The Lich watched its finest craftsmen as they made the final few stitches on the spine of its dread book with some small part of its mind even as it gazed out over the turmoil of its kingdom. Now it was drinking deep of that suffering, but as soon as the blood-red sun finished setting, it would be time to complete the spells and unite its latest victim’s body and soul once more. For now, though, it was content to enjoy the view. The Shrines were burning in every town and village along the length of the Oroza now, and the Lich’s pet goddess was struggling against her chains even as she burned with them. She could feel the suffering of those who loved her most in the same way that she’d been able to feel it as the Lich had slowly poisoned the souls of her most devout.
Both the darkness and the light had violated her in this sense, but she could do nothing about either, not as long as she was merely a focal point for such a terrible master. She still managed to resist the magics that chained her from time to time, but years of captivity had all but broken the river Goddess’s spirit. Her purpose was to constantly absorb torrents of power only to have them stripped away while the Lich filled whole reservoirs with her tears, drop by drop. Usually, this suffering was a private treasure, but today it shared the view with someone who would soon know his own personal brand of hell as a hint of things to come.
“She will remember this moment forever,” the Lich intoned to his audience of one. “Whereas I will forget it ever happened in time, I always do. A month? A season? A year? How could I ever hope to remember every torment I inflict on this miserable world? When the darkness overshadows everything, these small sadnesses will be erased like everything else.”
The maelstrom of souls that was its heart of darkness was so tumultuous and chaotic that it often had trouble remembering anything but its current obsession and the next steps of its great work. Today in between thoughts about the mysteries of flight and breaks to enjoy the continuing efforts of Siddrim’s dogs as they ravaged the countryside, all it could think about was its newest creation which was nearing completion, hour by hour. The tome was weighty by anyone’s measure, but it wasn’t the size of the thing that would define it when the construction was complete. It was the infinite darkness that would fill its pages, one black word at a time.
“But I cannot bear to lose even the smallest of my treasures anymore, and that is why I have created you. From now on, it will be your job. To remember everything that ever happens. You shall document my every whim and whisper so that nothing is lost. Likewise, every debt, every grudge, and every obligation will be recorded along with all the ways those debts are eventually repaid in blood so that everyone will get what it is they deserve when the time comes.” As the Lich’s poison-drenched words echoed voicelessly in the darkness, the soul that was the target of that terrible message trembled from the skull that it was still bound to. The last thing it wanted was to be put to such a purpose, but it had no choice in the matter.
When the world above finally drifted into night, the Lich turned away from the spectacle to find that its book now sat finished in the middle of the heptagram binding circle as it had been for the best part of the last hour, awaiting the next step in the process.
An ugly thing, the large black tome measured a foot and a half tall, nearly a foot wide, and several inches thick. Though that wasn’t enough space to fit an entire corpse, the Lich had done its very best to waste nothing. The book was bound in Kelvun’s flesh so that his face could still be made out on the cover, his sinew had been used to stitch the thing, and even his bones had not gone to waste. Not only had they been used to make the glue for the binding, but they’d also been pulverized and added to the pulped pages of religious scrolls and rare spell books to make up the terrible paper that was at the heart of this project. Though it might seem that the slender volume had perhaps 200 pages, there were a thousand times that many hidden inside the clever working, or at least there would be once the Lich’s magic had activated the rest of them.
Though its library of heads had served it well for decades as a repository of knowledge, they were not portable, and it would soon be time to centralize that power into a single implement that it could bring with it to the battlefields of the world above. The living might not realize that the darkness would soon be upon them. Still, every day drew closer to that dread confrontation whether they knew it or not.
At an unspoken signal, zombies brought in seven severed heads and set them down at each corner of the star. In life, none of them had known a single thing about magic, but in death, all that mattered was that they were fresh meat that was less than a week old. They had been pilfered from the local graveyard shortly after the ceremonies ended and brought here to be dissected for parts.
The locals of Blackwater might think that such places protected the dead, but the evil here ran deep, so only the first few feet of ground was truly consecrated. Beneath that lay the Lich’s domain, and every week new bodies were delivered to it only to disappear into the depths like they had never been.
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Their arms and legs would yet be used for new, outrageous war machines, but tonight their heads were nothing but extensions of the Lich’s will. As one, they began to sing a complex seven-part harmony. It was less of a sonata than sacrilege, and note by note, it pulled Kelvun’s screaming soul from where it had resided the last few weeks and into the infinite pages of the Lich’s new library. In time, he might be joined in there with other souls as the complexity of their task increased, but for now, his little lordling would suffer alone under the burden of transcribing everything the Lich knew.
Minute by minute the layers of enchantments and compulsions built up in a complex symphony of arcane cruelty that would have hurt the ears as much as the souls of any listeners if there had been anyone in that empty room to hear. Each line was a prohibition; it was a brand on Kelvun’s soul. The book must do this, but it couldn’t do that. It was a formula that had been borrowed from Krygain Mundi, a book that was meant for dealing with the diabolic, but there was no reason it couldn’t work on the dead, so long as small alterations were made to reflect the true nature of the bound.
Eventually, after several minutes, the singing reached a crescendo that verged on screeching as one of the heads' vocal cords started to fray, while two more were beginning to smolder even as they screamed their commandments louder and louder. Just before its tiny little implements could burst into flame, the ritual was done, smothering the room in an eerie silence that lasted until it was disturbed by the brief shuffling of pages as the book stirred briefly.
Judging the spell a success, a drudge was then allowed to bring the book to the Lich’s throne room. It held it there motionless until the thing suddenly sprang to life in its lifeless hands, opening on its own to a random blank page as it waited expectantly for its first order.
“We will start the volume with your own terrible end, Kelvun,” the Lich gloated. “You forgot that I existed, so we shall make certain that nothing else ever goes unremembered regarding our encounters.”
Suddenly the book sprang to life as line after line of dark script appeared on the page. The ink was a mixture of blood and shadows, but the handwriting was Kelvun’s formal penmanship. He’d hated those lessons his tutors had forced on him over and over with a passion, and now he would spend the rest of time doing just that. Creating short lines of text that captured every detail of an event with clean loops and tight, well-spaced letters, the book started the section with ‘The Life and Death of Kelvun Garvin.’ It went on ceaselessly for seven pages, making notes about things that Kelvun had never been aware of in life as it gathered clues and facts from the vast darkness that was the Lich.
In the end, it noted correctly that it had crossed the Lich three times and ‘in his final attempt to cheat the darkness of its due, Kelvun met with a sudden violent end, which is the only possible way to pay back such debts when dealing with forces of this nature.’ Obviously, if Kelvun had known that he would have happily paid double for the rest of his days in an effort to be as helpful to his dark benefactor as possible, but it was the Lich’s knowledge that lent to the rash man the only wisdom he’d ever had in the afterlife. The Lich was pleased to note that the document didn’t fail to mention that Kelvun’s surviving son was the product of an affair. That twisted the knife, though the Lich was surprised Kelvun hadn't figured it out before then. After all, his wife had had ample time to spend with the many bards that entertained at his house while he was off on his own dalliances.
That was one of the only reasons the Lich had spared the child, of course. A mewling infant would have made a lovely morsel in its banquet of death that night, but as the only living member of Kelvun’s “lineage,” the Lich knew that would forever irritate the tormented spirit and that the church would use the child to cement their legitimacy, as any group seeking to usurp power in the region would.
To most, it would make no sense at all that the darkness was doing everything it could to invite the light into its domain, but it knew something they didn’t. It was the first lesson that it had ever learned: the safest place to hide a treasure was a few feet under an empty treasure chest. The forces of light had already found and vanquished an evil in the form of the cult of the drowned lady. They would have no need to dig deeper and find out that she was little more than a hand puppet in the grand scheme of things. She'd never been at fault in the same way that the Garvin family had never really been in charge.
Neither had done anything, yet it was their names that would bear the shame in the histories that would be written about such things. Not that history portrayed the reality of such events any more than bardic song writers did, of course. After all, Blackwater wasn’t even a swamp anymore. It was the name of a growing river port and a style of beer that was brewed there. As a place, it no longer existed. It had been erased from the minds of the world.
Where once there had been a swamp brimming with disease and the unquiet dead, there was now only rich black earth and more farms every year as the population continued to blossom like the crops in the fields. People sometimes disappeared, of course, and to a man, the region experienced terrible nightmares that no one was willing to talk about openly, but that was the price that they paid for their peace, and no one seemed to think it was a high one.