me in your thoughts. I know everything you're thinking — that's a clause in the contract. First offense, so I'll be lenient. The punishment still happens, though."

Boniface screamed. His body curled against the ground.