Only now did Evan fully grasp the situation. He was a Lich — but an incomplete one. Physically he carried the form: no sensation in the flesh, no pain, only the strange orientation of a soul observing the world from within a body it didn't entirely feel as its own. He had accepted that much. Becoming a Lich was supposed to come with a price, and this had been his choice.
But a Lich without a Soul Vessel was something else entirely.
He knelt and gathered the broken pieces — the Mithril and Obsidian had lost their power, the magical arrays drawn across them shattered beyond recovery. Nicolai Ashton's soul had already gone on to meet whatever Death God Hedi actually was.
He stood, made a gesture, spoke a fireball incantation. Nothing happened. The bracers weren't on yet — this wasn't a death mage's spell but an ordinary fire-element one, and that was precisely the point: a Lich, unlike an ordinary death mage, couldn't draw on any element but darkness. Other mages, whatever their primary school, could manage at least a basic fireball. Even a water mage could produce a weak one through sheer incantation. A Lich could not.
He tried every common spell he could recall. All of them failed.
Then: "Death claims all things — Bone Cage Spell!"
Black fog rose. White bones materialized before him, layer over layer, forming a cage. He dismissed it.
That, at least, worked.
He was a Lich in full. Body, magical nature, all of it confirmed. But the one thing that defined a Lich — its root, its guarantee — was gone. If someone destroyed this body, he was simply gone. And there was another problem he hadn't yet allowed himself to think through: how long did this body have? Ashton had burned through its remaining vitality to fuel the transformation ritual. The reserves that should have sustained him were already spent.
Evan sat down on the floor in the middle of the night and let himself absorb the reality of it.
He didn't know, sitting there, that in the same moment Ashton had died, the servants elsewhere in the castle had felt something pass through them like a hook pulled from the chest — each one folding inward with cold sweat, trying not to cry out, constrained by the same fear that had kept them constrained for years. The magical slave contracts signed under Ashton's power had suddenly gone silent. The sensation of being owned had simply stopped.
They lay still and didn't dare believe it. One of them eventually tested it — let himself think an unkind thought about Nicolai Ashton — and nothing happened. He lay in the dark and felt, for the first time in years, the strange lightness of being free. He didn't know yet what it meant. He didn't know Ashton was dead, because by rights, the death of a master under that type of contract should have killed them all.
In another room, Alan Walshe was not asleep. He was Ashton's apprentice, and he had known the ritual was happening, and he had spent the night calculating. He was a fourth-level death mage — just across the threshold into Mage rank — and Ashton had never noticed, assuming he was still a Magic Apprentice. He had watched Ashton go mad with grief over Florine and drive himself into open war with the Prime Church, and he had concluded early on that he wanted no part of what came next.
On the West Tyrone Continent, the Prime Church was willing to accept mages of any school who professed loyalty, including death mages — they called them the strayed lambs, wanderers who had not yet found their way home. But a Lich was different. A Lich challenged the fundamental law that all human life belonged to the Prime Lord. A Lich was a standard heretic with no exceptions. Alan Walshe had no intention of dying on account of someone else's theological crimes.
He had been lying there making his decision while the ritual completed in the next room.
Meanwhile, Evan pulled his thoughts into order. He was eighteen years old, with the life experience that implied — and with Ashton's memories, which were someone else's life, not his own, and couldn't easily become it. But years in a hospital bed had made him stubborn in ways he hadn't always recognized, and he was not going to lie here and wait. He had a body, and magic, and he had two months.
He decided before morning: he wasn't leaving without making the Inquisition regret sending anyone. He was a person from Earth, with no particular reverence for religious institutions and none of the instilled awe that made the continent's inhabitants tread carefully around the Prime Church. He had no chivalric code to observe. He had no rules he was committed to following.
He went to the castle's storeroom and found what he was looking for immediately: a bronze cannon. Ashton had kept it as a collector's item. The world was in something like a late medieval period; cannon and firearms were in military use, though their accuracy left much to be desired. Most mages ignored such things in favor of spells. Evan's instincts ran in a different direction. He found the powder, the grapeshot, and a single-shot flintlock pistol, and permitted himself a thin smile.
He also found a sword-cane: roughly a meter long, with a strange beast's head — a lizard-like creature — carved at one end, which at first glance looked like a mage's staff. From Ashton's memory he knew what it actually was. He drew the blade: a rapier, cast from triple-refined steel, with Mithril-drawn magical arrays along the length. A magical blade.
He pushed a small amount of power into it. Grey-white light rose from the steel.
A thought followed immediately: a disguise. Not a Lich, not a death mage. A wandering adventurer. A swordsman, perhaps, or a general mage. He couldn't display death magic openly, but he also couldn't cast anything else — unless he had a workaround.
He went back to the alchemy laboratory, took magical beast hides, and worked through the night. By morning he had produced two bracers, the arrays drawn in beast blood and Mithril on the inside, with a concealing layer over them to hide the work. When he put them on and spoke a fireball incantation, a fireball appeared — roughly the strength of a fifth- or sixth-level mage. He tested several other common spells. They worked.
His identity was solved.