Prologue

  My armies were already close to being destroyed, and I knew that there would be no additional aid from them this day. Even if, somehow, they turned their battle around and bested the servants of my wretched enemies, there would be nothing they could do against the entities staring me down now. Billions of undead, torn from every burial site, every crypt, every mass grave, every long-forgotten battlefield, that I had found in a thousand years of preparation, and they were as useful to me now as an army of children.

  No matter, I was Lord Dread. All armies were armies of children to me.

  Lightning coiled in the skies, then surged down for me. I didn’t dodge it, one simply does not dodge a current of power moving across horizons in a mere fraction of a second. No, before it struck I had already enveloped myself in a bubble of aether—the stuff of magic given solid form. Aether is variable in its properties, and I’d made this variety to allow lightning to pass through it. The electrical energy rushed around me, not quite touching my skeletal body, as the aether guided it to the ground. The dirt exploded beneath me, simply unable to contain all the power held in my enemy’s attack. Before clumps of sizzling soil had even finished raining down, another blast came out.

  This one, I was unable to parry. The burning energy struck a glancing blow at my left arm, and the limb simply stopped existing.

  I was the most powerful human magician to have ever lived, at this point. I had walked Arwyna for thousands of years and spent all of that time accumulating knowledge and raw strength, and the sight of my Vessel—the container for my magical essence—had been likened by many to a volcano belching steam and magma. But this was a God, I was fighting now. A being older than my species and boasting more mana in one limb than there was in every human’s body combined.

  Looking at things in full perspective, I should say that I performed admirably well just to fend him off for as long as I did.

  More lightning built, but the God seemed too impatient to let his power reach its height. He lunged for me like an arc of electricity himself, crossing the hundreds of paces between us faster than I could process, then lashing out with a punch. His body was five times the height of mine, naked and blemishless, like some idealised statue of the human form come to life. His skin glowed golden, and I had seen already that he was many times heavier than anything even of his size should have been.

  I felt all of that unnatural mass as it was put behind a fist the size of a catapult stone and smashed into me, then the world went silent for one moment as my body lurched back and left sound in its wake.

  I flew miles, then miles more, before I finally slowed down enough to hear, before I could even start to assess the damage. I had been wearing an amulet designed to absorb the kinetic energy of any attacks that might impact me, and looked down to see that the amulet had, apparently, just exploded the moment I was hit, soaking up what it could, overloading and sending shards of its precious material out in all directions. Some of them were lodged in my breastbone, others might have lodged in my ribs, but it appeared that all of those bones had been completely pulverized by what was left over from my enemy’s punch.

  Then I hit the mountain. I had just enough thought to shield myself before impact, and the shield in question was barely powerful enough to see me through the other side of the rocky wall before shattering. I hit the ground a moment later, still moving so fast that I simply bounced from it and tumbled another league before finally stopping. The air around me was hot, steaming. I thought I had seen flames surrounding me as I flew—the friction of my body being moved too forcibly and too fast. I had simply never felt, seen or heard a blow as mighty as that one, and the being responsible, the God of skies and kings, had barely seemed to even exert himself.

  He hovered down to wait before me as I lay there in a heap, trying to figure out how many bones I still had unbroken. His face was bright enough that, if I still had eyes, they would have stung just gazing upon it. His expression was smug enough that, if I still had nerves, they would have trembled in rage at the sight.

  “And here we find the Lich King,” said the God. “The great Lord Dread, blight of mankind and enemy of the Gods.” He spat, and where the globule fell from his lips to hit the dirt, a small sapling sprouted. “As pathetic as to be expected.”

  I did not need breath to speak, and so despite my injuries was free to retort as I wished.

  “Disintegrate,” I declared, a moment after hurling out the spell that I had already seen rend solid iron down into glittering dust on the wind. The green energy wave enveloped the God and seemed for a moment to consume him, then it parted and I saw him standing without so much as a singed eyebrow. He looked amused.

  “And to think my siblings feared you,” Ngalaru the sky God sighed. An idle gesture of his sent more lightning arcing across the air, striking my outstretched arm and obliterating it just as he had the first. Before I could even process that, two more forks slashed across my legs and burned them out of existence too. I stared up into the God’s face and watched as more of his kin came down to join us.

  There was Maketa, first among the newcomers and direct subordinate to Ngalaru. Taller than his brother and far broader, though with skin of a deep, arterial red rather than vibrant gold. There were veins standing on the end of his flesh, and his hair was jutting skywards like the branches of trees. He stared like he felt more hatred towards me than everything else in the world put together. That would have been a feat, the world did not like me much.

  “Destroy him brother,” the God of War snarled. Blood hissed from his mouth instead of spittle, bright gold like the ichor of all his kind. It melted into the ground like acid beneath him. “Enough talk, let us erase this blasphemer and be done with it. I will grind him into dust, mix it into paste. I will smear his remains across my steak and digest his soul.”

  I could not help but feel a note of smugness at that, more Gods were arriving soon, and they quickly buried it.

  “That will not work, I’m afraid, father,” came a new voice. This was a Goddess, and though she was not as tall as either Maketa or the sky God, her king Ngalaru, she still towered at over four times my height. She was clothed, though in fabrics I could not name. They seemed to be those of a priestess, to me. A healer, one who watched over the dead and dying. Zameka, the Goddess of the Underworld. She smiled and seemed to be a pleasant thing, from the outside, beautiful as all Gods were, but I knew that this was no more than a disguise.

  I saw the hatred in her, felt how personal it was. She was the first God I had ever defied, by inventing lichdom, and I knew she remembered that slight to this day.

  “It’s a human!” Maketa spat, the ground trembling as fissures opened up beneath him in the display of fury. “Why not?!”

  Zameka did not flinch back from her father’s fury, simply kept her eyes on me. “Because his soul is not anchored to the body we see now, is it, lich?”

  Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author.

  I felt fear for the first time in a long time, and did not answer. She continued anyway.

  “He has gone and bound his vital essence to something elsewhere, and even I cannot find it. No matter what we try and do to it, it will just flit its way back there the moment his body perishes. Irritating. But I have another solution.” I felt the magic building as unseen snares hooked their way around my consciousness. “We don’t need to destroy his soul,” Zameka continued. “We can just lock it away.”

  Ngalaru, their King, grinned at that as more Gods made their way to us from distantly behind him.

  “Have you ever heard of the Depths, lich?” she asked me. It was rhetorical of course. I hated rhetorical questions, but the Goddess continued before I could tell her as much. “I would imagine not, no. Your knowledge of magic is puerile and childish, isn’t it? I’ve been watching you for a while, watched how hard you worked to accumulate all the little specs of power you have now. I even watched how you went and crippled your own Vessel in the effort. Do you remember that?”

  Of everything to happen so far, including the loss of my limbs, that remark stung the most. In my early days of magical training, I had pushed myself too hard and too far. My powers had been permanently damaged, and would never be what they might have been were I more sensible. Such were the dangers of being entirely self-taught, as I was.

  “I remember that,” the Goddess continued. “And so I very much doubt that you have the means to even identify the Depths, let alone escape them. Allow me to illuminate you, a parting gift before you go. The part of the Depths I will be sending you to is , for all intents and purposes, nothing. An eternal nothing. No sight, no touch, no sound, nothing. You will not even feel your mana. You will remain there, alive, I think, because of your undead form, but unable to do anything but think. For each second that passes here, aeons will crawl by you there. And when we have you there, locked away…” she turned to her fellow Gods at that. “Well, what do you all think? I would rather simply forget about him.”

  This was more than just a defeat, then. They had been so offended by my rise against them that they meant to inflict a punishment upon me too. I watched all the Gods, the three already there from the start and the handful of new arrivals, give their assent for Zameka’s plan, and only when I felt the chords of magic in the air readying to banish me did I finally speak.

  “I will be back,” I told them all. And I meant it, too. They had defied me, humiliated me, and impeded my plans. And gathered in force, they had, temporarily at least, bested me.

  But they were not indestructible. I knew that, because I could see now, by how excessive their retaliation was, that for a moment there, I had left them fearful of me.

  Maketa came a step closer, growling like an animal, while Ngalaru held his brother back. Zameka alone stayed as she was, just staring. Her features did not twitch, as a human’s did. Like an animated statue. Like, I realise now, ironically, my own.

  Perhaps that similarity is how I could feel just how much I had unnerved her.

  The magic interrupted whatever more I would have noticed, and the world was consumed by a gaping maw suddenly emerged into the air. I stared up at it as gravity flipped, felt myself drifting upwards, and then I was inside. True to the Gods’ word, I saw nothing, felt nothing, heard nothing. Was nothing. Can you imagine it? I do not believe you can, nobody can. A complete absence of anything, it simply does not register. Not to us, to thinking beings born into worlds of solid matter and sensation. It is more than alien, it is wrong.

  What I did next cannot be called floating, because I do not know if there was anything around me that I could be described as floating in. I simply existed, and I continued to exist. As had been promised, time passed me by with excruciating slowness, time immeasurable. A thousand wills would have shattered at the barest fraction of the eternity I spent in that horror.

  But not my will. Not the will of Lord Dread, the destined master of the universe, the greatest being to ever exist. I continued cycling that thought in my mind, fed from it like it was a bonfire I huddled around to stave off the cold night. I was the destined ruler of all creation, and this was nothing more than a setback.

  It took an excruciating span, but eventually I was proven right.

  It all started with a stroke of luck. I did not believe it was real, at first. I had hallucinated colour and sound before, and when I felt the first tug of magic on my senses I was certain it was just some new symptom of my sensory deprivation. It was like light fingers drumming along my arcane sense, but compared to the total absence I had felt until then…I could have been suddenly beaten with hammers and it would not have been as shocking or as striking.

  The magic may have been a trap, I considered that. Ridiculous. A trap for me? I was entirely powerless, and my situation was quite literally as bad as I could imagine it getting—and I had enjoyed a great amount of time with nothing to do but ponder how bad my situation was. No, this was not a trap. Or if it was, it was not one capable of making things worse for me.

  This was an opportunity. If I could latch onto this strand of mana, I could haul myself out of this mindless world and back to my own. I could have my revenge.

  I took my chance and dragged my spirit free of the Gods’ trap. That is when our story truly begins.

  For a moment, I experienced the most excruciating pain of my existence. Worse than the lightning that vaporized my bones, worse than any physical torture I have ever felt. You could have activated every pain receptor in my whole body and it would not have compared, because this pain was soul-deep and endless.

  Then it passed, and was replaced by confusion.

  I was…somewhere. That was a change, and one that I considered starkly promising, but the uncertainty still gnawed at me. Wherever I was, it was warm and wet, strange and somehow thick. I was not in air, not in some endless void, but was instead suspended, I thought, in fluid, and that fluid was pressing down on me from all sides. I tried to study my surroundings, but my vision seemed unresponsive.

  And then I felt a change.

  The liquid pressurised and surged, there was a rush. I was moving, though identifying anything like a direction was utterly beyond me given the circumstances. Then there was light and frosty air, sounds all around me. A woman screaming, people urgently talking.

  I barely noticed, because the most jarring differences were internal.

  My flesh was warm and pressing down on my bones with a weight I’d not felt in millennia. Because I had not, in millennia, had flesh. My ears rang, and I realised from the feeling that I had ears.

  My eyes stung, and now I had eyes.

  My mind was awash with dazed questions and uncertainties, even as the clinical part of it began tallying what it could of this new body of mine. Small, clumsy. My limbs were tiny stumps, my hands curled uncontrollably inwards, my whole form a roiling bundle of naked flesh that seemed intent to ignore my orders.

  Slowly, I soaked up more of my surroundings. A room, fashioned in a style I didn’t recognise and furnished in a way I could make no sense of. People were staring down at me, speaking in a language I did not understand.

  And I was a baby.

  My body wanted me to cry. Resisting that urge and exerting my will to keep it silent was, in that moment, all I could do. Because my Vessel was suddenly gone as well.

  ***

  Life as an infant was difficult to adjust to, for reasons that are abundantly obvious. I had not been even a child in thousands of years, countless aeons if one counted my time in the void, and my distant memories of boyhood did little to prepare me for the abject helplessness of this particular stage of existence.

  I could not so much as lift my head. Could barely even control my limbs, clumsy and unresponsive as they were, and even the effort of opening my newly-regrown eyes to peer at the world around me was exhausting.

  All of this, though, was nothing compared to the loss of my magic. Fortunately, as I studied my newfound problem more, I came to realise that my Vessel was not actually gone.

  It would be more accurate to say that it had been restored, or perhaps reverted. It was just as I remembered it being the first time I instinctively began to utilise magic, fresh and unchanged.

  This meant, of course, that all my long millennia spent slowly strengthening it had been undone. And yet I did not care, not really, because now I saw a new opportunity in it.

  The Goddess Zameka had been correct when she said that many of my early days studying magic were not just less productive than they could have been, but actually damaging to my abilities in the long-term. That my genius was heavily limited by my ignorance, and that I did a great deal of harm to my own potential through the clumsy way I was forced to learn.

  Here, I found a new opportunity to begin from the start. Yes, it stung to have lost all the raw power I’d enjoyed, but I barely registered that next to seeing the greatest regret of my existence undone.

  Whatever was happening here, whatever new land I had found myself in, one thing was abundantly clear. The pioneer of necromancy, the ancient lich known as Lord Dread, was not finished here. Far from it, he was reborn.