Book 4 Chapter 43: Assembly

++Liches are as solitary by nature as tigers, as sharks. More, even, for unlike those animals they do not need their fellow liches to create more. This sole reason may be all that keeps them from truly threatening the Gods.++

- A comment made in private by the Demigod Ikinzacha

I had other reasons for visiting Farah besides just the ones I had shared, but for the moment I saw no reason to give voice to them. I had, after all, been telling the truth about teaching him necromancy.

And now that he was a lich himself, bound to me by the simple fact that the Gods would obliterate him whether he turned on me or not, I had no reason to hide my learning from him.

I taught him everything, or at least everything I thought he could handle. The conduction and control of negative energy, the intermingling of vital essences, the ways of layering spellwork through a reanimated corpse to imprint it with mental faculties beyond the dregs of its withered consciousness. Our primary limit was the lack of physical materials to work with, but I had foreseen that problem and killed a few local animals on my fly over to help with it.

He learned quickly, as he always did. Though he was not my most gifted apprentice, he was certainly talented. Perhaps the equal of Sascithius in raw natural ability, and lacking the rather unfortunate idiocy that left the vampire-lich so unreliable.

Neither of us talked much as we worked, both engrossed in magic. That was a trait common to those I would take under me; the tendency towards obsessing so intensely over our work that we were left beyond words, almost beyond thought. That the rest of the world nearly stopped existing compared to our practice.

Hours slipped by like they were slick with oil, almost unnoticed in their passing. There were no grand breakthroughs or anything of the sort, though I did cover a lot of ground on theory.

“So far you have been approaching necromancy the Garamon way,” I explained. “The purely material way. It is not a worthless lens to analyse the science through, but it lacks a lot in nuance and detail.”

Aadan Farah had forsaken his oaths as Grandmaster and abandoned his Gods, but a lifetime spent pioneering Garamon magic had still left him rather prickly when it came to any perceived slights against it.

“Like what?” he growled, speaking with the sort of hardened scepticism people mustered up as a barrier in debate.

“Like the fact that the forces we are controlling are not wholly material. If you look at them purely as energy, as something to be quantified and calculated, then you are failing to grasp their true nature, and weakening yourself as a result.”

His facial expressions were getting harder to read all the time, muscles decaying beneath the skin and leaving it all paralyzed and hanging dead. Fortunately, I had more than ten millennia of practice interpreting the moods of liches. Farah may as well have been wearing a sign with his exact thoughts written on it.

More scepticism, in this case. An attempt at an open mind, but too much dogma absorbed over too many years for it to come easily. He needed more to convince him.

“Consider where your previous education comes from,” I told him.

“Are you about to tell me that I’ve dedicated eighty years to learning propaganda from the Gods?”

“No,” I replied. “Only that propaganda from the Gods prevented you from learning more in that time.”

He swore, while Sascithius, currently billowing around the room, made a dull snickering noise.

“When we manipulate necromantic energies, we are working with life as much as death. We are attempting to replicate, with magic, the naturally-occurring vitality that leaves living things to…well, live.”

“So it’s related to biomancy?” Farah asked.

“No. There is some overlap, but the two paths do ultimately different things. Necromancy is fixated on the immaterial, while biomancy, obviously, is the art of manipulating something tangible and solid. It is the difference between brain surgery and illusion magic. This analogy is still flawed, as illusion magic affects the mind by sending impulses through physical matter, but it should focus you into the right way of thinking.”

He still did not seem to understand, but that was fine. We had eternity after all.

This version of the story was never approved by its author; the real one is on .

“Essentially, necromantic energies can be any actual energies at all—what matters is how they are shaped. Into a semblance of thought, a semblance of cognition, a semblance of life. Necromancy is one of the most complex paths of magic specifically because there are so many different ways to go about mastering it and achieving the same set of results. Some are better than others in particular situations, and there is a nigh-infinite number of potential approaches. Too many for even a lich to memorise. So, instead, you must understand the theory to make accurate predictions about what approach will work in any given technique.”

He was getting it now. “I need to learn how the techniques are assembled rather than just memorising them,” he sighed. “So, in other words, you’ve only been teaching me the basics before now.”

“Yes. I did not think you would live long enough to make any use of the advanced magic in the first place, not without acquiring lichdom first.”

“Cold bastard, you are,” he grunted, though did not seem overly annoyed.

We continued drilling him on the metaphysics of necromancy. I noted, with irritation, that several of his questions drifted towards the topic of the Depths, naturally inquiring about the source of concepts such as ‘life’ or ‘death’ magic, what caused these natural patterns of mana to form in the first place, and what produced souls.

Sadly, I could not actually answer these. In regards to the immaterial, I was forced to admit that Sakhent was the master and I the student. And he had been miserly with his knowledge for as long as I knew him. My advancing experiments were one avenue through which I might coax more of his secrets out, and as our alliance aged we both became more willing to share in general, but I doubted I would ever know even half of what he did and I currently did not.

After all, each trick he helped me acquire today was one more arrow in my quiver when our alliance inevitably crumbled, be it tomorrow, next week, a thousand years from now or ten thousand. I knew that as well as he did, and was no less reluctant to share as a result.

Unfortunately, Farah and I had other things to do besides just practicing magic. If I were able to sit uninterrupted and do nothing but that, I may well have been able to surpass the Gods in a mere million years or so. The fear of discovery, however, was always there.

“You will accompany me to a particular location,” I told Farah. “I can transport you with the same technique I used for Sascithius, ensuring that your magical power is not detected in transit. Once we are there, the ambient mana will be easily enough to hide you.”

Easily enough ten times over. A hundred times over. And for good reason.

Farah clearly had questions, but I waved them away and he soon, reluctantly but unhesitatingly, stepped into my pocket space as Sascithius melted back within it to be transported. I had only one stop to make on my way, sending a brief order for Sethira to meet us at the location too.

It was about time that all the liches of my new alliance met face to face for a much-delayed conversation on our next move.

Flying had never stopped being fun in my new body. The novelty had certainly worn off, and doing it for hours on end did get grating, but the sheer physical sensation of it was intense enough that I would have struggled to desensitise myself if I had tried.

Not that I would ever want to, of course. This was like swimming through a lake of pure life.

It took me some time to find precisely what I was looking for, but I had already pinpointed the approximate location. I needed a leyline. A powerful one, untapped and undrained. These were rare, but not astonishingly so. There were probably a good few hundred in North Poloira, and the land was not yet so abused as to have seen them all converted into mines.

Fortunately, my eyes were always up to the task of finding magic. I could pick out a needle enchanted with a toddler’s power in a haystack enchanted with a Grandmaster’s, locating something as vast and world-shaking as a full leyline in the middle of largely-barren landscape was as simple as tightening my vision to study the intersection of arcane forces and following the deepest crease in reality.

I touched down outside the site and looked around. As with most leylines, the actual crux of this one’s magic ran underground. It was outwardly an unremarkable place, though a practiced eye could easily have identified what it was by the somewhat unnatural protrusions of stone around it, like the magic had thrust the very land up from below.

I sent a few probing waves of magic out to ensure that the ground was stable first, then, once I was confident it would not collapse upon me, I ventured deeper. A cave-in was probably not much of a danger even to Isabel Vornholt at this point, if I truly focused I could muster the magical energy needed to raise hundreds of thousands of pounds off the ground at this point. With a little more effort, and a more efficient application, I could produce explosive forces that might fling ten times as much through the air.

That did not prove to be necessary though, and I was soon in an expansive cavern which, after a quick study, I confirmed would do nicely for my meeting place. Sethira would not have set off more than a few minutes behind me, but she would take quite a lot longer to find the leyline on account of lacking my advantage. I estimated that, having already spent some time studying the place, I had a good half hour to myself and spent it on magic.

Only when I heard Sethira’s approach—heard, not felt, because she could have magically thrown a cruise ship at me and not produced enough energy to be felt over the ambient mana here—did I halt my work, stand, dust myself off and open up my pocket space to assemble our fellow liches.

I was Lord Dread by the time Sascithiuus oozed out into the leyline chamber and Farah stepped free to follow him. This time I did not bother hiding my power, wielding it without restraint and knowing I could trust in my surroundings to obfuscate it from the distant gaze of the Gods. This time, both my apprentices were reminded first-hand of its extent.

Farah took an involuntary step back, while even Sascithius, who had grown used to my strength through the few centuries he spent learning under it, coiled in a way that I could best describe as ‘furtive’. Then a new wave of magic hit the air, and Sakhent announced himself before any comment could be made on my own.

“GOOD,” I said. “WE ARE ALL HERE.”