by Ramy Vance
“Your plan should be to wipe the floor with the lich’s fucking face. How’s that for a fucking plan?”
Suzuki dashed forward, his sword raised high above his head. He brought it down on the lich, who parried with her bone spear, stopping the attack.
Anabelle dissolved into the shadows, slipping around the lich and reforming behind her. She sank her fist into Rasputina’s stomach, knocking the wind out of her.
Rasputina stumbled forward as Suzuki prepared to decapitate her, and the blade hit Rasputina in the neck. She dropped to her knees, but the blade would not pass through.
Anabelle leapt, her foot aflame, and cracked her heel into the back of Rasputina’s head as Suzuki hacked at the lich’s neck.
The lich screamed in pain, then grabbed Suzuki’s wrist and twisted it, causing him to drop his sword. When she backhanded Anabelle, the elf flew across the room and crashed into a wall. Then Rasputina lifted Suzuki, her eyes flashing green flames as she smiled widely. Her teeth were as sharp as fangs, and an otherworldly smell floated up from her like heavenly incense. “Boy, I suggest you step away now.”
Suzuki drew his feet back and brought them up into Rasputina’s chest, causing her to drop him. He rolled away, grabbing his sword with one hand. He drew a throwing axe from his back with the other and flung it, and the axe nailed the lich in the chest.
Rasputina screamed as Anabelle swooped in, throwing three lightning-bolt fists that connected drove the axe further into the lich. She stumbled back, trying to wrestle the axe out of her sternum. “I’m only going to tell you one more time; I am here to help you. I don’t want to fight. Do not push me to be what I used to be.”
Anabelle paused for a moment. What was she talking about? Who had she been before? Whatever. It’s probably a trap.
Suzuki wasn’t listening to the lich’s words either. He rushed forward and rolled, slashing the lich’s leg off as he passed.
She hit the ground.
Suzuki turned back around, and in one fluid motion, drove his sword into the back of the lich’s skull. “And that takes care of that.”
Anabelle stared at Suzuki, her jaw nearly touching the ground. The elegance he had just displayed was awe-inspiring. Not what she would have expected from a rough and tumble MERC. “How did you do that?” she asked.
Suzuki shrugged nonchalantly. “Holy sword. Buffs all my attacks to cause extra damage to undead creatures. Sandy showed me that one.”
Sandy, who was sitting on the sidelines drinking a beer, raised her glass and toasted with Stew. “That’s my boy!”
Before anyone could celebrate too much, the lich let out a screech and clawed at the sword in her skull, trying to pull it out. The sword had been driven too deep into the cave’s floor.
She started trying to pull her body back, her hands frantically grabbing at the floor as her screams turned to dry sobs.
Anabelle’s stomach lurched. Her display was pathetic and heart-wrenching. These were not the mad ramblings of the undead thing she’d faced before. There was something extremely human about what they were all listening to.
Anabelle was not alone in that feeling. It was evident from the silence that had descended on the cave.
The lich grasped the hilt of the sword, breaking her arms and contorting them while repeating, “Someone help me. Someone help me, please. She’s coming for me,” as she slid her head up and down, cutting her skull open.
Finally, Rasputina knelt on all fours like an animal and violently pulled back, yanking the sword through her skull. Brain matter, bone, and blood hit the ground as she scuttled backward.
She reached a wall, where she curled her knees to her chest, her head flopping, part of her face twitching uncontrollably as she chewed on her fingers, laughing quietly to herself.
Suzuki stared at Rasputina and then looked at Anabelle. “Okay, what the fuck is going on?”
Green energy burst from the wound on Rasputina’s head as it started to stitch itself back together, the lich wailing in pain the entire time and stumbling to her feet. She clawed at her stomach until she opened a wound from which green pus seeped out, then grabbed a rib and ripped it out. The rib honed itself to a knife-edge.
The lich hunched over, looking feral, her matted hair covering her face as she growled, “I am trying to help you.” She lunged at Suzuki, slashing at him with her bone knife.
The Mundanes’ leader backed away, raising his sword to block the attack with one hand, the other casting a fireball.
The flaming orb hit the lich in the stomach and burned through her, but she didn’t stop, not even when her intestines spilled out. She powered through Suzuki’s defense, eventually getting close enough to strike him. Instead, she grabbed him and stared him in the eyes. “I have seen Death, boy.”
Anabelle came in from the side, kicking her.
The lich crumpled, holding her stomach as the elf uppercut her and broke her jaw.
Rasputina stumbled back, holding her damaged face instead of her stomach. She raised her hand as she fell backward and fired a bone shard that hit Anabelle in the shoulder.
As Anabelle grabbed the bone to pull it out, the lich aimed her hands, green energy flowing all about her, and blasted Suzuki with it.
The blast rooted him to the ground and the energy flowed back to the lich, who made a fist, causing Suzuki to scream.
Anabelle came in for another attack, casting a small fireball that she followed with a series of punches.
A bone coating grew over the lich’s chest, where Anabelle’s blows fell.
The lich leaned forward and head-butted the elf, then released Suzuki from her grasp, wrapped both hands around Anabelle’s throat, and forced her to the ground as she strangled her.
Anabelle struggled, but the lich was too strong. She could feel her trachea collapsing as she gasped for breath, Rasputina hovering over her, eyes mad with bloodlust and a psychotic smile plastered across her face.
Suddenly it was gone. Rasputina slammed her knife down, driving it into the floor. Her eyes welled with tears. “I am here to help.” She sighed, then she stood, walked over to the soul jar, picked it up, and handed it to Anabelle before sitting down at the elf’s feet. “Just let me help.”
Anabelle sat up and stared at the lich, who was wiping away tears and rubbing her face frantically. “Why the hell do you want to help us all of a sudden? This is a far cry away from threatening to swallow Abby’s soul whole.”
The lich scratched at her face as she tried to talk. “I am…I wasn’t meant to be like this. This isn’t what I wanted. I used to be a good person. People loved me. I loved them. I didn’t…”
Rasputina continued scratching as skin came off in her nails.
Sandy, who had finally gotten to her feet, placed a hand on the lich’s shoulder.
Rasputina looked up at the wizard, her eyes still wet, tears mixed with the blood running down her face.
Sandy knelt next to the lich. “It happened to you, didn’t it?” She pulled up the arm of her robe, showing her skin, which was cracked, blue energy glowing beneath it.
Rasputina nodded. “There was a reason I became this. I need to make it right. Please let me.”
Sandy met Anabelle’s eyes. “I think we should give her a chance.”
The elf’s anger flashed as she stepped toward the Mundane and shook her head. “You haven’t seen what she’s done! She is responsible for the death of hundreds of people!”
“Aren’t we too? Those orcs and trolls and goblins we kill weren’t just nameless soldiers. All of them were people, even if they were mind-controlled. We’re all killers here.”
“They were unarmed! Innocent human lives tossed away as if they were nothing.”
Anabelle choked out on her words as she fought back tears, “Children.”
“I know,” Rasputina said softly. “I know what I’ve done.”
The wizard stood, her hand still resting on the lich’s shoulder. “She could have killed you both. Even if she was ex
hausted from fighting Telzrem, she had you, yet she was pulling her punches. We should listen to her. See what she has to say.”
Anabelle crossed her arms as she looked down on the lich, who was rocking back and forth, cradling herself. “Fine. I’ll listen. It better be a great fucking story.”
Chapter Four
Anabelle, Terra, and the Mundanes eyed the lich. She took a deep breath, stifling her tears and regaining a reasonable amount of composure so that she did not even seem like the same person from a few seconds ago. She looked like the confident, sane woman from the battle with Telzrem.
Even the dragon, now fully healed, seemed to be interested in the story.
Rasputina pointed at Stew and Terra. “First, let me undo some of the damage.” She traced her finger through the air, scribing arcane symbols that glowed a fiery green and then faded.
A green aura surrounded the two, healing their wounds instantly.
Rasputina chuckled to herself as she sat up straighter. “I’ve never been much of a storyteller. Perhaps my memories should speak for themselves.”
Anabelle, who was ready to find fault with the slightest thing, scoffed. “If they’re even your memories.”
Rasputina, eyes serious and dead, turned to face Anabelle. “There are few things more precious to share than memories. The dragon will tell you. To lie about such things is to call a curse upon yourself, one that does not end.”
Telzrem exhaled smoke and nodded solemnly. “The lich speaks truly. Continue, lich. We are curious. It is a rarity in one’s life to come across a creature such as you, and even rarer to hear them speak about themselves.”
Rasputina began to shiver, her body vibrating so quickly that it seemed there were two versions of her. There was a flash of light as two Rasputinas split from the one. The lich on the left looked much like the one before them, although her skin was rosier and full of more life. The second was a husk of a person, her pale, skin stretched loosely over bone, She had dead eyes.
The dead Rasputina muttered to herself, looking at the floor as she dug at the dirt, scrawling unknown words. The younger Rasputina looked at the dead thing as if she were ashamed. “That is the Rasputina you know,” she explained. “The feral, mindless lich. What happens to a body when it does not have a soul for too long?”
Anabelle pounced. “And what does that make you?”
“A piece of what made her human. Her soul.”
Telzrem gasped. “What you say is madness. A lich with a soul?”
“Only a third. Not enough to truly be alive, but enough to retain most of my power and not be consumed by madness.”
Anabelle sighed, breaking up the conversation. “Okay, let’s assume all of us haven’t been reading arcane tomes our entire lives.”
Sandy spoke up, her death mask fading so that her skin could be seen. Before she spoke, she wiped her face, destroying the glamour that covered the blue cracks. “Liches hide their souls to gain immortality. That’s how they have enough time for their magic studies. They last for centuries, or even thousands of years sometimes. When I first started practicing magic, the older mages would joke that I could become one someday.” She pressed a finger to a crack in her face.
“What the hell is going on with that?”
Rasputina stepped in. “Humans haven’t been able to use magic for thousands of years, even those of us displaced across the Nine Realms. Most can only use it with a familiar, and even so, the magic rots their body—and eventually, their mind if it is undertaken for too long. That isn’t a problem, given how short our lives are compared to elves or gnomes. Even if a wizard devotes all their time to studying, they will die before their mind slips from them.”
Anabelle leaned closer, suddenly interested in the tale of the lich. “What about Myrddin? He’s been alive for thousands of years, and he hasn’t shown the same kind of mental decay as you. Or, you know, your general level of evil.”
Rasputina didn’t seem perturbed by the elf’s slight. “Myrddin has cultivated his own method, one he keeps to himself for fear that humanity may abuse it. He is one of those men who trust they know best and rarely question it.”
“Seeing as how he didn’t become a lich, he might not be wrong.”
The woman stared down at her hands as the older, dead lich barked mindlessly, snapping at the wind with her teeth. “I won’t say he was wrong,” the young one said. “You can see what happened to me, but I was aware that it might. I sectioned off part of my soul in a place my later self would have a desire to return to, giving me the opportunity to take back some of the power I’d wasted immortality getting.”
Anabelle still wasn’t convinced this was a story worth listening to. “What happened?”
Rasputina closed her eyes, and the cavern around them contorted and changed. They were now at the altar where she had split her soul.
The memory of the lich laid there quietly, no longer breathing, then rose and looked around. Her eyes fell on the dead thing muttering madly on the floor.
“I saw many things throughout the years that I could not understand. Visions. I thought I was haunted by a ghost of myself. Only now do I know I was being chased by the nightmare of what I was going to become. For years I saw that wraith. It never occurred to me that it was me, sitting here telling my own story.”
The newly-made lich left the cavern, and the image shimmered once more. Now they were all in a mage school. Rasputina sat around a table with elves, gnomes, and dwarves, laughing and talking over drinks. Books were spread out all over the table.
“I grew up in a flux realm of your dimension. If you think of your world as a bubble, my reality was as if you pressed a pin into it, and it didn’t pop. Humans could hardly use magic in our realm, yet I was gifted as a child. The only place I could learn magic was from the mage colleges throughout my realm. I dedicated years of my life to its study.”
Anabelle interrupted Rasputina. “Why? What made magic so important to you?”
Rasputina chuckled to herself. “It’s something you could never understand. Your kind is born with magic, as most of the races are. But us humans? All we have is our creativity, and even that pales next to the dumbest gnome.” The woman looked at Sandy. “Once you have a taste, it’s hard to turn away.”
The wizard nodded in agreement but said nothing.
The lich continued. “It was not the thirst that drove me at first. I wanted to save my village. We were dying of a plague, one that I believed I could cure with alchemy, but as always with magic, the journey was not straightforward. Every time I returned home, there were more dead. By the time I became a lich, the whole village had passed.”
Anabelle was tired of listening to the lich talk. She wanted to bash the foul creature’s head in, regardless of the sob story. “So, what I’m hearing is that you were too slow, your people died, and you became a mindless killer. This is why we should trust you?”
Rasputina shook her head slowly. “No, that was not what happened.”
The scene changed again to Rasputina walking into a village, stopping briefly to look at the husk of the lich, still chattering mindlessly in the dark.
The people of the village were gathered and talking among themselves as Rasputina pulled out a wand and began performing wonders. The villagers were enchanted.
The DGA and Mundanes watched as Rasputina moved through the village, visiting families, healing the sick, and working her magic for the benefit of those around her.
Anabelle couldn’t care less about what she was watching—the wistful memories of one who had committed atrocious crimes. None of this changed what the lich was or what she had done.
The woman met Anabelle’s eyes as Rasputina looked over her shoulder at Anabelle and Terra. “The first time that I thought I might be going mad was when I saw you two while I was in the middle of dinner. I tried to talk to you but couldn’t hear anything you said. All night…I stayed up all night trying to communicate, but all I could see was the hatred in your eyes for everythi
ng I was.”
The scene disappeared, replaced by Rasputina in an old elven library, buried beneath books. Days passed. Weeks. Eventually months. She hardly moved from the spot, her eyes growing hollow and sunken. Green cracks started to appear across her body.
“We aren’t meant to live this long. It unwinds us without us releasing it. Slowly, we cease to be, and there are only two desires, both for that which we do not possess: knowledge and a soul. When the second craving came to me, I removed myself from civilization.”
Roots burst from the floor of the college and trees sprang up, tearing through the ceiling, shattering glass until there was only a forest with an angry stream moving throughout it.
Rasputina trampled through the woods, her eyes wide with fear as she screamed at nothing. She tripped over her feet and landed in the river, crawling through the mud before rolling over and grabbing her stomach, her face screwed up in pain as she begged for death.
“It was not my proudest moment, only the first in a long line of shame. I wandered those woods for hundreds of years, never coming across another human. The longer I went without nourishment, the wilder my mind became, yet I was still learning. Hearing the sound of natural magic all around me. Before long, I couldn’t distinguish the voices of fairies from the river or my own screams.”
Rasputina collapsed beneath a tree. Winter came, and then spring. The seasons changed as the roots of the tree grew over the lich, finally covering her completely.
“The folks who stumbled upon me never stood a chance.”
Two young men walked through the forest. They stopped by the river, sat, and started talking to each other.
From beneath the roots of the tree came an unearthly green glow. One of the men looked over his shoulder as a loud growl came from the tree.
Rasputina tore through the ground, her eyes empty of even a semblance of humanity. They were windows into an emptiness not much seen in any realm. She beset one of the men, bounding after him as if she were an animal, then landing on him and ripping his throat out. She didn’t worry about the other. She peeled the flesh from her first kill, choking it down as she tore through his chest to get to his heart. That night, she knew contentment for the first time in hundreds of years.
