Author's Note: This story was written for a contest hosted by the Quill and Magic group on X.  The challenge was to write a story of 1500-2500 words based on the hook: "Life of a Lich." 

 

My original cut was over 3500 words, and had to be cut down significantly for entry.  The cut down version came in at a close 2nd place.

 

This is the original, uncut version:

***

               Wake up. 

               Wake up, it is time for war.

               He was suddenly aware again.  Vonn never awoke groggy; only those with living bodies had such weaknesses.

               “What do you need?” he thought into the void he floated in.

               His answer came as he was Pulled.  His consciousness was sucked out of the blissful, empty existence of the Weave and forced into a new shell, like old clothes being roughly shoved into a sack.  It was a form of pain the living could never experience, having your entire world collapsed like that.  It had also become the normal start of his day.

               All of a sudden he had hands again, and eyes to see them.  He flexed his fingers, seeing them enclosed in leather gloves.  From the feel of metal over his face, he guessed he was masked.  His masters were always so squeamish about seeing a corpse moving around on its own.

               He was in the war room of the castle.  He allowed himself a moment to look around, seeing the extra wear on the stones since he’d last been here.  One familiar stone in the wall across the room still looked loose.  The flag over the large central table was different, a sporting a combination of two crests he half-remembered.  Perhaps the young lord had gotten married?

               An impatient tapping drew him back to the moment.  He looked to see a balding man tapping his staff on the ground for attention.  Vonn looked at him pensively, thinking he remembered the face, but much younger, and with more hair.  How long had it been this time?  At least he recalled the man’s name.

               “Janos,” Vonn said through a desiccated throat that turned the simple question into a hiss.  “You’ve gotten old.”

               “Reminiscing can wait,” Janos snapped.  “We are under attack.  Look.”

               Janos waved his hands in an intricate pattern, manipulating the enchantment on the table.  The wood glowed, the surface melting over to an open valley nestled between harsh, jagged mountain peaks.  Dozens of miniature playing pieces scattered over the table moved of their own accord, skidding over the illusory terrain to snap to attention at various places.  Vonn took it all in with a thoughtful rumbling from his hollow chest.

               “Who do we face?” Vonn asked.

               “Enemies.  That is all you need to know,” Janos curtly answered.

               “They attacked this morning, coming from the sea,” a new voice said.  Vonn turned his head to look at a young woman in robes across the table.  “There was no call for treaty, no messenger, just an attack…”

               “Silence, Elina,” Janos interrupted her.  “Our ally does not need to know that.  He is here to do a job, as always.”

               “As always,” Vonn grumbled.  His masters were always so paranoid about what they told him.  Surely Janos could understand the value in knowing who the enemy was.  It could tell of their tactics, their conditioning, what targets they would prioritize.  But no, Vonn was here to face ‘the enemy,’ and that was apparently all he needed to know.

               “The Great Gate has been overrun,” Vonn commented, pointing to a wall blocking off a pass between two of the largest peaks, where a great many pieces were arrayed.

               “Not yet!  The knights are holding fast!” Elina protested.

               Vonn groaned.  Apprentices, always sure they knew how things worked.  “If I have been summoned, it is because you need magic,” he explained.  “Any spell I can work which can reach the Great Gate will take time to cast.  And I will need to cast several such spells, as I assume my presence here means the invaders have a wizard of their own,” he said, half a question as he glanced at Janos.  The balding man clenched his jaw, but nodded.  Vonn noted the man’s shallow, nervous breaths.

               “Rest assured by the time anyone in this room has done anything significant, the forces I see will have overrun the Gate.  Our focus must then be on the next stage,” Vonn finished.

               Elina paled at his words.  “But…our knights are there…”

               “Enough, Vonn is right,” Janos warned.  “Elina, you will manage our defenses here.  I shall prepare our counterattack.  Vonn, you are to neutralize their wizard as soon as you can.”

               Elina’s counterargument died on her lips under Janos’ sharp stare.  She took a breath and her eyes rolled up in her head as she linked herself to the Weave, touching the enchantments folded into the castle’s walls.

               Janos stepped back from the table and began the opening chants of a spell.  Vonn mentally shrugged and concentrated, casting his consciousness into the Weave himself.  Before his eyes, the imitation battlefield came to life, the wooden pieces breaking into dozens of men in armor, facing against gray-skinned, monstrous creatures.  There were hundreds, no, thousands of the twisted beasts…

               He caught himself.  The enemy wizard had skill, it seemed.  This would take more effort.  He concentrated harder, searching until he found a suitable shell.

               On top of the Great Gate, a soldier lying dead with an arrow through his throat twitched, then got up.  Vonn moved his temporary body gingerly, getting a feel for it.  Freshly dead corpses always moved more smoothly, the muscles having not yet succumbed to rigor mortis.  He looked at the crossbow in his hands and the armor over his body, admiring the workmanship.  The arbalists and armorers had come a long way since he’d last seen the sun.

               He went to the edge of the rampart, looking down to see the great doors of the Gate had been split asunder by the gray-skinned monstrosities, which were now pouring through in a crazed horde.  Men wearing armor similar to his were fighting and, for the most part, dying as they were overwhelmed.  He narrowed his eyes, seeing reinforcements moving up from the castle to meet the invaders.  Time to get to work, then.

               He focused himself, touching the Weave and feeling it straining as the enemy wizard manipulated reality.  Vonn carefully felt the push and pull of the magic, getting a feel for what was happening.  Centuries of experience made it easy – magic could create monsters from nothing, yes, but that took time and energy.  A smart wizard knew that for comparatively little effort you could make your opponents think they were fighting against horrible monsters and impossible odds.

               With a few expert manipulations of his own, Vonn began to undo the illusions.  The monstrous army began to waver, then dissolve, two-thirds of its number fading away to shadows.  Impressive you could glamour that many, he thought to the enemy wizard.  His own reinforcements cheered at the sight of so many of their enemy evaporating, and formed ranks to meet the remaining attackers.

               Vonn turned at the sound of footsteps, but too late to dodge.  A bodkin arrow punched right through his breastplate and into his chest, with enough force to make him stumble.  Another one followed shortly, spearing him through the leg.  He shot an annoyed look at his attackers, a pair of the gray mutants, holding wicked bows made of black wood.  They had come up a staircase from below, apparently part of a rear guard meant to clear out any survivors of the overrun Gate.

               Vonn grinned with anticipation as he snapped off the arrows.  There was still some blood from the wounds, the corpse was so fresh.  But there was no pain, and his muscles still worked just fine.  It had been a while since he’d had to engage hand-to-hand.

               There was a sword lying nearby; he grabbed it and ran towards the pair of beasts, whose eyes widened in surprise that the man they’d just shot twice was not only still standing, but moving to attack.  They’re not truly beasts, then, Vonn thought.

               They overcame their surprise and quickly drew long knives from their belts.  Vonn was upon them a heartbeat later, dodging back and forth, slipping between their clumsy strikes and prodding them with his sword.  His weapon was a bit heavier than he was used to – had the blacksmiths changed the type of steel they used?  It made his movements slower than he’d have liked, but his opponents were relying on their strength and numbers instead of skill.  After a few moments he’d slipped inside one’s guard and buried his sword in up to the hilt.  The creature’s eyes bugged out and it collapsed, bringing his sword with it as it fell. 

               The other creature grabbed him at that point, roaring its defiance as it smashed his head against the stone ramparts.  The knife stabbed again and again, trying to hammer through his armor with raw force.  Vonn groaned in frustration.  When had finesse and skill in a soldier fallen by the wayside, to be replaced with simple rage and savagery?

               He grabbed at the creature’s face, seemingly in an effort to push it back, but instead he reached inwardly, finding the thing’s presence in the Weave.  Even as the thing continued to stab him, he pulled on the Weave strands around it, and the illusion fractured: the towering creature was replaced by an unwashed, haggard-looking man in furs, his face a rictus of savage glee as his knife finally found a seam in Vonn’s armor and plunged into his guts.

               “Well that won’t do, will it?” Vonn asked.  He focused, using his free hand to work through a series of gestures while the man savaged his body.  After ten agonizingly long seconds, the spell was ready, and Vonn pulled on the Weave. 

               The man shot back from him, slapped by a paranormal force.  With a wave Vonn cast a follow-up spell, and the man started screaming, writhing around as he saw his skin burst into flames. 

               Vonn stood up and casually strode over to the man desperately trying to put out the fire.  With a snap of his fingers the flames vanished, leaving him unburned.  Vonn knelt down next to him.

               “You’re going to tell me who you work for,” he said calmly.  “And whose kingdom this is.  Or you’re going to burn again.  And this time, it’ll be real.”  Janos hadn’t had time to catch him up on world events, maybe a more ground-level view would help.

               The man babbled something at him in a language he half-understood; a new dialect of the Northmen, perhaps.  Vonn groaned and began to work a translation spell, but was interrupted as he was Pulled again.  Agony ripped through him as his consciousness was forcibly pulled out of his perforated shell, leaving it to collapse lifeless next to the shocked man on the rampart.

               His awareness was rammed back into the desiccated, masked shell back in the war room, so roughly it left Vonn disoriented for a moment.

               “I wish you wouldn’t do that,” he muttered.

               “We are in the middle of an invasion!” Janos chided.  “I do not need one more soldier on the field, I need a weapon that will turn the tide!”

               “I was gathering information you did not bother to give me,” Vonn replied, straining.

               He saw Janos’s fingers twitch, and the pain came again, more severe this time.  Somewhere in the castle, hidden under powerful obscuring spells, was the gem that held Vonn’s life force.  Next to it, another apprentice was standing at the ready, receiving Janos’ commands to work the enchantment on the gem that would Pull Vonn, or – as now – punish him.

               Vonn was driven to his knees, his whole world seeming to fracture.  He wondered if the apprentice hadn’t even bothered with the enchantment and had just hit the gem with a hammer instead.

               “I have told you what you needed to know,” Janos warned.  “Now get to work.”

               “Yes…master…” Vonn breathed.  Still, he felt the subtle burning feeling that was the sign of someone working powerful magic.  Janos had paused his spell so he could pull on Vonn’s leash, but even with the spell half-done Vonn felt like he was standing too close to a raging bonfire, with Janos right at its center.  Vonn could see the spell would be a powerful one, which would take several more minutes to finish.

               He stood, glancing at Elina who was still in a trance, though sweat was breaking out on her forehead from the stress, likely fighting off the first attacks on the castle walls.  Meanwhile, Janos was resuming his chant, adding more power and complexity to his spell.

               Vonn allowed himself a moment to consider what he knew.  The enemy was brutes, likely starving gangs and wildmen.  It spoke much of his opponent’s charisma to have been able to pull so many under one banner, but they were untrained and disorganized.  They could not be trusted to manage any kind of coordinated assault on their own.  And to simply attack, with no warning ahead of time…his opponent was talented, but as unrefined as his troops.  Either from pride, greed, or simple anger against some insult Vonn was unaware of, the enemy wizard would not be content to sit back and work his spells from a distance.  He would want to be at the front, where he could control the flow of his soldiers, and watch with his own eyes as they chewed through their prey.

               He looked at the table, where the pieces had been rearranged to show the enemy vanguard coming towards the castle, with outriders already striking at the guards on the walls with hit-and-run attacks, softening them up for the big blow that was coming with the main force.

               The vanguard had a simplistic, but solid formation, with the strongest forces clustered in the center behind the front lines.  An elite guard, ready to strike once the pawns at the front had worn through the defenders.  That knot of powerful soldiers also marked itself out as protecting something important, even more obvious as fresh phantom troops were appearing all through the ranks.

               Vonn squared his shoulders and began his casting.  He could not project himself to a new shell for this; with so many troops standing guard around the wizard, any body he took would be hewn apart before he could do anything.  He had to handle this from a distance.

               In his mind’s eye, he could sense the battle raging down below.  He felt the faceless rage and fear of the soldiers on both sides, merging into hopeless complex blobs of emotion.  Attacking the soldiers would take too much effort, especially with the enemy wizard so close.  He had to strike directly at the heart of the problem.  And as he felt the movement of the Weave, he found his target.

               The wizard was a bright light in the center of the enemy formation, chanting his way through one spell after another.  Vonn wasted no time, concentrating on a spell and sending a lance of energy towards the man. 

               The wizard blocked it with a wave of his hand; he was sensing Janos’s building spell as well, and was quickly setting up defenses.  Now though, as he sensed he was being targeted directly, he turned his attention on his attacker.

               Vonn quickly put up his own defenses as the wizard struck at him, sending energies through the Weave.  To someone watching, it would have seemed Vonn and the wizard were simply staring at each other, when in fact they were expending enormous energy targeting each others’ very essence, each trying to find the other’s life force and snuff it out.  Vonn parried each attack with easy skill, counterattacking long enough to keep his opponent on his guard while he got a feel for the wizard.  His opponent’s life force was hidden behind several carefully constructed barriers, strong but crudely erected.  Meanwhile, the other wizard’s strikes were getting steadily more frantic as he realized Vonn’s attack was distracting him from completing his defenses against Janos’s spell.  Furthermore, Vonn imagined the man was having trouble finding his own life force.

               It was supposed to have been a master stroke, pulling his own life out and overcoming his mortal weaknesses.  In a way, it had worked.  Now if only he had not gotten careless and let a human kingdom find his life and lock it away like they had.

               He saw his opening as the wizard unleashed a powerful strike, but missed.  The spell took such energy that the wizard’s defenses weakened.  Vonn focused his energy and cast a lance of pure energy through the Weave, smashing through what was left of the barriers and spearing the wizard’s life.  He felt the man scream through the Weave, and then nothing.

               “Janos, if you are going to do something, now is the time,” Vonn warned.

               Janos immediately complied, finishing his chant with a deafening crescendo.  Overhead, the sky darkened and dozens of lightning bolts arced down.  With the enemy wizard removed, there was no way for the attacking army to counter or defend against the force.  The lightning danced through the attackers’ ranks, sending men flying by the hundreds.  The world around the castle seemed to explode into blinding light.

               In the moments afterwards, the war room felt quiet and dark, the enchantments fueling it having been depleted by the powerful spell.  Vonn could hear Janos fall to his knees, gasping for breath.  Sensing an empty shell, Vonn took advantage of Janos’ distraction and cast himself into it.

               He felt his lungs draw breath, and felt lingering body warmth.  A fresh corpse then.  He looked down at his hands to see them slight and small, with the taut skin of youth.  As he saw the familiar outline of the war room and his own former shell standing stationary at the table, he winced internally.  The poor apprentice; charged with working the castle’s enchantments, she would have been close enough that the enemy wizard would have sensed her.  Perhaps the man’s last strike hadn’t missed its target after all.

               What’s happening?

               Vonn was momentarily confused by the voice in his head. 

               Who are you?  What are you doing to me?  The voice asked.

               Ah.  Perhaps the girl was not as wet-behind-the-ears as he’d suspected, and had set up defenses of her own.  Either that or the castle’s own enchantments had softened the blow to the point that instead of eradicating her from existence, it had simply stopped her heart.

               Be at ease, this will not last long, he thought at her.  He moved the girl’s hands, quickly moving through a spell.  Janos’s spell had weakened the enchantments over the whole castle.  If he worked fast…

               There.  He could sense the bright spark of his life force, like a sunrise seen through a thick curtain.  He quickly took note of it, and its place in the Weave.

               “Nicely done,” Janos said breathlessly.  “You performed adequately, Vonn.”

               Vonn cursed, knowing he did not have much time.  He worked his fingers again, finding the threads of a long-dormant spell and adding onto it, continuing a casting left dormant decades ago.

               “What…what is this?” Janos asked breathlessly, seeing the empty husk where Vonn had been.  “Where have you…” he began to ask, as he turned suspiciously towards Elina.

               Stop it!  Elina’s voice shouted in his head.  This isn’t what you’re supposed to do!

               I do what I wish to do, Vonn thought back at her.  Be quiet, and maybe you will learn something.

               “YOU!” Janos shouted accusingly.  “What are you trying!”

               Vonn responded with a spell that set off a bright flash of light.  Janos shielded his eyes and countered the spell with a few quick words, but it was enough of a distraction.  Vonn surreptitiously ended his manipulation of the other, older spell.

               Janos twitched his fingers, signaling the apprentice in the other room.  Vonn felt himself being Pulled again.  It wasn’t as abrupt this time; the enchantments were still recovering.  But he was still inexorably being pulled away from his shell.

               It hurts!  Elina’s voice shouted.  Get out get out get OUT!

               Despite himself, Vonn felt a pang of sympathy for the girl.  She was fighting so hard to hang onto her ebbing life force, yet without his presence she wouldn’t be able to move.  When he was pulled out of her, she would go limp, and be forced to lie there, feeling herself drain away.  Janos, coarse as he was, probably wouldn’t even check to see if she had any spark left to her.

               He resisted the Pull, concentrating on one last spell.  A token of appreciation for my talented host, he thought, and touched his – Elina’s – chest.  A wave of energy burst into his shell, and Vonn felt a wave of heat and tingling nerves as his heart beat again.  And with that, the last of his willpower was expended, and he was Pulled free.

               He did not get moved into a shell again; that was unsurprising.  He was back in the dark void of bodiless awareness he knew was his life gem. 

               This insubordination will not be tolerated!  Janos’s voice chided him in his mind.  Return to your unliving oblivion, lich!  You will know your place.

               Vonn felt his mind shutting down under the force of the magics being imposed on him.  Another day was over, ending as they always did for him since being taken prisoner.  But he still felt some satisfaction at his plight; he’d had a chance to add onto his spell.  The spell he’d been casting for decades, now.  A little more each time he was used, a little more each time his masters turned their backs on him for a minute. 

               Now, the spell knew where to find his life force.  When the spell was done, he would split the castle asunder.  The layers of enchantments holding him prisoner and subject to men like Janos would be over, and he would be free to pursue whatever life he wanted.  A clever master have put together what he was doing, but so much time passed between his days that it was almost never the same master twice. 

               Perhaps saving Elina had been a mistake, a momentary flicker of his old human weakness.  The girl might have gotten some inkling of what he’d been doing…then again, she had been so scared, caught between life and death, odds were she wouldn’t have figured anything out.  He thought, humorously, that perhaps next time it would be Elina holding his leash.  He wondered if the girl would be ready to handle him then.

               We will have to see, he thought with a bodiless smile as his consciousness faded away.