Varus snapped his quill at the sudden interjection of a voice from the real world into the place where fictions came alive. The scene in his head froze, the characters whose lives he observed in the midst of their march to their final fate seemed to the elder lich as if they stopped in midstep just to look up at him. ‘I’m sorry.’ He said, and as if they were no mere phantasms of his daydreams the hero seemed as if he answered…

‘No, no, it’s fine. Just a life and death struggle for the world here, you go right ahead, we’ll just stand here frozen in the middle of the page until you can come back to us again. It’s fine, just fi-i-i-i-i-i-i-ine. Don’t worry about us at all.’

Sometimes Varus wondered why he still sighed even though he had no need to breathe, but this was not one of those times.

He set his quill down, put his hands in his lap, and looked down at the young kitsune whose tail was dancing about at her back and whose wide amber eyes looked up at him with bright and shining curiosity. ‘My characters are very salty, today.’ He thought and cleared his nonexistent throat.

“A novel.” He answered.

“Why’d you break your quill?” She asked and rose to her tiptoes to try to look at the top of his desk, only to have no luck.

“I was surprised by the interruption and snapped it by using too much force. Elder liches are some of the mightiest of undead, so I have to be very gentle with everything or I’ll break things just by accident.” He responded with patient slowness, and waited while she decided if she had more questions.

“How come you’re undead?” She asked. “In your story, you were a knight, my…” Tuesday paused, her eyes welled up with tears for a moment, “They,” she said with a brief but bitter souring of her expression, “told me that only magic casters can cast spells to raise themselves from the dead. And that only evil ones do that kind of thing. So… if you were a knight, how come you could use magic to do that?”

Varus looked away for a moment and rubbed his pale jaw with an equally pale thumb and forefinger.

“I don’t really know. I have a vague memory of waking up. The field was empty, there was a shadow over me…the grave, I guess. I woke up, and I was wearing this…lovely robe.” He said sardonically and ran his hand over the soft black fabric, “I had no flesh anymore, and I realized… I’d done my duty. I’d sworn my life to the hero, but my life was over, and I realized I couldn’t go home. The world isn’t too kind to the undead. So I decided to spend my unlife how I wanted. Writing novels the way I’d always dreamed of doing. Maybe it was my strong desire to complete my unfinished business, and my unfinished business was that. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’d really like to finish this chapter. We can talk in the morning before I go get you what you’ll need to sleep more comfortably.”

A yawn went up from the couch as Hannah stirred in her place.

“It is morning. It’s been morning for hours.” Tuesday answered and after tugging at his robe, she pointed to the window where light was already streaming into the house to touch the table and invite the living to dine.

“Oh. I must have been busier than I thought.” Varus said as Hannah sat up.

“What’s to eat… Anything would be pur-r-r-r-rfect.” She said and brought her little fists to her eyes to rub away the sleep.

Her little cat tail swished about, and Varus stood up to stretch. ‘Why do I still do that? I haven’t got any muscles.’ He snorted, and tried not to question that too. To distract himself, he said, “You can help yourself to the apples and some preserved meat from the cellar. I’m going to go out for a little while, but I won’t be long.”

It really wouldn’t be that long. The forest where he intended to go was a rare place of magic, and as such there were few things about it which were predictable. Few. But some. One of those things was the flow of time, the other was the state of death.

Why it was the way it was, Varus wasn’t sure, though oftentimes he suspected that he himself was the cause. ‘I’m an elder lich, after all. I exude magic like my old body used to sweat. And it did take a long time to learn how to control and somewhat contain it. How much time did I spend beneath those trees when they were barely saplings, trying and failing to contain my mana until I could function without creating distortions of magic? Is it any wonder some would seep into the seedlings and other nearby plants? Is it strange that the animals that ate there would change too? No. I suppose not.’ He thought as he entered the mottled spaces of light and shadow beneath the morning sun.

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There were places in the deep woods where time flowed differently, where a day was a year or a year was an hour, there were places where a plant would grow to old age in seconds, and there were places where creatures of magic would manifest and dwell and make their homes… where even insects might gain wisdom and animals might learn to speak as if they’d lived an age.

‘If they’d been stuck in those woods for much longer, who knows where they might have ended up, if not in the belly of a few wandering wolves?’ Varus shook his head at that. If they’d meandered into the wrong spot, they could have emerged to find a thousand years had come and gone for the rest of the world, and they would never have been the wiser, given how little they knew of the world at their ages.

Kitsune and Nekoni were both potentially immortal creatures if they survived to adulthood, but their innately magic natures meant that they were quite rare. It all but guaranteed their good treatment at least, ‘Once I get them somewhere safe, they’ll grow up honored and loved, the way all children should. That’s what a knight fights for after all, a good one, at least. That’s what I died for.’ Varus thought and touched his hand to a tree of great age, the bark was cool to the touch, and he thought again about all those he recalled which time and struggle took from the world.

‘I’ve always been so sure we succeeded, or… have I just been too worried to find out? What if it was all for nothing? What if we lost?’ Varus asked himself that question and paused. He darkened his eyes again and looked through the eyes of his summon. The road was still hard, packed earth, the way was still open, a light fog from a pair of ponds on either side of the road obscured his vision, but when he broke through, there was only more horizon. ‘Strange, my skeleton should have come across something by now.’ He searched through its recall, what passed for its ‘memories’ and saw nothing but the open road.

‘Strange. But even so, the whole world can’t be empty, I’ll check again in a few hours.’ This had been his first look at the outside world other than his forest in an interminably long time, and oddly enough, empty as it was, it felt good to see something of it.

‘After Tuesday and Hannah are gone, perhaps I should try summoning other things, things ‘better suited’ for interacting with the living. Now that I think about it, I summoned that skeleton only because it was the first and easiest thing to come to mind. I should have thought to give it the ability to speak. Folly, Varus. That was folly. You thought only of finding a place, not how to explain what you wanted.’ He shook his head, his mind had wandered again and he’d lingered in one place for longer than he meant to.

“Always so scatterbrained, it’s a wonder you ever finish writing anything.” He chuckled to himself as he went deeper within until he found what he sought.

The wolves, the ones whose lives he’d taken. “How fitting.” He said, and stretched out his hand. [Shadow Blade] He cast his spell, and the shadows of the ground fled their places to coalesce in front of his outstretched palm until they formed a single dark knife.

In his forest, the dead decayed barely at all for long, long periods of time, and scavengers were few, leaving these intact for him to harvest. Thanks to his time as a knight, and by extension, a hunter, Varus had the knowledge to take the skins he needed with relative ease.

It was a bit messy, but nothing that mattered, even if the stains wouldn’t come out with magic, unlikely as that was, the red would blend flawlessly into the black of his cloak. ‘Although…’ He pondered as he looked at the red stains on his white bones, ‘This might be a trifle much when they’re still anxious. A big skeleton with bloody hands wandering in…’ He chuckled in spite of himself, and made a mental note of the image to use later, ‘That would make an excellent scene in a novel.’

Already the ideas were spiraling through his mind as he rolled up the furs and the story unfolded while he returned to his cottage. Out of sheer habit, when hurry was not at play, he paused when he reached the road. The reason for his pause was to check his stock, not of food or water or tools, but of the only thing he really cared about.

It was the remnants of a once mighty tree that had died when struck by lightning, and which he’d reshaped with his own bare hands. Being as big around as two men standing with both arms out, it was no small thing, and through his own work, Varus had cut open the remnants to create a room within the tree. In addition, he’d cut shelves out of the wood, and on those shelves sat his many bound texts. Books he’d written with the same hand that had carved a way into the tree. The only things of magic that he’d made was a barrier of magic that would keep animals at bay, but allow people through, and a little white gem that hung from the ceiling and cast a white glow over the contents.

Against the far wall sat a sign, ‘Take them, read them, sell them to someone who will love them as I did’.

A few tomes were missing, not many, likely taken by one person on horseback. ‘Wonderful. I hope they find good homes.’ Varus thought of the children that were his beloved books.

Sometimes he wondered about them, not the texts, but as he emerged with the wolfskins still rolled under one arm, he looked up and down the long and empty road where the sun’s glow cast down its light in all directions, he wondered about those who read them. ‘Did I make them smile? Did I make them laugh? Did I make them cry? Did I make them angry? Are they good people? Sad people? Bad people? Are they elves or humans? Dwarves or goblins? Are they scholars, nobles, peasants, merchants, knights…where did my children find homes? And do their keepers ever wonder about their father?’

It was a pointless question, and yet that didn’t stop him asking the unknowable to the quiet world in his quiet mind, before returning to his cottage where a little smoke was rising from the chimney. ‘Did they decide to cook something? Or are they just warming it up?’ He shrugged, it was fine either way, and there were other things to attend to.

‘I have to make their beds, I suppose, and ‘then’ I can work on another chapter.’ He promised himself the latter and reached for the doorknob to make his way into his home once again.