Book 4 Chapter 42: Generations

++I never understood why Lord Dread kept only one apprentice at a time. Myself, and I would later learn Shuo Meg, held whole schools to study our mastery. Perhaps it was his perfectionism rearing its head again. His monomaniacal obsession to have the best, and only the best.++

- Sethira, ‘The Dread Necromancer’, date unknown.

It had been some time before I had met with my newest living apprentice, Aadan Farah, and a whim struck me as I headed off to encounter him. It had been even longer since I had met with my oldest. I headed down into the leyline cave and stopped deep in its heart, calling out without delay.

“Sascithius, where are you?”

He took some time to respond. Long minutes, a petulant little display that I could only imagine was his way of trying to assert some level of control—or perhaps just spite—against me. Sascithius had never been the brightest of my apprentices. Magically talented enough, though even in that field he fell short of Sakhent, but altogether too dull-witted to ever become a truly great lich. I had often suspected that as many as one in twenty random people were as mentally nimble as him.

This slowness was why he had never quite mastered the fine art of feeling one thing and thinking another. When he inconvenienced me out of spite, he was doing essentially nothing but letting me know that there was ill will for me harbored in him. In doing so, he was letting me prepare for it to manifest more significantly.

It was not like I was remotely stupid enough to have ever thought otherwise of course, but even if I had been, little displays like this would have tipped his hand. Perhaps he just did not plan any betrayal even in the far future. Was he truly that beaten?

My ruminations were interrupted when he finally deigned to show his face, congealing up through the cracks in the stone. The bloody fog that now made up Sascithius’ natural form was thicker than I had yet seen it, and to my surprise it continued to grow thicker still, curling in and swelling until it looked like nothing more than floating blood. Then it began to reshape itself, falling into a humanoid structure. Head, chest, limbs. I felt the overwhelming impression of intense eyes upon me, though the fog fell just short of actually manifesting sensory organs.

“What do you want?” my apprentice asked.

He had grown strong. Oh, he had grown strong. Sascithius had made himself as much vampire as lich and thus had always suffered from a singular weakness; the inability to naturally channel magic of his own. Vampires were things of theft and predation, and any power they used must first be stolen from another.

That was how it was for pure vampires, but Sascithius was an interesting exception. Though his Vessel would not naturally refill itself regardless of location, as mine might, he could feed on ambient mana as easily as blood, provided he had time to focus. In most places this effect was almost unnoticeable, with his natural mana capacity being so great that it would take many millennia or more to replenish even a noticeable scrap. The speed of the process increased exponentially with how dense the mana was, however.

Here, in this cave, it was very dense indeed. One second spent here was equivalent to decades in the outer world, and likely long minutes under the Winzorth Institute. Had it been a full leyline at the height of its intensity, my apprentice would likely already have restored himself.

As things were, the year and a half he had spent here was still sufficient to have empowered a significant portion of his old strength. Perhaps a few more years would add another ancient lich to my growing forces.

That was good, I would always need more lieutenants.

“What do you want?” Sascithius repeated with that barking, jerky tone he seemed to reserve for conversations with me. Most liches never had to grow used to speaking to more powerful beings, that he had lived the life he had and still failed to acquire the skill was almost impressive, in a way.

“I wanted to see how your powers were developing,” I told him. “I am pleased that they seem so heavily restored.”

“Heavily restored?” he frowned. “I have maybe half my power back, and once I reconstruct a permanent physical body I’ll burn another great portion of even that. I’m still going to be formless for years.”

I waved a hand, distractedly. “Oh, I have gained quite a lot of resources since we last saw one another, I can just deposit you in a true leyline somewhere far from the Empire and raise your growth rate another few times over if that is a serious concern.”

It is difficult to read emotions in a disembodied swirl of crimson mist, but not impossible. By how it now coiled, suddenly less cloud and more nimbus, I got the distinct impression of rage. Sascithius had always been vulnerable to petty slights.

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“Why didn’t you come to me as soon as this option was available?” he asked.

“I was busy,” I told him. “Developing experiments, uncovering the secrets of magic in this new era. It was all very productive I assure you—another century and I will have risen to twice my previous power.”

The mists shuddered at that. As they rightly should have.

“Was that all then?” Sascithius asked. “You just came here to mock me?”

“No,” I was genuinely rather offended that he thought I cared enough to waste my own time tormenting him like that, however mildly amusing it was. “I have come to collect you. As I said, I can deposit you into a more powerful leyline to accelerate your strength returning. Before I do that, there is someone you must meet.”

***

I did not carry Sascithius in the conventional sense. My pocket space now held him as I flew, and, with Dread’s ability to open up a new gateway to it wherever he set foot, that meant that I essentially had him in my pocket.

Granted, Sascithius would escape eventually if he chose to. Come to think of it, with Nu’chista bound and helpless in there, my apprentice could replenish his own power rather quickly by feeding on the Demigod.

I was not especially worried about this. Sascithius, though strong, did not have the ability to permanently empower himself by draining another creature, even one stronger than himself. Even if he had, I was quite confident that his own current reserves of power would remain lesser than Lord Dread’s whether they were bolstered by the entirety of Nu’chista’s or not.

And all that aside…he simply was not that stupid. If Sascithius intended a betrayal, it would probably not be the most subtle of efforts, but I did not think even he was mentally dull enough to leap upon the very first perceived opportunity to fall before him.

I reached Aadan Farah’s mountain without any incident, though the flight was long, and drifted my way into it. As expected, the defences had grown far more formidable since I last set foot in it. None were actively hostile, but I noted innumerable alarms and wards that would each have had effects ranging from a simple alert to their creator deeper in the caves to rather violently activating every pain receptor in my whole body.

For the outer layer, I slipped past as Isabel Vornholt. Raw dexterity with magic and, of course, power went to Farah still for now, but my eyes let me see creases in any spellwork that other magicians could only predict the location of. Once I reached the halfway point, the spells became denser and more complex, but fortunately so did the ambient mana.

I would need to be careful here. Lord Dread’s very existence would not overcome the natural mana of the mountain, but if he exerted himself then that power would be easily detected. It was more than enough to hide a young lich like Farah, but Dread at his peak was more than an order of magnitude stronger than that. Such forces were noticed.

Provided they exerted their power too heavily, that was. If I used it in little bursts and bouts, and carefully measured it with the intersection of natural mana in this already-dense area around us, then I should be able to blend in for at least a short while. I would not be doing any long-term work here, but I did not think I would be bringing on a squad of Demigods this afternoon either.

“You need something?” Farah asked me. He was suitably awed by Dread’s physical manifestation, and I could practically see the gears turning in his head as he attempted to calculate the depths of my power. I became Isabel Vornholt again before he could finish. I saw no reason to allow any ally to know me better than was necessary.

“Not particularly. But there is someone you should meet.” I became Dread once more for one brief explosion of power, opening my gate and allowing Sascithius to congeal out of it into the air. Farah watched with a mix of fascination and fear as his senior emerged.

Even at a fraction of his normal strength, Sascithius was of roughly equivalent magical output to Farah himself. I suspected a fight between them right now would be dead even; one side enjoying the advantage of over ten millennia spent acquiring skill and versatility, the other enjoying a physical form with which to act.

I saw Farah formulating his own predictions on the topic, while Sascithius’ thoughts remained rather impossible to gauge. Not only was he an older lich than the fresh ones that still had some semblance of body language, but he had no body with which to speak at all.

“This is Sascithus,” I told Farah. “He is your senior, one of the first of my apprentices.”

“I know,” Farah said. “I recognise him.”

Of course he did, Sascithius had not changed so very much, though he now manifested more openly than ever before.

“You’ve ascended,” Sascithius remarked, his tone giving the impression of eyes focused upon Farah, though he had none. “And recently, too. No more than a year ago by the state of your bodily decay.”

“And you’re still an annoying puff of red smoke,” Farah told him. I cracked a smile, knowing how much that would irk my former apprentice. Farah turned to me. “What is the actual purpose of this?”

“The two of you should be aware of one another, you are both my apprentices after all.”

“I’ve not been your apprentice in ten thousand years,” Sascithius snapped.

“You have not learned anything in ten thousand years, that is not the same as your apprenticeship ending,” I told him. He responded with a string of profanity that spanned several dozen languages, most of which were older than recorded history. I tuned him out to focus on Farah once again.

“My first reason in bringing Sascithius was so that you can communicate with a lich besides myself,” I continued.

“The second?” he asked, still wary.

“The second was because I was heading here anyway,” I admitted. “I have a bit of free time on my hands while I wait for some preparations to finish among other subordinates. I see no better moment to begin your studies in advanced necromancy.”