It had taken the Lich more than a decade of planning before the first stone for this complicated building had been laid. Hundreds of souls had labored on the subject until they ceased to be, though. Dozens of bright men and women had set themselves to the impossible task of building this singular work of art, and all of them had perished after moving it only a few steps forward because of the dozens of contradictory goals it had to accomplish.
It had to be full of darkness but appear untainted. It had to be a perfect trap yet somehow appear inviting. Every part of it had been designed to appear holy, but even the most frivolous decorations had always had an ulterior motive in mind. It wasn’t even built to be a trap primarily.
That was only ever the first step of the plan. It was also to be the arena where it fought the true might of the God of light and the place of its birth, where It had originally intended to build the whole thing in secret and spring it upon the world as a fully formed temple of Siddrim, but the tainted priest had made a more public plan possible.
The Lich had only avoided killing him initially to distract the templars that fought beside him, but he’d been glad that he’d let Verdenin live after he’d taken a peek into his grasping, greedy little mind on his death bed. Men that lusted for power were the easiest of all to control, and the Lich had filled his dreams with not only the grandeur of this place but the respect and esteem he would get for being the one to imagine it.
It was true that his name would live throughout history after this, though perhaps not the way that he’d originally intended. Even now, the one-arm priest was down in the under temple praying for his God to see the truth along with a few dozen of his fellow broken worshipers. The Lich had not yet decided if they would live, but for now, their tainted and discordant prayers were one more weapon in his arsenal that he would need come sunrise.
The fight between his absurdly lethal body and the wounded avatar would not last all night after all. Indeed, the battle was already more than halfway over as soon as the first blow had been struck. The champion of light was still swinging his sword, of course, but blindly because the Lich had already used the slender shard of darkness that it had worked past the man’s armor to obscure the link between the mortal and the divine.
This disconnect made conversation all but impossible just now, of course. Not that the Lich had much to say to the Lord of Light. Its initial taunts had only been to keep the man’s interest so he would not immediately try to flee. Now that the two of them were stuck together, conversations could wait until it had burrowed deep inside the other man’s mind.
That, more than anything else, would be Siddrim’s undoing. It wasn’t that he’d picked a fight in a place where the Lich’s power was absolute, though he had. It wasn’t even that he’d been completely blindsided to find an enemy where none existed. His real mistake was that in his rush to fight that newfound enemy, he’d chosen a deeply flawed vessel, and you could hardly build a bastion of light on a foundation of shadows.
Todd had been every bit as important to its plan as this formidable structure. The darkness had found several boys in the region with enough of a connection to magic that the templars might have taken an interest in them, but they’d only ever found Todd. It had tormented all of its candidates, of course. As suitable as they might be to join the light, they were useless to the dark without at least a little blood on their hands.
Even now, Todd was too busy struggling with the souls of the boys he’d killed so many years ago to keep fighting with him in the here and now. That was why he was bleeding both blood and light from half a dozen places now.
The Lich bore a few wounds, too, of course, but this body was just another tool, and the sooner it could return to the heart of the labyrinth for the final battle, the better. Its mithril shell had not been breached, though it was dented in half a dozen places now. That wasn’t a problem, and neither was the severed arm. Not really. It had served its purpose. The real issue was that it had already used up more than half of the shadows it had loaded this body with.
Before this fight had ever started, every bone was filled with darkness where its marrow should have been, and every blast of light or fire was offset by boiling some of that away in equal measure. Oh, the Lich could have used some of it for a few abilities of its own, of course. This was an endurance match, though. It might occasionally use the shadows to flicker just out of reach of that terrible blade or to replace a blade of its own when it shattered, but that was all it could afford.
Even cut off from the rest of his God, the avatar was a powerful thing, and its light tried hard to burn through the layers of mithril and steel in their attempts to blast the Lich away into nothingness. Only the combination of holy bones and the unholy blood that cycled through its inhuman body thanks to the resentful beating of a templar’s heart enabled it to resist the terrible energies.
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The wings were flickering now, and the internal fires were dying, and more and more knives crawled their way inside the flesh that was now only protected by the avatar’s fading armor. Even this much light would have been enough to boil his leviathan in under a minute. Only the Lich’s juggernaut had any hope of withstanding such prolonged exposure, and Siddrim’s avatar would have cut that behemoth to ribbons within a minute or two.
No, the Lich needed to be the one to bait the hook, and even as its reserves began to drain, it could see its enemy faltering. Moment by moment and blow by corrupting blow, the avatar weakened, and after his wings faded to the barest flickering flames on his shoulder blades, his blade slipped from his fingers and vanished before it even hit the ground.
After that, the room was plunged into darkness, but the Lich could see just as well as it ever could. More importantly, it could breathe a sigh of relief as it silently ordered its remaining minions to drag the wounded body to the altar and chain it down to the hidden manacles there.
It was only once all these things had happened that he let the mind of the man inside this shell of a body come back to the surface. By that point, the templar had been reduced to little more than a sobbing child, and the ghosts of his bullies had done more damage to him in there than the Lich had done physically to his body in the real world.
Forcing the sobbing, sniveling brat to wake up and realize that while he’d been indulging in his weakness, the battle had already been lost would have been enough to make the Lich smile if it was capable of such a thing. It wasn’t, though. All it could do was look down coldly at the man while he realized he was bound and tried to break free.
“I will never serve you!” Todd spat as he realized what was probably about to happen next.
“You won’t,” the Lich agreed. “Your soul and the piece of Siddrim’s essence that you still carry inside you will be irrevocably destroyed by the ritual that happens next.”
Reminded of Siddrim’s avatar, Todd tried to invoke his God briefly, but the only evidence of that was that his eyes glowed briefly while he struggled. Then he lay back, temporarily exhausted.
“You lost before the cornerstone was ever laid here, boy,” the Lich gloated as it tripped the switch, and the altar began to sink back into the earth. “I chose the vessel. I chose the place. I chose the stakes and the weapons. All you ever did was play your part!”
“That’s not true!” Todd yelled, “I would never do what you wanted!”
The Lich ignored him for a moment as he mentally ordered his pet fire godling to begin channeling fire into all the ruined gold up there. It was a slow process, but it needed to come pouring down this shaft to complete the final circle.
“You fed on my land and drank of my waters,” the Lich countered. “I never forced you to do a single thing, and you still did everything I needed you to do. I showed you horrors, and you ran straight to your God for help as I desired. Now I only have one task left for you. To die, as painfully as possible.”
“If you’re going to kill me, then just do it now and get it over with!” Todd screamed from fear as much as bravery. He wouldn’t snivel, even at the end, but then the Lich had already known that.
As the altar slowly sank into the ground, the Lich looked up and saw the first of the gold just starting to trickle down the shaft. Though it had been impossible to notice the pattern in the grooves of the dark stone up until now, they were one of the most critical parts of the whole design.
The pit the altar descended into was only forty feet deep because that was the amount of space that had been required to inscribe the spell. It contained the seven secret names of Siddrim as well as all of the more common ones, and though it suspected that none of them were the Lord of Light’s true name, they would be enough to make the circle nigh unbreakable.
As it descended, so did the molten gold. It drizzled smoothly through the grooves hidden in the rock face and slowly but surely made its way down. They followed the complex paths that were laid out for them, and as the altar finally reached the bottom of the pit, they were nearly halfway down their course.
When they were complete, the winding circle of binding would be one of the most complex works of applied archaeology to ever have been built according to the voices in its library. No one, not even a god, would be able to see it coming.
“Why rush?” the Lich asked. “We have all night to make you suffer and marinate you in darkness. When the sun next rises, I will unveil you to the light and then force the tainted shard of the divine that you carry back into your God at my leisure. It will be an attack that will be utterly impossible for him to escape and just as fatal as sewing a gangrenous limb back onto the body of an otherwise healthy patient.”
Todd’s eyes widened in horror, though the Lich did not linger to hear what he would say next. It didn’t matter. Nothing did until the next phase of the battle was truly joined. As the Lich’s body left the pit and began the long walk back to the foundry with its severed arm in its remaining left hand so that it could be repaired, the Lich’s soul fled back to his throne room and to Albrecht’s moldering, mummified body. At the same moment, the stone door slid down from above and slammed shut.
The Lich would have liked to stay to watch the shadows pour into the pit to properly marinate its victim, but there was nowhere else it would rather recuperate until the time of the final battle was at hand. The Lich wouldn’t let him drown in that darkness, of course, but it doubted very much that he would still be sane when the sun rose above the horizon once more in ten hours.