He decided against it. He'd just completed the transformation; it would take time to stabilize. And Ashton was fighting on his home ground, in a castle he'd had weeks to prepare. Walking in blind was a loss waiting to happen.
Besides, he had a problem. He was a Lich now — which made him a heretic in the eyes of the Prime Church, with no room for negotiation. The Inquisition would be after Ashton too. The sensible play was to lie low and wait. If the Inquisition killed Ashton, he could slip into the castle afterward and look for the Soul Vessel. If Ashton survived, he could reconsider then.
What Boniface didn't know was that Evan had no Soul Vessel. He assumed Evan was the same as himself, and planned accordingly.
Inside the Hell's Projection's perimeter, Evan was still training.
He was close — he could feel the threshold of the Will Realm just ahead of him, a wall rather than a distance — but a Lich could only work with the dark element, and the dark element's will wasn't yielding to him. He didn't have Boniface's advantage: Boniface had touched the edge of elemental will before the transformation, and that foundation had carried over. Ashton hadn't, and neither had Evan.
The problem, as Evan understood it, was that he didn't believe.
He'd been educated in a tradition that treated elements as metaphors or ancient classification systems, not as genuine properties of the world. Light, wind, fire, water, earth, lightning, dark — he kept thinking of the Chinese five-element theory, which modern science had reframed as an early intuitive materialism rather than a description of physical reality. Was this world different? Were these actual elements? Or were they categories this world's inhabitants had invented, the same way the ancients had invented theirs?
The question mattered because understanding the will of an element required accepting its reality on some level, and Evan couldn't quite get there.
He was still turning this over when the Inquisition arrived.
Alan's defection had shaved a month off his timeline. He'd expected two months of preparation; he got one. But the month hadn't been wasted: his spells were faster and more accurate than they'd been when he started, his sword-thrust had become reflex, and the Hell's Projection's aura added a layer to his combat environment that actively benefited him.
On the day they came, he was practicing — thrust, recover, evaluate, repeat — when something from one of the hell-bats reached him. Seven people approaching. One of them carried a familiar resonance, though he couldn't place it from the bat's limited sensory report.
Inquisitor-General Yaltu led six men, one of whom was Alan. Alan hadn't wanted to come. He'd defected to the Church, but he was barely a Mage, and facing his former master wasn't something he'd bargained for. He felt guilty enough that it showed in his posture, though he'd kept his face blank through every mile of the journey. Yaltu said nothing about it and thought less of him for it. The others didn't bother hiding their contempt.
Alan swallowed his anger and smiled at people who looked through him.
They stopped at the Hell's Projection's edge. Even through the grey murk, the castle was visible as a darker shape inside the darkness.
"Hell's Projection," said Kencelli — the oldest of the group. "This will take some work."
"I underestimated him." Yaltu's voice was cold. "Three months of saturation. The effects will linger for decades. Weapons ready. I should have requested a Dragon Knight." He was speaking practically: a Dragon Knight — a rider bonded with their dragon, attacking from the air — was one of the continent's few reliable counters to a fortified Lich's position.
They checked their weapons. Yaltu carried twin short spears, rune-wrapped, glowing faintly — genuine magical weapons. Kencelli had a long spear with holy light woven through it. The others carried less: Aubrey a great sword with a thin blessing, Bitzel shield and short sword both blessed, Bogo a chain mace, Boll a long knife. Alan had only his staff.
They moved in single file into the projection, Alan in the middle. The death-aura hit them immediately, a constant pressure against everything alive. They activated the blessings on their armor — under their outer robes they all wore lightweight chain, a compromise between protection and mobility — and thin halos of holy light pushed the worst of it back. Only Alan stood unaffected. He was a death mage, and the projection recognized him as kin.
The hell-bats watched them from the trees with half-open eyes and didn't attack.
Then the skeletons came — a formation, empty eye sockets burning green, bone knives ready. The group formed up instantly. Yaltu began to chant. A ring of holy light expanded outward from him in a sweep and crossed the skeleton line: several went dark and collapsed immediately, their soul-fire simply extinguished. The rest slowed, their movement turning sluggish.
Kencelli and the others moved through the gap, blades and weapons finding the stilled skeletons before they could react. They went down fast and hard.
Alan stared. He'd expected a real fight.
Then the sound came — a roar from somewhere in the black smoke, which suddenly thickened — and three Bone Mammoths came through it. Curved white tusks like blades. Behind them, the hell-bats above responded to whatever signal was in the smoke, wheeling together into a mass that blotted out the sky and swept downward.
"Hell's teeth." Yaltu cursed without stopping his chanting. A column of holy light rose from him and pushed outward in a broader sweep than before. Bats in the column's path burned to ash. But the black smoke absorbed most of the light before it reached the Mammoths; what arrived was barely enough to produce wisps of dark vapor from their bones, and they came on faster.
Yaltu charged the nearest one himself, both spears blazing, driving the tips toward its eye sockets. The Mammoth swung its tusks and deflected, bone cracking but not breaking, the soul-fire untouched. The impact pushed him back two steps. The Mammoth took the same two steps back. He'd hit it hard enough to move something that size — that said something about him.
Kencelli launched himself into the air, spear-tip trailing holy light, and drove it through the skull of the second Mammoth in a single committed strike. His wrist rotated as he sank it in; the skull came apart from the inside, and the soul-fire went out in the same moment. The Mammoth fell in a cascade of bone.
The bats found Kencelli as he landed. Most of them burned in his aura before they reached him. Three got through. The scratches closed under the holy light almost immediately, but the blessing on his robes went noticeably dimmer.
Bitzel caught a tusk on his shield and was driven back three steps. Aubrey came in from the side, holy light on his blade — barely a thread of it left now — and extinguished the third Mammoth's fire with a single stroke. Bogo and Boll worked the last one together, chain mace opening the skull, long knife following for the soul-fire.
The ground shook. More Mammoths coming.