Lichdom

Lichdom.

I had believed it to be just a parable, a cautionary tale they told younger magi as a reinforcement of that old rule- just because you can do something doesn't mean you should.

But the idea fascinated me, for some reason. What if, down the line, I found something that would require centuries to bring to fruition? Wouldn't the option of doing it myself be so much better than expecting a heir to carry out my work?

Of course, I said nothing out loud. Templars and Illuminati alike have a distaste for anyone who researches binding a soul, even if it's your own.

"Burn's Coffee And Pastry House" is a haven for Magi who just want to be able to relax and not worry about letting certain things slip in front of mundanes. Good place for a snack after school, too. My parents still didn't know about the books our elderly neighbor willed me, and I didn't have any reason to tell them.

Hyper-conservative Christians, both of them. The kind that carried around small bottles of olive oil and tried to anoint little kids who were playing anything they deemed 'Satanic', like Pokemon. They refused to let me have any fiction and only grudgingly accepted school books on math and science- too much 'worldly' knowledge, they said, distracted a person from being a mighty warrior for God.

I spent a lot of time in Burns, as you can imagine.

The magus who approached me was into his late 60s. Klein, he called himself. We talked about how we got pulled into this world. He sympathized about having parents that would burn my books without a second thought. I listened to him lament about how so many of his friends had passed on, either due to catastrophic failure of an experiment, bad run ins with rival magi, or finding out something that just broke their brain to the point that eating the strongest black magic they could muster sounded like a good idea.

One day, when the crowd was light, he confided in me. He had lots of ideas. Too many ideas.

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Reminder the monster manual for death knights refers to Liches as "lesser undead" frequently bound in service to the knights.

Tell that to Larloch, who isn't even a demilich.

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Those ideas required a careful hand and years of experience, and already he could feel his memory failing. Potions and spells helped to slow the hereditary Alzheimer's, but he had watched it kill his father. Now it was coming for him.

"I need you to help me do something drastic. Something that you should never tell anyone about, ever."

Any worries this was going to end with a sore rectum evaporated when he showed me a half-finished phylactery and an engraved Metatron's Cube in his laboratory floor.

I could have reported it to the Templars. The reward would have been great. But maybe he was misunderstood by those knights as my world was misunderstood by my parents. After all, just because an organization is old and mysterious doesn't mean they're right all the time.

...so was my rationalization.

The mental preparation for becoming a Lich is, to put it lightly, severe. You are preparing to enter a state of awareness with very limited sensory input. No ability to taste, no ability to smell. Touch is limited. You have to rely on magical sensory emulation to do things you took for granted. You don't eat. You don't drink. You don't experience dopamine rushes or chemical highs in your brain from achievement. You can't feel pain like a living being feels pain.

You don't sleep, really. You just... he would describe it as a sort of 'screen saver' state, where a slight jostle would awaken him. There is no sense of being physically rested or tired.

To train to become a Lich meant taking a series of potions and performing a series of exercises to slowly numb the body, so the shock wouldn't instantly drive him mad. He would not, out of morality, allow me to suffer the exercises with him.

For that, I was grateful.

You ask what my role was. I made sure he was properly dosed while in preparatory trances. I double checked formulas to make sure he got them right. I ran errands and made inquiries a fledgling like me could get away with, but an elder magus like him could not.

Eventually, the day came when it was time for him to cross the threshold. The instructions he gave me in case the ritual failed were concise. I was to set off a delayed reaction of condensed artificial hellfire and run. It would look like a magical experiment gone horribly awry. I would drink a potion that would alter my memory and allow me to truthfully and tearfully tell a story about how my poor teacher had me flee while he minimized the damage his mistake would do. It would eliminate the suspicion on me and let him die with his dignity intact.

A phylactery is what holds a Lich's soul, as you know. The center part must be something of utmost significance to a Lich, something that they would feel devastated if they lost.

A locket of his late wife, lost to a cancer he could not prevent. Entombed in alchemically reinforced titanium and ceramic allow, runed and warded.

He stepped into the circle. I began the chant. He drank the poison, coughed, and slumped over, dead.

For five solid minutes I stared at his cooling corpse. I used both a life-scrying lens and spells to detect even residual life to see if maybe he had survived before it hit me that whatever he was trying to do had failed. If I was to walk the earth a free man, I had to act quickly.

Then his corpse moved of it's own accord.

It was not alive. It was like a very well manipulated puppet, but the movement, the lack of breath, the eyes... so many little things wrong.

Klein's plan had gone horribly, horribly right.

One thing a lich must deal with- quickly- is the disposal of their now deteriorating flesh. Fortunately, Klein was prepared for this with a sort of shower rigged with an acid that would dissolve tissue but not bone.

For reasons I hope the reader can sympathize with, I let him perform this in private.

No cartilage to link the bones, yet they moved together, clacking and clattering with every step, bound by his own magic.

Once the initial shock had passed, his walking about didn't faze me much. I helped a little with preparation for the next experiment before I left for home, when I noticed something.

He had filled a glass with water, stared at it, poured it out. Minutes later, the same process, only he lifted it to his jawbone, as if uncertain.

I pretended not to notice, but something about this action unnerved me.

I put it out of my head. Uncle Paul wanted me to visit over the summer, and he was taking us to the water park- against my parents' wishes, who believed my time was best spent walking the neighborhood in my sunday best and preaching against the evils of doing anything other than church, chores, and charity.

It was while enjoying the mad, frantic action of a wave pool the memory of the glass of water hit me. Why had that embedded in my brain?

I tried to put it out of my mind. I would be gone for a week. What could happen in that time?

When I arrived at Klein's lab, immediately something was off. There was no hum of aether energy, no residual spells save one- a spell for summoning water in great quantity.

I found him immersed in a hastily constructed tank filled with distilled water, fleshless jaw opening and closing with desperate speed.

Eventually, he saw me trying to make sense of this bizarre behavior, and climbed out to explain, with a fear palpable even in his artificial voice,

"I'm thirsty."

One little detail.

One so little detail.

The ritual for lichdom advises the lich-to-be to make sure they are as comfortable as possible. Having gone to the bathroom. Having removed eyelashes from the eye, or any splinters from the skin. Having numbed or healed any aches or pains. Having sated hunger... and thirst. Why?

Because how you feel before you drink the poison potion is how you will feel forever.

And Klein had a parched throat, but wanted to get the ritual done and over with. A minor transgression.

An eternal cost.

He tried to ignore it, but the thirst consumed his every thought. Needles in his throat, he said. Burning in the back of an esophagus he no longer had.

Our research turned from cancer cures and extending normal human lifespans to see if there was a way to numb this sensation.

Over the course of two weeks, we committed several high acts of magical violation, multiple acts of trespassing, and use and possession of materials and knowledge "deemed hazardous to the welfare of existence at large", all to make his thirst go away.

We finally found enough books, scrolls, and notes to detail every facet of lichdom there was to know. He expected a solution.

Every profane experiment, every log by every lich that was, all told the same tale. Those who became lichs while in a state of relatively perfect comfort lasted the longest before going insane. Those who had discomforts like Klein lasted maybe a year or two.

What is it about Klein's and transgressive studies?

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"No."

That was what he said when we arrived at the same conclusion for the fifteenth time.

"No." he rasped again.

"No." he repeated. "No. No. No. No."

I pitied him, and then I spoke words I soon would come to regret.

"Couldn't you just make a new living body and pass your soul to it?"

"No. A homunculus doesn't have the spiritual tethers to hold a soul. I would need a living-"

The eyeless skull turned to look at me. Klein paused for several seconds.

I knew what conclusion he had come to, and I was powerless to stop it.

"For what it's worth, I am truly sorry."

This sentiment meant little to me, bound and rune-shackled as he desperately carved a new circle.

"I am truly sorry. I will see to it your sacrifice doesn't go to waste. I will spend every year you have bettering mankind. I swear it."

I screamed. I pleaded. He pretended not to hear me as he made panicked, rushed preparations. Despite my fatigue, my weariness, I was kept wide awake as I observed his methods.

He was rushing the etching of the runes, not paying attention to spacing or length of lines. He skimmed notes in a frenzy. His mixing of vials was done hastily, out of what seemed to be equal parts desperation and joy at having found a potential relief to his pain.

In his haste to undo his life's greatest work, he was going to kill us both.

When he had finished, I had lost count of the number of errors and gross oversights he had made. Even as a skeleton, he shook with fear.

"I will make this as painless as possible." his artificial voice lacked any ability to sound soothing, empty and hollow. "I am truly sorry."

Then, holding the phylactery, he began his spell.

The circle beneath me flared, but the energy was all wrong. He had to of noticed it, because he hesitated, but after a second, continued.

Yet another mistake. You never force an unstable circle, not unless you want to demolish your laboratory and yourself in the process.

What looked to be white fire sprung from the phylactery to him, then another link of white fire shot towards me, and I braced for pain that never came.