Evan moved fast. The blade was already out when Boniface, caught by Grease on open ground, was still struggling to push himself upright. Boniface was a mage — he had always been a mage — and whatever physical adaptations the lich transformation had brought, balance and close-quarters movement weren't among them. He had never trained for this.
Evan had. A month of nothing but the thrust, ten thousand repetitions a day, and when his mind went clear in the moment of action there was nothing left but the motion itself. The sword-cane's magical array activated on instinct as he lunged — he hadn't consciously drawn on his magic, only the motion had triggered it — and a blade-light four or five feet long blazed white with a trace of grey.
The point found Boniface's throat and pinned him to the ground before he'd finished getting up.
A lich's body resisted ordinary weapons. The flesh, such as it was, had a density that most blades couldn't breach. But this wasn't an ordinary blade, and Boniface's eyes flared green. Evan felt the warning a fraction before it arrived and pulled the sword free, stepping sideways into a short-range blink — he reappeared thirty yards away just as Boniface's body detonated. Where the lich had been, a face appeared in the dispersing smoke, cackling: "I'll be back, Nicholas Andrew. Boniface always comes back."
The face dissolved. Evan stood in the silence it left behind.
He had known this was the complication with liches. Destroy the body, and as long as the soul vessel survived, the lich returned. He turned the thought inward with something close to bitterness. Boniface would resurrect. He himself would not — no soul vessel, no second life. He had killed a lich and was somehow in a worse position than the lich he'd killed.
He had no idea where Boniface's soul vessel was hidden. Searching his memory of Nicholas Andrew's knowledge produced nothing useful — historically, liches who had been permanently destroyed were ones whose soul vessels were found by accident. There was no reliable method for locating one deliberately. Astromancy and divination came to mind, though without much conviction.
One small consolation: resurrection had a cost. Each time a lich returned, it lost something — a portion of memory, thin but real. Over many deaths the cost accumulated. So liches weren't truly immortal. They were long-lived in a way that made the distinction feel irrelevant most of the time, but it wasn't nothing.
He sheathed the blade. Reloaded the flintlock and tucked it back inside his coat. The fight had gone his way, but he was honest with himself: if it had come down to raw magical power, the outcome was genuinely uncertain. Boniface had comprehended elemental will and Evan hadn't. The advantages he'd used — terrain, preparation, positioning — had made the difference.
He looked at where Boniface had been. A small crater, the body entirely consumed in the detonation. Nearby, at some distance from the pit, lay a severed hand. On its skeletal middle finger sat an unassuming ring — a gemstone at its center, and he recognized the gemstone immediately. Space-stone. A storage ring.
He extended his hand and the severed hand drifted up to him. He slipped the ring free and probed it with his spiritual sense. The contents arranged themselves in his mind: materials, scrolls, and several objects he hadn't expected — crystals of varying sizes and colors, multifaceted, some red, some green-blue, each one dense with elemental energy. He'd never seen them in person before. Magic cores.
Wind-element and fire-element, both. No dark-element cores — Boniface had presumably used those up. The magic core was what remained when a magical beast of sufficient development was killed and a mage applied Core-seal before the internal elements dispersed. Without Core-seal applied quickly enough, the energy simply scattered and nothing remained.
Beyond the cores: some gold coin, not much. And one object that caught his attention — a jade pendant of some kind. Unusual, because jade wasn't particularly valued in this world. No books, which was what he'd most wanted — something to tell him more about Boniface's magical practice. He was out of luck there.
He looked at the magic cores for a moment, feeling that something in the back of his mind was trying to surface. It didn't come. He shook his head and let it go.
He turned and looked at the castle one last time. Then he faced the Liya Demon Forest and walked into it without looking back.
He was gone for over a month before the next group of Inquisitors arrived at the castle. The Hell's Projection was still active, but without anyone sustaining it the constructs within had lost cohesion, and the group pushed through without real difficulty. They searched the castle from end to end, found no one, and burned it to the ground. In the Holy Inquisition's records, the entry for the heretic lich Nicholas Andrew moved from position ninety-two to position seventy-six. Notices went out to Creationist churches across the region.
Evan moved slowly through the Liya Demon Forest. For most travelers, entering it was tantamount to dying. For Evan, as long as he stayed out of its deepest reaches, the danger was manageable. The magical beasts didn't reason or negotiate — cross into their territory and they attacked without hesitation — but each time, Evan came out ahead. By the end of the month he had accumulated more than twenty magic cores; the rest of his kills had either lacked cores entirely or he'd been too slow with Core-seal and the elements had already dispersed.
The unexpected development was his vision. He had gained something he privately called infrared sight — the ability to perceive heat as shape, to see the world in the dark as a landscape of temperature differences. Nicholas Andrew's memory mentioned something like it, but offered no explanation for its origin. Evan had his own theory, rooted in what he remembered from secondary school physics: temperature was molecular motion, and what he was perceiving was the energy of that motion translated into something his eyes could use. He thought about his old physics teacher, who had explained this with great self-satisfaction in a classroom Evan had occupied during one of his better stretches of health. The memory felt impossibly distant now. Almost like something that had happened to someone else.
The infrared sight made the nights significantly easier to navigate. But it also set him thinking again about the nature of this world. The physical laws seemed to be the same as Earth's — gravity, heat, motion, light. The only departure was magic. Which raised a question he kept returning to: were the magical elements actually fundamental, or were they expressions of something simpler underneath? The classification felt too neat, too intuitive — like the ancient Chinese five phases, a useful organizing principle that didn't necessarily describe underlying reality. He suspected there was something deeper. He had no way to reach it yet.
He had just killed a two-pronged demon stag — no magic core, the rest of the herd spooked and gone — and was sitting by his fire with the carcass roasting on a spit. As a lich he had no need for food, and no sense of taste. But he had developed a habit anyway: he liked the sensation of hot food going down, and his sense of smell had grown unusually acute. The fat dripping into the fire, the smell of the meat — these things registered, even if flavor didn't. Strange, for a lich. Strange for a lot of reasons. He had stopped trying to explain it.
He was close to the forest's edge now. Another day or two and he would be out of the Liya Demon Forest and into the territory held by Count Laine.
He was still thinking about this when horses moved in the trees.
"My lord, there's a fire ahead. Someone's there. Shall we go over?"
A woman's voice, low and practical.
"Yes. Let's go, Becky." A young man.
"My lord, be careful. Anyone who can survive in the Liya Demon Forest is not weak. Let me go ahead first." A heavier voice, male.
"Mm." Noncommittal.
Evan didn't stand, but his attention sharpened. It was the end of summer, nearly autumn, still warm enough for insects — though insects had no interest in a lich. He watched a broad-shouldered man with a full beard push through the undergrowth toward him. No armor, but the way he moved said knight. Low-ranked knight, by the feel of it.
The knight hierarchy ran from Squire Knight at the bottom through Low-rank Knight, Knight, Great Knight, and Epic Knight. Below the Knight tier, rank was increasingly tied to social position rather than pure ability. This bearded man, judged on ability alone, was Low-rank — skilled, but without any distinctive quality beyond that.
He stopped in front of Evan and took in the black robe, the deep cowl, and frowned slightly before composing himself and offering a proper knight's salute. "Sir, I am Raymond, knight in service to Baron Edmund. My lord is hunting, and the hour has grown late. We saw your fire and hoped we might make camp nearby, if that doesn't disturb you."
"Not at all. I'm alone out here. Some company is welcome." Evan meant it. He had questions about the outside world that he needed answered.
"Ilay — you and the others attend to his lordship. Fetch — let's make camp."
The group set to work efficiently, fire going up, camp taking shape. The young lord and a maidservant came over to Evan's fire. He was young, seventeen or eighteen, with a steady, grounded way of moving and callused fingers — knight's training, started early. His actual level was hard to judge; as a baron's son his social standing didn't track directly with his ability. When Evan's attention shifted to the maidservant, he felt a trace of magical resonance. She was a Magic Apprentice. That alone said something about Baron Edmund.
"Knight Franklin, at your service." The young lord smiled and dipped his head slightly. "May I ask your name, sir?"