The lich has laid out a feast for her. Glistening hams, round ripe grapes, chalices overflowing with wine. He, a skeletal and immortal sorcerer, has no need of the food. He lounges in his throne of ebony and bone, simply waiting. As soon as she enters, he waves his hand and the door slams shut behind her.
With a hiss, the gas.
Her sword clatters to the ground. She chokes, hands making clawing motions at the air, eyes bulging. He is surprised she isn’t saving herself. She must not have thought of poison gas. A simple, deadly oversight. She falls prone, spluttering, seizing at the foot of the table, red-faced, and silently begs for mercy, pleading with her eyes. But he is unmoved. The lich’s skeletal grin, immortal and unchanging, would be the last thing she ever saw.
The lich watches the light leave her eyes with an eerie fascination.
When she is still, he stands, wraps himself in his robe of midnight darkness, and waits, tapping his foot. How long did it take, again? Two minutes, he guesses. Had it been two minutes? Probably… so she is dead. He doesn’t want to celebrate too early. But she doesn’t move, and the lich decides she is definitely dead.
He makes skeletal fist pumps and whoops manically.
The dead hero says nothing.
“You died!”
The dead hero says nothing.
“Pathetic mortal.”
The lich reaches down to the hero’s still warm throat and removes her silver-chained amulet. Set in the middle is a brilliant emerald—his phylactery, which he had hidden under her nose the whole time. He sits back down in his throne of bone and ebony, admiring his phylactery. He wants to be excited, but there is something empty in his victory. No one to tell. The skeletons surrounding him are little more than puppets. He waves his hand and they leap out of their hiding places.
“Make a kick line.”
It is alway funny seeing the skeletons, perfectly synchronized, kicking their legs absurdly high.
But the hero’s body still lies there, unmoving.
The lich considers simply disintegrating the loathsome object with a spell, but that also feels… wrong. Still, something about the corpse terrifies the lich, so he waves his hand and teleports it into a storeroom deeper in the stronghold.
Out of sight of the hero’s dead eyes, he brushes his bony hands and gets back to the very important work of writing his treatise on the condition of the undead in the Sun God’s theocracy, which is not good, clearly, and hence why his treatise was necessary, just like the undead—a core part of the lich’s argument, though one he suspects he would be criticized as self-interested.
And yet, suddenly the lich’s treatise doesn’t seem very important anymore. He procrastinates for days and nights, telling himself he needs to do more “non-writing,” going on walks in the crystal caverns, the silent midnight haunts of his mausoleum. For some reason, in his nighttime wanderings, the lich inevitably finds his way down to the storeroom where, under the power of his magic, the hero’s body has been perfectly preserved, as if in stasis.
“What’s it like?” he asks the corpse.
The corpse says nothing.
“I mean, when you die. What happens?”
Corpse: nothing.
He sits on a spare sarcophagus.
“I have been alive for a thousand years.”
Nothing.
“I don’t know anything about death…”
The lich looks at the hero’s stiff corpse. There is no light in her glassy eyes. He can see that. He wonders, what is the point of trying to talk to a lifeless corpse? Except, laughing, he realizes that was the point of his treatise. His last laugh echoes in the silence. And then he really feels doomed.
“Is it an endless sleep?”
–
“Is there an afterlife you go to instead?”
–
“Are you in heaven with the Sun God?”
–
“Is the Sun God even real?”
–
“No, I don’t think so.”
He reanimates the corpse with his magic, the dark necromantic energy puppeting the limbs, hanging them like strings on a marionette. He bids the hero’s corpse to walk around the room. To swing her sword as she had before. But it is a farce. Even if he tried to fix the slack expression on her face, he knows he is the only thing making the body move. He bids the corpse sit on the sarcophagus with him.
“I wish I hadn’t killed you,” he says quietly. “Now I’ve got no one to distract me from myself.”
–
“You know the trouble with immortality is
you’re always waiting for your luck to run out.”
–
“You can distract yourself in work…
in creating little rivals for yourself…”
–
“But when you watch her die
it reminds you
one day, some day
you will too.”