Chapter 83: Devoured Whole

Chapter 83: Devoured Whole

It had taken the Lich more than a decade of planning before the first stone for this complicated building had been laid. Hundreds of souls had labored on the subject until they ceased to be, though. Dozens of bright men and women had set themselves to the impossible task of building this singular work of art, and all of them had perished after moving it only a few steps forward because of the dozens of contradictory goals it had to accomplish.

It had to be full of darkness but appear untainted. It had to be a perfect trap yet somehow appear inviting. Every part of it had been designed to appear holy, but even the most frivolous decorations had always had an ulterior motive in mind. It wasn’t even built to be a trap primarily.

That was only ever the first step of the plan. It was also to be the arena where it fought the true might of the God of light and the place of its birth, where it would It had originally intended to build the whole thing in secret and spring it upon the world as a fully formed temple of Siddrim, but the tainted priest had made a more public plan possible.

The Lich had only avoided killing him initially to distract the templars that fought beside him, but he’d been glad that he’d let Verdenin live after he’d taken a peek into his grasping, greedy little mind on his death bed. Men that lusted for power were the easiest of all to control, and the Lich had filled his dreams with not only the grandeur of this place but the respect and esteem he would get for being the one to imagine it.

It was true that his name would live throughout history after this, though perhaps not the way that he’d originally intended. Even now, the one-arm priest was down in the under temple praying for his God to see the truth along with a few dozen of his fellow broken worshipers. The Lich had not yet decided if they would live, but for now, their tainted and discordant prayers were one more weapon in his arsenal that he would need come sunrise.

The fight between his inanely lethal body and the wounded avatar would not last all night after all. Indeed, the battle was already more than halfway over as soon as the first blow had been struck. The champion of light was still swinging its sword, of course, but blindly because the Lich had already used the slender shard of darkness that it had worked past the man’s armor to obscure the link between the mortal and the divine.

This disconnect made conversation all but impossible just now, of course. Not that the Lich had much to say to the Lord of Light. Its initial taunts had only been to keep the man’s interest so he would not immediately try to flee. Now that the two of them were stuck together, conversations could wait until it had burrowed deep inside the other man’s mind.

That, more than anything else, would be Siddrim’s undoing. It wasn’t that he’d picked a fight in a place where the Lich’s power was absolute, though he had. It wasn’t even that he’d been completely blindsided to find an enemy where none existed. His real mistake was that in his rush to fight that newfound enemy, he’d chosen a deeply flawed vessel, and you could hardly build a bastion of light on a foundation of shadows.

Todd had been every bit as important to its plan as this formidable structure. The darkness had found several boys in the region with enough of a connection to magic that the templars might have taken an interest in them, but they’d only ever found Todd. It had tormented all of its candidates, of course. As suitable as they might be to join the light, they were useless to the dark without at least a little blood on their hands.

Even now, Todd was too busy struggling with the souls of the boys he’d killed so many years ago to keep fighting with him in the here and now. That was why he was bleeding both blood and light from half a dozen places now. This chapter was first shared on the Ñøv€lß1n platform.

The Lich bore a few wounds, too, of course, but this body was just another tool, and the sooner it could return to the heart of the labyrinth for the final battle, the better. Its mithril shell had not been breached, though it was dented in half a dozen places now. That wasn’t a problem, and neither was the severed arm. Not really. It had served its purpose. The real issue was that it had already used up more than half of the shadows it had loaded this body with.

“That’s not true!” Todd yelled, “I would never do what you wanted!”

The Lich ignored him for a moment as he mentally ordered his pet fire godling to begin channeling fire into all the ruined gold up there. It was a slow process, but it needed to come pouring down this shaft to complete the final circle.

“You fed on my land and drank of my waters,” the Lich countered. “I never forced you to do a single thing, and you still did everything I needed you to do. I showed you horrors, and you ran straight to your God for help as I desired. Now I only have one task left for you. To die, as painfully as possible.”

“If you’re going to kill me, then just do it now and get it over with!” Todd screamed from fear as much as bravery. He wouldn’t snivel, even at the end, but then the Lich had already known that.

As the altar slowly sank into the ground, the Lich looked up and saw the first of the gold just starting to trickle down the shaft. Though it had been impossible to notice the pattern in the grooves of the dark stone up until now, they were one of the most critical parts of the whole design.

The pit the altar descended into was only forty feet deep because that was the amount of space that had been required to inscribe the spell. It contained the seven secret names of Siddrim as well as all of the more common ones, and though it suspected that none of them were the Lord of Light’s true name, they would be enough to make the circle nigh unbreakable.

As it descended, so did the molten gold. It drizzled smoothly through the grooves hidden in the rock face and slowly but surely made its way down. They followed the complex paths that were laid out for them, and as the altar finally reached the bottom of the pit, they were nearly halfway down their course.

When they were complete, the winding circle of binding would be one of the most complex works of applied archaeology to ever have been built according to the voices in its library. No one, not even a god, would be able to see it coming.

“Why rush?” the Lich asked. “We have all night to make you suffer and marinate you in darkness. When the sun next rises, I will unveil you to the light and the force the tainted shard of the divine that you carry back into your God at my leisure. It will be an attack that will be utterly impossible for him to escape and just as fatal as sewing a gangrenous limb back onto the body of an otherwise healthy patient.”

Todd’s eyes widened in horror, though the Lich did not linger to hear what he would say next. It didn’t matter. Nothing did until the next phase of the battle was truly joined. As the Lich’s body left the pit and began the long walk back to the foundry with its severed arm in its remaining left hand so that it could be repaired, the Lich’s soul fled back to his throne room and to Albrecht’s moldering, mummified body. At the same moment, the stone door slid down from above and slammed shut.

The Lich would have liked to stay to watch the shadows pour into the pit to properly marinate its victim, but there was nowhere else it would rather recuperate until the time of the final battle was at hand. The Lich wouldn’t let him drown in that darkness, of course, but it doubted very much that he would still be sane when the sun rose above the horizon once more in ten hours.