Book 3 Chapter 25: Homecoming

++It is possible to make magic that lasts for a thousand years, even ten thousand. But not forever.++

- From the writings of Isabel Vornholt, ‘The Great Lich’. 1,891 A.E.

Sethira did not seem to have heard me describe the dangers involved in my lab, she just grinned at the mention of it.

“Excellent,” she said enthusiastically. “I’ve been wanting to see where you did your work for a long time.”

She realised she was being invited, then. But her lack of concern was, itself, a source for my own concern.

“You should take this more seriously,” I told her. “This is my old laboratory, it has been abandoned for thousands of years. And unlike yours it is not…self-maintaining.”

I saw the good humour melt from her face.

“You have…things there that might have escaped?” she asked.

“Many,” I confirmed.

Sethira sobered quickly.

“Alright then. So that’s why you want me to accompany you.”

“Yes. It will be, as I said, dangerous.” Better to be up-front about that, rather than cultivate unneeded and potentially dangerous animosity between myself and an ally. Sethira nodded.

“Give me an hour to prepare,” she told me.

I did so, and took the chance to head to the leyline and finally see to my pocket world’s new contents.

Sascithius was situated just where I had left him, and I wasted no time in breaking the bindings that had let me transport his essence before permitting it to exit through the portal and re-settle in the leyline itself. I stepped out to join him.

“This is…a weak one,” he noted petulantly.

“It is as strong of one as you could have hoped for,” I replied.

He grumbled more, though I could already see his magical tendrils reaching out to gorge themselves on the ambient magic. The truth was that just about any leyline, even a withered and drained one like this, was a source of near-limitless power. Sascithius had been relying on the ambient mana wasted by heavy magic use from Winzorth’s magicians until now. As of today, he would be gathering strength thousands of times more quickly.

“It will still take years to regain my full strength from this,” he grumbled.

“We have years.”

“It could be months. If you found me a regular leyline, you could have a full-powered ancient lich as your ally in mere months.”

He was trying to tempt me, unfortunately ignorant about Sethira.

“You will make do with what you have,” I told him, then took my leave.

Sethira was true to her word, and ready to depart. She had done little different apart from don a few items which I could feel humming with magical power, though none of it was significant enough that it would help her in any fight that Sakhent’s power was not already sufficient to end instantly.

“How are we travelling?” she asked.

“I was going to fly us,” I explained. “I can make a winged construct for longer-distance travel with passengers.” In fact, I had been improving on the design in my free time. It was now significantly faster.

Sethira certainly seemed to appreciate it. She stared with awe at the sledge as I worked it out of aether, occasionally asking questions about one thing or giving feedback on another.

“This feels so obvious, looking at it,” she frowned. “I could’ve made this myself” I knew she was not bragging, the design was very simple.

“It was tricky to get the balance right,” I conceded. “But most of the practice needed was already done with my sledges anyway.”

Sethira soon found out just how fast this vehicle could move, and she giggled as she did.

“It’s a shame you have to seal it,” she sighed as we flew. “I’d love to feel the wind on me.”

“That is almost exactly what my twelve-year-old brother said,” I frowned. “I will tell you what I told him; at this speed the wind would probably rip your skin off and kill you.”

“I could take it.”

I ignored her ridiculous response and just focused on returning to Irucci. We really were moving fast. It was just a hair short of six thousand miles by flight, but I made that distance in barely half an hour. The slowest parts were actually decelerating before landing, an unfortunately necessary step. If I was not willing to become Lord Dread, I would not be withstanding a supersonic impact.

Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

Then again, that was one of the least dangerous things facing me now. We touched down on familiar sands and I took a moment to re-orient myself, looking around at the landscape and noting the ways it had and had not changed since I was last here.

“Feeling nostalgic?” Sethira asked me.

“Do you ever wonder if there is something wrong about our existence?” I said quietly. “The world changes around us, breaks down and reforms, always in flux, always a product of entropy. And here we are, as we always were, as we always will be. Sterile and dead and crystalised in essence.”

Her smile dropped away fast.

“Sometimes,” she admitted. “But then I look at all this, and how it’s changed, and I think about how brief human lifespans are naturally. You and I are looking at this and recalling how the landscape has changed. We couldn’t do that if we were mortal. We’re creating all the beauty of the ages here by observing it.”

I considered that. “I have…never had much time for beauty,” I admitted.

“I know,” she sighed, looking at me with a look that, to my dawning horror, I realised was pitying. “And I’m sorry to see that. But five, ten or however many thousands of years you’ve existed for, it’s not too late to start making time.”

Sethira always had an interesting way of looking at things. Perhaps it was because her own views were so starkly different from mine. In the past, I had rarely met another lich who was not one of my own apprentices, a process that tended to influence their thinking and leave them aligning roughly with my own philosophy, even if most of them refused to actually serve me for some reason.

Not only was Sethira not trained by me, but she was almost as old to boot. It made for engaging conversation.

“Where is your lab, anyway?” she asked. “I can’t sense it. Is it possible it’s…gone? Been found already and destroyed?”

I smiled at that.

“We would know if the Gods had done that. When they destroy something I make, they tend to do so with a rather excessive amount of power.”

There was no vast, glassy crater in the sand where yottajoules of energy had been violently inserted into the terrain, no disturbed weather patterns from when I had last come here myself. For that matter, I was fairly sure each time the Gods had destroyed one of my laboratories in the past, global weather conditions had changed quite significantly until they were able to burn yet more power to fix them.

Where Sethira and I were standing right now was not on top of the lab, but it was close enough that if Nglaru had discovered the place already, the sands under our feet would have been blasted, melted and vaporized away long ago. It would be a crater from one horizon to the other.

And it was not.

“You must be very good at warding then,” Sethira frowned. “I can’t sense anything at all.”

“That is one area that physically perceiving mana helps with,” I noted dryly as I began walking.

“Yeah, I’ll say,” she sighed. “What’s that even like?”

It was not the first time someone had asked me the question.

“It is…difficult to describe,” I admitted. “I have never not had the ability. What is it like for you to work mana blindly?”

“It feels exactly like manipulating an invisible force that you can only vaguely feel is there,” Sethira grumbled. “Each new level of complexity to any spell is another order of magnitude added to its difficulty, and simply finding out where I’ve gone wrong with a matrix can be hours or even days of trial and error.”

I nodded at that, unsurprised. “For me, I simply look. I can see how mana interacts with mana, so replicating given effects is just a matter of replicating exact shapes. When I am trying to uncover a flaw in my powers, I can just…look, and see what the mana is doing that I do not want it to.”

Sethira looked at me for a long time. “I’ve never heard of this in another,” she admitted at last. “Not even a rumour of it.”

“Neither have I,” I told her. “As far as I can tell, I am unique.”

She fell into silence while we continued our search. My memory was as perfect as ever, though the landscape having changed so much made memory alone incapable of pinpointing my destination. Fortunately, warded as it was, my lab was not quite hidden enough to disguise its ambient glow from my own mana sight. It took less than ten minutes before we were standing over it.

“Originally, it was buried some thousand yards beneath the ground,” I told Sethira. “I would wager time has added another few hundred.”

“So, nothing at all then?” she grinned. I grinned back.

Lord Dread and Sakhent took to the desert like twin meteors striking the same spot. Our mana screamed through the air with the intensity of a volcanic eruption, announcing where and what we were to every mana-sensitive creature in a hundred miles.

But there was nobody within two hundred miles to feel it.

It took us mere moments to melt and displace the sand right down to the top of my laboratory. From there, I teleported down to stand on it and reached out with my mana to interface with the ancient mechanisms within.

They recognised me, even after all this time. Of course they did. Lord Dread did not build things that crumbled and broke after a mere few millennia. The great door rolled aside and we were able to drop ourselves down. Above us, the molten sludge was transmuted back to sand and fell into place like it had never been moved at all. The desert was peaceful once more.

But we were cut off from it. Around us I saw the familiar sights I had spent so much of my existence working among. Long, sheer metal planes, dark stone, darker crystals, substances that did not even exist in the physical world conjured forth from the other planes to serve as my bastions. Long corridors with ceilings made a dozen yards high to accommodate Lord Dread’s towering height.

It was all quiet, though I instinctively felt danger in the air as I looked out at the sight. That this place had once been my own did not make it any less of a potential threat now. In fact, it made it far more threatening. Because I knew just what sort of things I had bound here in the past.

Sakhent, for his part, was somewhat muted in response as he examined the architecture.

“MORE PRIMITIVE THAN I WAS EXPECTING,” he noted.

“MOST OF THESE MATERIALS DO NOT EVEN FOLLOW THE LAWS OF PHYSICS.” I pointed out. He made a low, rattling sound that liches create when we attempt to laugh without vocal chords.

“AND YET YOU’RE SO VERY POWERFUL, THE LEADER OF OUR GROUP, AND STILL FALL SHORT OF MY OWN CRYPTS.”

I ignored the goading and moved deeper inside, and Sakhent accompanied me. It did not matter how the ruins looked. What mattered was the treasures they held.