Velinaer paced around the room irritably. This was something of a feat for him, as pacing required continuous mental exertion and quite a bit of thought to prevent him from planting face-first into the manor's flooring, but he did it regardless; the skittering uneasiness and frustration which pervaded his mental state like a miasmic fog required an outlet, and this was the best he could do under his current circumstances. His zombies and skeletons, alternately swarming out of the mansion to take up guard posts and swarming back inside to fail pitiably at cleaning and tidying, were not helping matters.

Okay. He'd tried to get help three times now, and all three had ended in disaster (had he been aware of the devastation his earlier efforts had created in Ciel-Upon-The-Sea, he might have upgraded "disaster" to "catastro-fuck", but regrettably this was not the case). At this point, he felt reasonably certain that something had gone unbelievably wrong with the sarcophagus -- he was obviously nowhere near any sort of civilization that he understood or recognized, and his best guess was that the teleportation mechanism had gone completely screwy and deposited him on the other side of the world, or something. He kept panicking, trying to calm himself down, attempting to figure out his next angle of problem-solving, and then looping back to panic again each time he came up short on obvious solutions. The problem of not being able to think clearly was obviously his main problem, but he was rather neatly prevented from solving it by dint of not being able to think clearly. His undead minions reported that a large number of people were engaging in some sort of discussion-slash-brawl in the town square of the village which could be seen from the manor's front door, but he paid it no mind -- most of his attention was on the fact that he couldn't concentrate, because he kept getting distracted by how he couldn't concentrate.

Eventually, it dawned on him that his minions being directly connected to his consciousness was probably creating some kind of feedback loop. All right, he thought, let's see if I can do something about that. Willing all his minions to come into the main room of the manor and sit, rather hilariously, on the floor in a circle like undead kindergartners was ridiculous, but it seemed to help a little; with all of them where he could see them, his mind seemed to dedicate a little bit less effort to collating and acting upon their various inputs. Hmm. Maybe there was someplace he could put them with even less stimuli.

Searching the manor, he eventually found the burgon's wine cellar and ordered the zombies and skeletons inside. Wow, that was a stark difference. Now the only things pestering him were his own movements and sensory inputs. It only took a few minutes of dazed contemplation for him to hit upon the obvious solution, and he stuffed himself in there with them and closed the door.

At long last, everything was silent and still. It took a little effort to get all of the various undead at his command into stable resting positions where no focus would be required to keep them from toppling over noisily, but he felt that he was in the home stretch now and applied his attentions to this task vigorously. Finally, nearly two hours after the burgon's accidental defenestration from the mortal coil, he managed to corral the last zombie into a corner and sit down in a regal fashion upon a discarded beer cask.

Oh, wow. That was great. The buzzing and popping of invisible background thought that his mind had been apparently sorting and processing without his awareness for the last several days was finally, mercifully silent. He wished he could take a nap, but that was obviously not going to be a thing at this point, so he settled for staring into space and doing his level best to think about nothing whatsoever (and as a mage, even a mediocre one, his ability to think about nothing whatsoever was considerable). An unknown length of time passed as he marveled at simply being able to do what passed for relaxation when one was an undead horror.

Eventually, the noisome jitters of stress began to leave him; and, bit by bit, Velinaer Dax'taxu started to think clearly again for the first time since this had all happened. He began to notice small things, like the fact that his bones were apparently covered in some kind of disgusting black ichor that left slimy trails on anything he touched, including his robe, which struck him as decidedly less than regal. Gross. Well, he might be a lich now (and it looked like he wasn't going to get any opportunities to stop being one anytime soon), but that didn't mean he had to be some sort of nasty epicenter of skeletal swamp-ass. There had to be some way for him to get rid of that crap. He poked at the idea curiously, becoming more calm and focused in the presence of a smaller, more eminently solvable problem.

All right, he was obviously being sustained by some set of magical forces to keep him alive, or unalive, inside an obviously non-living skeleton. Did he still have a brain? He poked his finger into his eye-socket curiously. Didn't seem like it. He amused himself by rooting around in his cranial cavity for a minute or two, marveling at the uniquely impossible sensation of his own fingers on the inside of his skull.

Okay, no brain. He chuckled at how many jokes that would set up, then moved on. That obviously meant that his neural configuration had been transformed into pure magical circuits, and that in turn implied that his bones were animated and controlled by some similar framework. Was there a physical component? He inspected his various limbs for runes, carved or otherwise. None, it would seem. Dang, was he entirely ephemeral in nature?

Curious, he wove the gestures for a planar refraction construct and regarded himself in the shimmering mirror-like surface which appeared. Whoa. His astral form looked badass. He turned this way and that, stripping off the filthy robe he'd been wearing to get a better look. Very cool. He could get used to that, at least; meat-version Velinaer had been short, fat, and prematurely wrinkling even in his mid-twenties. He marveled over some of the visible artifacts of the spellwork which bound him together. Was that a Gaelinex cascader in his sensorimotor loop? Those were expensive as hell. Whatever converted him into this form must have been ridiculously top-of-the-line; he wished he could take a look at the code. Oh, wait, he could.

For a living being, mucking about with one's biology is dangerous and foolhardy; directly poking around in your own astral underpinnings as a magical construct is decidedly moreso. He'd have to be really careful. Booting up an interface once more (he was beginning to doubt he'd get billed at all now), he attached a debugger to himself and started analyzing the output runes. Oh, wow. Daaaang. This was some cool stuff!

For typical living beings, the process of being captivated by something is usually self-limiting; eventually, the trance is broken by hunger, thirst, or discomfort stemming from any number of one's bothersome meat-parts. For Velinaer, this was a perfect environment; he slipped into a flow state seamlessly and began carefully poking about through the masterfully interwoven code which governed his new existence. He had the good sense, thankfully, to stay out of anything managing his cognition or his soul (and watching his own thought processes made him dizzy and queasy), but his body was easily the largest component in the codebase and it was fantastically complex. He sifted through motor-simulation functions, goggled at locomotive subroutines, and marveled at the holographic tactile projection systems which compensated masterfully for the lack of fleshy feely-bits (he was astonished to discover that he apparently felt physical sensation due to a network of whisker-like invisible ectoplasmic tendrils radiating tiny distances out from his bones). In minutes, he was lost to the outside world completely.

Help support creative writers by finding and reading their stories on the original site.

To anyone who managed to look inside, the wine cellar would have been a perfect reproduction of a stereotypical lich's tomb, with corpses lying still as death in meticulously arranged positions of repose. If Velinaer had been paying attention, he'd have appreciated the irony of having independently derived a beginner's effort at a dungeon.

***

Cheis awoke in a puddle of drool atop her desk, a piercing headache behind her eyes and a throbbing discomfort in the general vicinity of her bladder. Empty water bottles were scattered across the floor, the beef jerky had all been consumed (and was sitting like a lump in a stomach completely empty of other nutrition) and the neat pile of papers she had set aside for notes were now either jammed into a haphazard stack of output or crumpled into balls and thrown carelessly about. All solid evidence of a successful recompilation, plus she wasn't dead. At least, not anymore.

She made a quick trip to the room's enchanted chamberpot while she leafed through the notes her boot eidolon had left her. Some efficiency improvements in her mnemonic routing, that was nice. She'd also apparently loaded a checkpoint for herself and updated it, since all her new scars and disfigurements were gone. Shame that didn't work for emotional trauma. Some clinically blunt notes about the fact that not all her memories had properly serialized, and that everything from the autumn of her ninth year had failed to make it into the transitional backups. Oh well. She hoped there weren't any particularly formative experiences in there. At least any relatives whose names she had forgotten were all dead by this point (at least, she was pretty sure -- how would she know?). Ah, here we go -- the core launcher of the cognitive boot loader had been made drastically more efficient, and had been reduced down to a mere two diagrams and one chant. She was tempted to get it tattooed somewhere on her, but with her luck the next version of herself would make it sufficiently obsolete that the whole thing would be a waste of time. The diary worked well enough for now, she supposed. She dutifully documented the latest version, tucked it back into its hiding place in the chair with a sense of profound respite, and concentrated on the trigger thought for the emulator interface with only a slight amount of trepidation.

To her relief, the emulator prompt unfolded in her mind instantly, responding to all her queries with blazing speed. She let out a massive breath she hadn't known she was holding in -- it would still be the work of weeks, if not months, to get everything set back up just the way she liked it again, but at least now she could check spell structures for correctness before executing them and potentially making a catastrophic mistake that killed her and everyone within her line of sight. Or doomed the whole world, she supposed. The upper end of the "bad things that could happen while hardcasting" scale was pretty far out there.

She tidied up her study and put everything away, then set about securing everything again; she'd get around to preparing for next time later. She bumped her head and cursed while crawling out from under her bed, which put her in a foul mood, but then she remembered that she had her emulator again and scripted an analgesic filter, which deleted the pain right out of her consciousness instantly and left her almost maniacally chipper. She changed into her most severe black robes, did what little she could with her hair, then headed to the kitchen and assembled a full breakfast of pancakes, eggs, and bacon from her magically-preserved stores. She was about to tuck in when she stopped, smirked, and cobbled together a backup extractor that dumped a serialized copy of the entire meal in her newly-pristine backups directory. Now she could reload it as a virtual and eat it again whenever she wanted, without all that tiresome cooking business -- wasteful, but she was in a good mood. Humming, she loaded it onto a tray and muttered a command to the house to unlock the cellar door.

As the light from the morning sun illuminated the stairs, she caught sight of Linduin's recumbent form, sprawled atop his blankets and pillows. Asleep, he looked almost painfully young, innocent, and not at all unhandsome, but Cheis was almost exclusively attracted to men of the older, collegiate, and bearded persuasions and mostly just felt an unwelcome tinge of maternal impatience. Suppressing it, she tiptoed down the stairs and kicked him lightly in the shoulder. "Hey, wake up."

Linduin's eyes sprang open, staring widely at the ceiling. "Your door bit me."

Cheis nodded. "You should know better than to try to pound on a sorcerer's door, you goober. Sit up, I've got breakfast."

"Wha...?" Linduin goggled. "You made breakfast? For me?"

Cheis chuckled. "Yes. It will absolutely be the only time such a thing occurs, so I highly suggest you enjoy it." She sat down opposite him, flexing sore wrists and fingers, and patiently ignored all his questions and comments until he was done eating (with the exception of the sudden and urgent request for a chamberpot near the end, which she obliged by pointing him towards the basement's garderobe). When he returned, embarrassed, she shrugged and patted the floor in front of her meaningfully.

"Okay, now that that's out of the way," she said, as he awkwardly folded himself into a poor imitation of her cross-legged position, "we need to get a couple things cleared up between us. You saved my life -- poorly and stupidly, but nonetheless -- and you needed a place to stay because of whatever your weird family circumstances were. Okay. I'll let you stay here, despite that being a monumentally poor idea for everyone involved, and in return you'll do whatever miserable grunt work I assign you. You will cook, clean, and basically be a totally unpaid servant I will treat exceptionally poorly. This is absolutely your last chance to back out."

Linduin, who unbenknownst to Cheis had had exactly this sort of life beforehand except for the part about being, even nominally, the apprentice of a legendary sorceress, nodded without an instant of hesitation. "I understand."

"Seriously?" Cheis blinked, taken aback. "I'm not joking. Your life will totally suck. You'll be put through every single kind of drudgery I can imagine. I'm going to actively try to make you quit. And under absolutely no circumstances am I going to teach you any magic whatsoever unless you impress the shit out of me."

Linduin nodded again, more vigorously. He could not have imagined a more epic beginning to his tale of greatness if he tried.

Cheis sighed. "All right. Don't say I didn't warn you. From this point forward, no complaining, no slacking off, and no disobedience. I'd also forbid you from stupidity, but I think we both know that's a lost cause." Linduin winced, but did not object. "That said, it's going to be fairly important to your continued survival that you give your best effort, think carefully before doing anything, and for land's sake, don't do anything I tell you not to. I don't want to clean up your brains after you unleash a skull-disintegrator demon or something."

Linduin, now thoroughly entranced by the prospect of the magical adventure clearly taking shape before him in real-time, knelt extravagantly. "I swear. I swear, I'll do my absolute best!"

"Great," said Cheis, pointing at the remains of the breakfast. "Now clean that shit up."