Undercover Lich, Chapter Three (Patreon)

Howdy folks,For those of you who don't know, I'm doing a bit of a novel project on the side and as a Patreon exclusive, you guys get the early access to the first drafts as they come out!

I was stuck on this chapter for a long time, couldn't get it to work semi-allright, so I just put it on the backburner. Now, I'm on a bit of a quest to reinforce the FUN part about what I do, since it's easy for me to focus on the stress, pressure and profit-chasing, and the best way to do that is it to work on and finish stuff that has bothered me and/or is fun to finish! Hence, I sat down and just finished the first draft of Chapter 3! Make it exist, make it good later type of shit!

Also gonna finish up the leftover commissions from the Kickstarter this week, feels amazing to get those of my back!

Thinking about opening up a bit of commissions too, bit for extra cash but also for the fun of it. Not sure about the price yet but we'll see.

New TWR coming along with the Torvald shirt on Friday!

Enjoy and do let me know if you have any notes, ideas or criticism!

Previous Chapters:

Undercover Lich: Chapter Two

___________________________________________________________________“WHAT IS THE POINT?!”

Vuld's face remained patiently placid, like a mountain lake on a frosty winter morning. If said lake looked like it had been molded from clay by a drunk amateur going through something, as the chair crashed into the wall. After having quite a few… whatever the word for tantrum but for adults is… over the years, I’ve found that despite having the power to vaporize furniture at a whim, nothing beats just smashing furniture to help express your frustration. It’s better if someone is present as well to hear your incoherent ravings. Especially if said someone has the magical know-whats to repair the damage immediately!

 A quick flick of Vuld's wand and the chair reassembled itself and hopped back to its place by the dining table. He continued to say nothing and waited for the next unlucky airborne furniture.

“WHAT THE FUCK IS THE FUCKING POINT?!” I shrieked and grabbed glassware and plates from the shelves around the walls, sending them with expedited shipping into the far wall. Arguably, the best place to have an emotional episode is in the kitchen. Most of the more satisfying but not overtly expensive things to break are there. Very few things beat the sound of shattering porcelain when you're working through something. The staff had gracefully decided to abscond from the kitchens as I’d entered. 

Faintly it dawned on me that having a full complement of chefs, scullery maids and whatever the other non-big-white-hat-wearing folks did, in a tower with mostly undead inhabitants was a bit… unnecessary? Apart from Vuld, the kitchen staff themselves, the only proper living people were the prisoners in the dungeons. I decided to ask Vuld about the tower's finances at a later time. Did we pay the kitchen staff? Rousing myself back into channeling my inner toddler, I went back to throwing my grandmother’s fine china into the fireplace. As per usual, my melancholic retreat from the battlefield had been an emotional rollercoaster. One moment catatonic shuffling down the dusty road, the next a stomping march to the tune of every profanity and curse I had in my extensive vocabulary. I had arrived at my tower during one of the latter stages, plowing my way into the kitchens.

I grabbed hold of the large cooking pot, trying my best to lift the heavy cast iron monstrosity. It would have been a monumental effort even if it hadn't been filled to the brim with some form of stew. A sizzling sound and a tiny little message in the back of my head let me know that the flesh of my palms had loudly started to broil. I jerked back. 

Now, pain was an… interesting subject to a lich like myself. Pain, in essence, is electrical impulses sent via an organism's nerves to its brain, letting it know that there’s some damage happening to the body. The brain then reacts by doing its best to remove the body from the source of the pain. Basically, pain functions to motivate an organism to withdraw and avoid situations that would harm it. As an Undead, every single biological function in my body had decided to go on an indefinite sabbatical. My nerves were dead, my brain long ago rotted, my intestinal system a stagnant mess… you get the drift. My point is, there are no electrical impulses coursing through my body and the body itself is no longer alive, so there is, biologically speaking, nothing to protect. But part of the spells that animate my body means I know what happens to my body at all times, including when things hurt my immortal shell. Technically, one could call this information “pain”, as it serves the exact same purpose. It’s not the flashing warning lights of a body in danger as “OH FUCK, WE HAVE AN ARROW IN OUR KNEE DO SOMETHING FOR THE LOVE OF THE GODS” but more of a statement of fact, “to whom it may concern, there is a foreign object in the left knee cap”. Same information but one is yelled in your ear by a drill sergeant and the other is something you read in a biology textbook. Nonetheless, I jerked back when I burned my palms to a blackened mess. Not the response of a brain reacting to harmful stimuli, but a mental reflex left over from my living flesh days. Some damage can easily be ignored or brushed aside as mere trivia. But burns? Very hard to ignore. That and needles.

Snarling, I made a quick series of arcane gestures and levitated the pot from its hearth, preparing to send it flying into the large china cabinet standing on the other side of the room. My burning eyes fixed on Vuld as he suddenly, but quietly, cleared his throat. His face was as placid as before, bar a slight elevation of his left eyebrow. Not a reprimand, not an order, not even a suggestion. Just a small reminder that tossing that out would set breakfast back an hour. 

With a groan, and the sound of crackling cartilage, I sat my bony ass down on a chair. I stared at my charred hands, feeling that empty feeling in my chest come back screaming into the void I temporarily filled with a tantrum. Vuld gently but firmly grabbed my hands and started repairing the damage with mending spells. The man wasn't a healer, but in my deathless state, it’s not really about healing and more leatherworking. I looked at Vuld as he worked. He had been in my service now for over sixty years, stitching me up countless times from whatever crap heroes and adventurers managed to toss at my body. A strange feeling filled me, uncomfortable in its foreignness. A need.     

“Vuld?”

“Mastah.” Vuld didn’t look up from his labour. 

“What should I do?”

“Wa’eva the mastah like, mastah.” Vuld responded. “A’ always”.

“What if I don't know what I want?” I whispered.

I’m not sure if it was my words or the pathetic tone I used but Vuld froze. He looked at me, right eyebrow firmly now raised, giving me a rare unobstructed sight of his bright yellow eye. The silence stretched on. The realization suddenly hit that I had never really asked his honest opinion on something before. 

Vuld worked his mouth, tusks moving around like yellowed trees in a harsh wind. 

“The mastah could always try… adventuring?” he ventured. 

Was that a… joke? Did the fossilized old Orc actually make a joke? For the very first time in sixty years? I studied his face. A slight pull at one corner of his mouth betraying the sentiment as an attempt at humor. Truly a moment of firsts. 

After an appropriate amount of stunned silence, plenty of time for Vuld to have some serious doubts about getting too familiar and develop a slight nervous twitch, I chuckled dryly. My knees clicked as I rose from my chair and clapped my old butler on the shoulder a couple of times. 

“Good one” I said. 

The empty feeling inside was still there, make no mistake, but it felt less… overwhelming. Humor really was a great coping mechanism. Pretty sure I read that in a book somewhere. Vuld seemed tense though, glancing unsurely at the hand on his shoulder. I realised I hadn’t moved it away after that last clap. A very… intimate gesture, by our standards. First time for that. While I’d always respected Vuld and treated him better than I knew many of my peers would, there had always been a clear divide. Which I’d reinforce at times with threats and casual displays of cruelty towards those who’d fail me. He’d attempted to… comfort me? I had expressed some form of appreciation in return? It felt vulnerable. 

Neither of us knew what to expect now. Looking back, the last time I had physical contact with someone else for this long, I’d used the time to shoot enough lighting directly into a barbarians nervous system to cook him thoroughly. I think Vuld was replaying the same incident as well. 

We were on new waters here, him and I. Somewhere there was a proverbial line in the sand between what was expected of this professional relationship and we had cleared it with a running start.

I wasn’t sure I liked that.

Removing my hand, I swiftly turned and made for the door.

“I’ll be in my study!” I threw behind me as I stalked out of the room past the terrified kitchen staff hunkering in the hallway. Blasting one or two of them would be a good way to restore a bit of the equilibrium but good kitchen staff were hard to come by these days.

—

With my second-favorite reading moccasins on my feet, relaxing robes on (they had less arcane symbols stitched into them) and with a large glass of port in my hand, I settled back into my reading chair in front of the skull fireplace. The leather creaked and the legs groaned, a testament to the advanced age of the chair, not judgement on the weight of my desiccated undead form. With practiced motions, I swirled the crimson liquid around in its crystal glass. The liquid would remain unabided of course, my entire digestive system from top to bottom had dried up and died almost the instant I achieved lichdom. For those without basic understanding of human anatomy (living or deceased) or a fairly mundane level of imagination, this means that anything I swallow would just… Remain. Undigested and unable to hitch a ride down the digestive tract to the exit. Walking around with liquid sloshing around your insides was a disgusting concept, only marginally less unpleasant as the concept of having to manually remove said liquids from your own stomach. I’ll leave the latter process up to the reader to imagine. 

The fine port was purely for ambience. Nothing like taking a long sniff, doing a lazy little swirl and sigh contentedly. 

Now of course, at this point you, dearest gentle reader may reasonably interject with “hang on, you just made a point of how your body is dead, how can you smell things?” A reasonable point, to which I shall counter with two points. 

One: I can still see and hear things, did you question that?

Two: Fuck you, I’m not explaining the minutae of the Undead condition. For a true deep dive into Undeath, I recommend “A. Newbie’s Guide To Life, Death & Beyond”. The book goes into tremendous detail about everything from ghasts and ghouls to vampires and tax collectors. Impressive considering the author is a mortal. Though to be fair, he is a fellow Ylvanian and if it’s one thing my fair homeland Ylvania is up to its neck in, it’s undead bullshittery. Something to do with ley lines, thin magical veil but it sure as hell doesn’t help that the mageocracy is the most welcoming place on the continent for necromancers. We even had a vampire head of state once. She was quite popular, even the vampire hunters decided to give her a skip. Something about “take care of the cattle” policies spoke to the unwashed masses. She really should have felt the room out before being candid with her noble court though. “Hypothetically, how would we go about making housing and healthcare free- why do you have a stake?”.

“Become an adventurer”, I snickered. “It was a good one.” The notion was absurd, which was what made it a good joke. That and the subversion of expectation in that Vuld never made jokes. Or something. I wondered if I still had that copy of “Humor & The Art of Making Friends” that I purchased in my first year at Athel’Varn.

But when I let my mind wander along the tracks from that statement of fact, I ran into a hurdle. Being an adventurer would be absurd. Why? I hate adventurers. Why? Because they wont stop bothering me and getting blood on the upholstery. Why? 

This is where I hit a wall. I had a hard time pinning down WHY an adventurer did what they did. Reasonably, the first place I went to was “reward”, there was certainly a large reward for my demise and there was a LOT of loot in this tower, most of which came from dead adventurers. But if it’s just for gold, then they’d just be mercenaries and sure, there’d been plenty of those too but a significant portion had been firmly in the “adventurer” category. There was more to it than a hunger of gold, even fame. There was a… fire. A… passion… in the eyes of the parties as they navigated my traps and fought my minions. There was SOMETHING there, underneath whatever motivation they’d wear on their sleeve as they charged into the lair of a powerful lich. Behind the lust for gold, the religious fervour, chivalrous zeal. Forget what the fuckin point of my life was, what was the fucking point of an adventurers life? What made the little bothersome fuckers so keen on diving headfirst into the most ridiculously dangerous situations on this plane of existence? Some-

It was at this point that I noticed that the light from the fireplace, and assorted candles spread about for that nice cozy ambience, had slowly but surely dimmed, deepening the shadows nestled in the deeper corners of the room. If I had exhaled a confused breath now, it would have fogged in the sudden supernatural cold. It was a shame that I didn't draw breath anymore because it’s such a classic image. Frost was starting to creep up on the mended window however, so the effect was still there. Looking down, I noticed that the port in my glass had frozen mid-swirl. 

“Very theatrical”, I mused and scanned the darkness around me, comfortably distracted from my worryingly spiralling train of thought. 

The shadows held no secrets from me, one of the many pros of having replaced my rotting eyeballs with magic. Even the deepest recesses of shadow were pierced by the baleful stare from my balefully glowing eyeballs. Colors were a bit muted, like someone slapped a blue shader on top of it and darkened it a bit. Two pinpricks of light stood out in the gloom. They were small, roughly pupil sized and spaced apart roughly the same width as a pair of pupils would be had they not been floating in space. So probably eyes then. Though the spacing kept… Fluctuating. Quite substantially actually. Kind of made the “eyes” theory a bit less secure but I still felt there was a fair bit of eye-y quality to it, so I kept referring to them as eyes. Apart from all of the above, one thing stood out to me. 

The lights radiated a palpable sense of hate. Menace. Righteous anger. If you ever worked in retail or the service industry, you know the vibe.

With a sigh, I set down my glass of frozen port, careful not to break eye-contact with the lights. While this was a nuisance and a half, it didn't set off the feelings of melancholy and rage that had plagued me since DuBeaus departure from this mortal plane. The reason for that was simple. Ever since I was a wee laddie, growing up in the Ylvanian countryside and listening to Grand-pappys stories by the fire, I’ve always loved a good haunting. 

I wondered who it would be.

Spontaneous hauntings are exceptionally common in my tower for a multitude of reasons but in order to not go on too long of a tangent, I’ll give you the quick and dirty: When you die, your body ceases to be able to function as the tether to your soul and it flows out into the world. Usually, it then passes over the proverbial barrier or veil between the realms of life and death and further on onto the Beyond with a capital B (which looks very different depending on a massive amount of factors that I refuse to get into). Sometimes, the soul in question has something else to tether itself to the living which means it can resist to pass beyond. This tether is the classic concept of “unfinished business”. The veil could also be weaker or damaged in places, for example a large concentration of violent deaths can in of itself weaken the veil. My tower has had a number of violent deaths, necromantic energies and the folks who die tend to have a bit of a grudge against me, which makes a flower bed for ghosts to come along and bother me. ‘

The spectre materialised from the shadows. It had a pale blue form that gave off a harsh light, commonly referred to in academic circles as “slightly-creepy-ghost-lighty”, and would have been quite useful as a torch. The more corporeal parts of the manifestations were a mess. Undead spirits can take a variety of forms, usually it depends how the spirit defines itself, i.e. what form it feels its old body had. This more often than not means how it regularly looked when alive or how it looked at or around the moment of death. This one clearly picked the latter. 

The ghost was roughly humanoid shaped, draped in indistinct robes that flowed out behind it like it was surging through troubled waters. Any color of the fabric was drowned in the pale blue filter of its ghost form but they had a certain wizard vibe. This didn’t really narrow the list of potential suspects, a LOT of the previous home intruders had been wizards and sometimes a spectre took time to form after the murder of its body. From the flowing and torn robes came pale limbs, starkly more defined than the spectral robes, all of them twisted and broken. Its face was a flowing mass of broken bone and split meat, flowing like the tide together to form a horror stricken woman’s face then splitting apart and flowing outwards. Very much like someone constantly reliving (hehe) the moment they fell onto their face from a substantial height. While hard to tell without some color, the hair flowing behind the crushed face could certainly have been blond. The wizard from last night! I was genuinely impressed, she’d taken less than a day to come back to haunt her murderer. She must REALLY hate me.

I smiled and raised my glass in a lazy greeting.

With a shriek that would have shattered eardrums, burst hearts and emptied bladders, the spectral apparition flew towards me. It reared up momentarily as it reached me, a bit like you’d imagine a horse or snake would do before striking, and then lunged at me with its clawed fists. It would not be hyperbole to say that it was going absolute ham on me. Fists leaving ghostly trails in the air as they fell towards me like meteors or the paws of a cat that does that drumming attack move cats sometimes do. Now, a bit of a short lesson on the Undead, specifically incorporeal spectres like this one. Being non-corporeal, they don’t rely on blunt force trauma to harm those they decide to harm. Okay, wording it like that makes it sound like they have a choice in the matter. The matter of fact is that they can't because their form just passes right through their victim. That is not to say it doesn't harm the living. Apart from the massive psychological trauma traditionally associated with having a member of the restless dead (not the punk tavern band) try to murder you, the touch of a spectre, though incorporeal, can be dangerous. The effects vary from the types of spectre that exist; life-sapping, burning, toxic and the list goes on and on. Floaty McFucked Up Face here had a classic case of the chill touch. Wherever its spectral form passed through an object, a film of frost would form on. 

Which brings us back to me, the intended punching bag of this miffed manifestation of malice. When the fists and claws would pass through my body, a deep chill would spread through my body. My skin would crack and freeze, robes becoming stiff with ice, the glass in my hand completely coated with a spiderweb of frost. Had I been a regular mortal, it would have been a horrid experience. The assault caused no bludgeoning damage and the claws not rending my flesh but my body breaking by the deep chill assaulting it with every swipe. I’d be unable to defend myself too, as the spectre in its current form would be immune to my feeble return punches or pathetic attempts to shield my face and vitals from the onslaught.

But as things stand, I’m neither mortal, nor regular in any sense of the word.

After a quick series of little somatic gestures with my non-glass of port having hand (my left, if it matters to you), a green spectral glow quickly spread from my fingertips up to about half my forearm. The spell was called Grave Touch, or Ephrael’s Reworked Spectral Touch for the arcanally inclined (the latter a term that always got a giggle in school), had been made specifically for this type of situation. 

My hand shot out and grabbed the spectre by the throat, the spell allowing my hand to interact with objects and creatures normally untouchable by the mundane. Even with the face being in such a geographically scrambled state as it was, the spectre looked shook at this development. A sudden reminder of my train of thought before the specter’s arrival stopped me from activating the spell and blasting the spirit to proverbial bits. My brows furrowed in thought, and I absent-mindedly made the swirling motion with my crystal glass once more, thoroughly disappointing to do when the liquid inside is frozen by the way.

A decision was made.

Baring my teeth in a smile, I moved the flailing thing closer to me with deliberate slowness. 

“We’re going to have a bit of a talk, you and I”, I purred.

The spectre shrieked and struggled as I dragged it behind me like the most trauma inducing children's balloon ever. We were off to the Grand Library to see my former apprentice.

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