“Arise! Arise my minions from your eternal rest! Arise and deliver furious vengeance upon the living whom dares disturb my work! Disturb your slumber! Arise and attend me in death as you did in life! Arise!”

The Mad Embalmer’s proclamations echoed throughout the grand mortuary.

Ghastly magic unleashed from a grizzly staff saturated the embalmed dead lining the hall, awaking them once more. From the dust and sand, they arose. Dozens of mummified corpses staggered silently to their feet to stare down the living with hate burning in their eyes.

The tomb guardians all bore humanoid forms wrapped in strips of old linen damaged by rot and age. A distinctive aroma of cinnamon, ginger, frankincense, and myrrh used in their creation wafted off the dead, covering up the dusty stench of desiccated flesh.

That same creation had imbued these greater undead with a strength and resilience far beyond what they’d possessed in life, along with retaining most of their martial might and training.

Loyal even in death, the implacable warriors gathered up their regalia of war.

From their graves, they armed themselves with bronze-tipped spears, curved khopesh swords, and sturdy tall painted shields. Bright blue and gold jewelry and armor adorned the skeletal warriors of the growing legion of the dead. At the back of the formation, several undead archers picked up rotten bows of yew and bronze-tipped arrows from the sands.

If that was all the tomb guards had brought to bear, it’d still be enough to worry even the most stalwart of adventurers. However, the necromantic embalming had also imbued them all with a palpable aura of fear and a virulent touch.

While Autumn could easily handle the aura — basically devouring it to recharge her magic before it could affect her or her friends — she couldn’t do much about the foul, disease-like curses even a slight scratch could inflict.

The prospects of those afflicted were…grim, or so she was told.

Sickly green magic swirled about the Mad Embalmer as he cast another spell, this time upon himself. He rose high into the air and leveled his staff towards the living.

“War!” screamed the Lich. “Unto war, march my warriors of eternity! Unto war, brandish your weapons of bronze and hate! Make the world tremble before the might of the dead!”

The rasp of bone filled the hall as the dead marched as one.

“Wow, he sure loves the sound of his own voice, huh?” Liddie said. She slashed her mithril blade through the air nervously as the dead stomped towards the party in a rough formation. “He say anything interesting?”

Autumn shook her head as she hastily cast her Witch Armor spell. The familiar weight of a shadowy breastplate fell upon her chest and back, while a tattered scarf coiled itself around her throat protectively.

“Nah, just standard mad mage stuff. ‘Arise my minions. Kill all my enemies. Make the world tremble beneath your bony feet.’ That sort of thing. He called us thieves before, but he didn’t seem all that there to me.”

And wasn’t that an interesting tidbit of information.

“We can figure that out later — right now we need to focus,” Nethlia said. “Nelva, I want you up front with me. Make sure the undead don’t get past you. Funnel them somehow if you have to.”

Nelva nodded as she slammed her visor shut. She hefted her enchanted shield between herself and the approaching undead. A kaleidoscope of death shone in the shattered mirror.

“Eme, give us defensive and movement buffs if you’ve got them, but prioritize defense — we can’t risk getting hurt if they’re carrying magical diseases. Feel free to lop off a limb or two if they get too close to you, but try to stay back.”

Eme nodded as well at Nethlia’s quickly barked orders. “One Ballad of the Ornery Tortoise coming right up!” Catching Autumn’s quizzical look, she shrugged. “What? I didn’t name it.”

A hummed tune and melodic lyrics trickled slowly from the bard’s lips. As the languid song filled their ears, so too did it fill their bodies. The party’s skin soon hardened like a tortoise’s shell.

Turning to the others, Nethlia continued on. “Edwyn, any luck with that barrier?”

“Nay, it’s a tough sono’abitch,” Edwyn groused. “Need stronger runes than wit’ I’ve got on me, an’ that blastit necrobollocks is maintainin’ it. It wonae come down unless ye kill ‘em. Or re-kill ‘em. Un-unalive ‘em? Ecch, whatever.”

“Right, I was afraid of that. Focus on hitting the undead with whatever flammable stuff you’ve got. You too, Pyre.”

“We’ll dae what we can,” Edwyn gruffly replied as they dragged Pyre behind Nelva’s cover.

Nethlia now turned to Liddie and Autumn. “I want you two to focus down the Lich while we engage the rest.”

“We can do that,” Autumn replied for both of them. “But, uh, don’t we need to destroy his phylactery to stop him? Like, isn’t that the whole point of becoming a Lich? Even if we vaporize his body, he’ll just reform. And there’s no telling if his barrier will come down if we do.”

“What makes you think I’ll be in here?”

“Because he is. If it wasn’t, he’d have reformed outside ages ago. As he hasn’t, that means it must be in here somewhere. Likely, he’s disguised it as something else.”

Personally, if Autumn was going to make a phylactery, she’d make it either out of something impossible to break, like adamantium if she could get it, or something far more costly to destroy than it was worth just keeping her around, like, say an entire city people were still living in or even the moon. The only limitations she knew of was that it had to be hollow, or have some hollow spaces within it.

While nobody else would get the joke, she’d love it if the adventurers coming to defeat her saw her phylactery and said — “that’s no moon.”

Thankfully for her lack of moon-destroying plans, she doubted the Lich had much to work with on that kind of scale.

“Alright,” Nethlia said, breaking through Autumn's fantastical thoughts, “try to find it between the two of you, but keep that Lich from casting any spells if you can — we’ve enough to deal with as it is.”

There was little else they could say before the guardians of the tomb were upon them.

Nelva met the bronze phalanx with her mirror shield while Nethlia crashed into their side.

Normally, greater undead such as these would be highly resistant, to the point of near immunity, to any non-magical damage that hit them, and as Nethlia’s pole-hammer was unenchanted, her blows ought to bounce off their defenses ineffectually. However, the towering berserker told reality to go fuck itself.

With a wrathful roar, she swept her long weapon through the massed ranks, shattering bones and rotten spears beneath her mighty strength.

Above, the Mad enchanter snarled. Impressive, given his lack of features. “Foul miscreant! Know your betters!”

Raising his foul staff high, he sought to cast deathly magics on those below, but a bolt of forceful magic interrupted him. Unfortunately, a shield similar to the witch’s own sprang up before the jinx, intercepting it.

“You! Thief! I shall flay you alive and make art of your entrails!”

“How lovely,” Autumn muttered.

Before she could send another jinx his way, the Mad Enchanter cast another spell upon himself and vanished before her eyes. Even her Witchsight saw nothing, not that she could see much with all the necromantic energies radiating off the undead.

“Oh, come on! That’s not fair!”

Autumn sent a barrage of jinxes sailing through the spot the Lich had been before he went invisible, hitting nothing, unfortunately.

By her side, Liddie grimaced. “Well, that’s certainly not good. Any way you can spot where he’s gone with those witchy powers of yours?”

“No,” Autumn shook her head, frustrated. “Not with all this magic in the air masking his movements. Hopefully, he’ll have to drop the spell if he wants to cast any other spells. That’s how that one works, right?”

Liddie shrugged. “I dunno. Possibly.”

Autumn took a moment to knock a volley of bronze-tipped arrows out of the air hurriedly with several Forceful Blasts. Even in their low numbers, the undead archers sought to cloud the skies with death.

“I’ll hit him if he does, anyway,” Autumn continued. “If we find his phylactery, we can draw him out.”

“If it’s here.”

“It is. It has to be. Nothing else makes sense. If it’s not…we’re screwed unless we pull down that barrier. You circle around and look for it while I try to find him.”

Liddie scanned the large hall full of rubble and miscellaneous artifacts. “Any idea what it looks like?”

“No clue — it could be literally anything.”

“Helpful. Truly,” Liddie said dryly.

Autumn willfully ignored her and carried on. “However, it’s likely very expensive looking. I don’t know how it works exactly, but as it needs to hold the Lich’s soul, it logically needs to be a magical item. Plus, I don’t know if wizards like them could resist making their soul jar look impressive. It could be a sealed box, a jeweled skull, a ring, or an amulet — anything with an interior space, really.”

“Expensive, you say? I can find expensive,” Liddie grinned. “Try not to hit me while I’m out there.”

With a dramatic flourish of her piratical coat, Liddie spun around and slashed her way through the undead nearest to them towards the shadows. Between blinks, she vanished into the dark.

“I’ll do my best,” Autumn muttered to herself.

Still unable to see the Lich, she instead turned her attention towards the amassing undead.

Fire bloomed brightly in their packed ranks, courtesy of both Pyre and Edwyn. Thrown orbs of alchemical flames and bursting fiery runes caught the dry linens and withered flesh of the undead alight with ease. Frightened by the flames, or at least with an approximation of the emotion, the undead staggered back from the conflagration consuming them.

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Blasts of violet knocked several off their feet to burn helplessly in the sand and dust.

As undead creatures were immune to both fear and necrotic magic, there was little else Autumn could do to help without putting herself or her teammates at risk. She regretted not learning how to disrupt the formation of undeathly energies while she’d been learning how to create them.

Reaching out with her mind, Autumn tried to subvert the Mad Enchanter’s will and wrest control over the Tomb Guard.

However, the Lich had many millennia of experience over her in the art of Necromancy, and it felt like she’d run into a wall of force. Her attempts fizzed away without effect.

Another volley of bronze-tipped arrows whistles over the heads of the burning mummies towards the party.

In response, Autumn unleashed another blast of magic back towards them, smashing them all to splinters.

Her ivory wand roared in her hand. Its detest of undeath empowered her spells beyond their normal limits. For now, at least. Still, she clamped down on the wand’s will with her own, lest it become too wilful and cause her to inadvertently harm her friends in its furor.

It grumbled and fought her for a moment, but she was its master, its creator, and she won the contest of wills.

The Tomb Guard chittered silently as they fought.

Bones broke. Shields shattered. Flesh burned. And armor melted. What few blows they could land, reinforced flesh turned aside.

While many, they were not endless.

Slowly, the party whittled down the warriors of old. If the Lich wanted to drown them in the dead, as he said he would, he’d have to show himself eventually in order to do so. More dead lay ready to be raised in their great mounds.

And show himself he did.

Suddenly, the Mad Embalmer appeared out of thin air and hovered before the party. His face lay twisted in a grim scowl. “You,” he snarled down at the living. “You all should just—”

Jinxes splashed harmlessly across the Lich’s magical shield as he dramatically raised his arms. Behind him, a tidal wave of necrotic energies rose to match his movements.

“— die!”

With a screamed shout, the Lich threw his hands forward and sent the colossal, dire wave crashing towards the party.

“Get behind me!” Nelva shouted.

Autumn sprinted across the sandstone floor towards her, heart pounding her throat as she slid to a stop behind the armored knight. The others piled in beside the witch, throwing themselves at Nelva’s back to brace the brave chevalier against the oncoming wave. With a shout, she slammed the edge of her enchanted shield down into the floor, cracking the stone.

Liddie was nowhere to be seen. Autumn just hoped she’d found somewhere safe to hide.

The necrotic wave washed over the undead, quenching their flames and bolstering their decaying bodies. It roared towards the party, and with an almighty crash, smashed into Nelva’s shield.

Nelva boot’s slid back beneath the sheer power of the magical wave and the force of it pressed her back into those she protected.

Around the shield, the green hellish waters flowed.

With a flash, the Reflection of Kazam held in the knight’s hands activated. From its shattered surface erupted a prismatic spray to match the wave that’d crashed into it. Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet — all the colors of the rainbow washed over the guardians of the tomb towards the shocked Lich.

When the lightshow dimmed, the Lich’s undead army lay burned, electrocuted, frozen, petrified, or simply just gone.

“Wow,” Autumn whistled. “So that’s what that does. I hope Liddie wasn’t caught in that.”

“I’m sure she’s fine. Deal with the spellcaster before he vanishes again,” Nethlia ordered.

“Right.”

Turning away from Nethlia, Autumn leveled her wand towards the apocalyptically mad Mad Embalmer. She focused her magic tightly down her arm and coiled it into the lightning spell she’d yet to master. As a tingling spark built up in her magical channels, she unleashed it towards the Lich still hovering in the air.

A boom of thunder ripped through the room as the spell jumped the distance in a near instant.

Without even looking at her, the Lich cried out — “Counterspell!” — and the lightning fizzled out before it even touched him.

“Motherfucker!” Autumn cursed as she clutched her numb arm to her chest.

“Such paltry magics! I hath learned magic under the pale moon, under the starless sky, under the dry winds and shifting dunes, and you wish to cast me low with this?! You shall pay for this insult to my great self!”

The Lich sent a bombardment of green-tinged magic missiles screaming towards Autumn as he raged.

Autumn hurriedly raised her violet shield and watched as the homing missiles crashed one by one onto the rippling surface. Distracted, she could do nothing to stop the Mad Embalmer from raising yet more of the undead to add to his Tomb Guard.

“Arise minions and destroy my foes!”

With a wave of his staff, the Lich sent out a wave of sickly green light into a hundred corpses littering the chamber. They rose silently, hauntingly, to their feet as that light of Necromancy glimmered in their eyes. Bronze weapons they gathered from the previously fallen as they marched towards their hated foes.

Yet, the foul spellcaster wasn’t done.

Around the room, the tall jackal-headed statues came to life. Painted limbs cracked as the towering Ushabti stepped off their plinths, rocking the ground as they landed. In stony hands, they bore heavy curved swords of stone.

Sweat pooled down Autumn’s spine as she paled at the sight of them. “Are you fucking kidding me?” she whispered under her breath.

“Autumn,” Nethlia barked. “Anything you can do to stop them? Or to keep that Lich from vanishing again?”

Autumn jumped. “Uh, I have a Counterspell scroll of my own I could use, but I was saving that for the fight with the hag. Even if I could learn a word of power from it, there’s no guarantee it’d work the same way. The banishment spell didn’t,” she said, hurriedly.

Nethlia’s brow furrowed as she contemplated her options. Things were looking dire, but it wasn’t unsalvageable yet.

Step by pounding step, the towering statues approached amongst the legion of the dead.

“Hold off on it for now, but use it if the Lich tries to cast something we can’t handle. Something worse than that wave. We just need to buy Liddie some time to find that phylactery. Can you keep casting, or did that lightning knock you out of the fight?”

Autumn flexed her hand. While it still felt somewhat numb, she thought she could cast fine with it all the same. Not that she’d be casting any more lightning bolts anytime soon — the risk of hurting herself was too great.

“I’m good.”

Nethlia nodded tightly before launching herself at the undead to support Nelva’s defense. As soon as she arrived, she tore a painted tower shield free from withered hands and caved in the undead’s skull with an armored headbutt.

A song of alacrity joined the rhythm of combat, lightening limbs as it spilled forth from sweet bardic lips. The party moved faster as they carved, cut, and crushed.

Fire and flame bloomed along the dead legion’s flanks, sending great waves of heat rolling through the ranks of the undead. They shied away from the orange glow, crushing themselves tightly together in the center.

An idea percolated in Autumn’s brain at the sight.

“I’ve got an idea!” she yelled.

“We’re all ears!” Nethlia yelled back as she broke the kneecap of a statuesque Ushabti. It swung back at her with a great stone sword as it crashed down onto one knee.

Luckily, the berserker ducked in time.

“Funnel them as tightly together as you can! And I need someone to distract the Lich so that he can’t counterspell me again!”

With a roar, Nethlia smashed the Ushabti’s head off with a powerful swing of her pole-hammer. “Easier said than done, but we’ll give it a go,” she yelled over the clamber of combat. “Send me a message when you’re ready! I know just the thing!”

Unholy spells splashed violently around Autumn as she rummaged hastily through her belt of holding for what she needed to pull off her plan.

Above her, the Lich continued to hurl both magic and insults down upon the witch and her party.

While she was doing so, the others corralled the undead tightly together with fire and violence. It was hard, dangerous work, especially with how insanely outnumbered they were.

Thankfully, undead were famously stupid.

“We can’t hold them here for long!” Nelva called back as she scrambled back from the marching phalanx.

Finding what she was looking for, Autumn pulled it out of her belt and rushed over to the front. [Now!] she whispered magically into Nethlia’s mind. [Distract him!]

Nethlia needed no other encouragement. Reaching forward into the phalanx, she tore a spear free from undead hands and hurled it towards the hovering Lich like an Olympic javelineer. The spear sailed through the air unerringly towards its target.

Surprised, the Mad Embalmer quickly flew out of the way, only to have another spear thrown accurately towards him.

So distracted was he, that he did not see as Autumn unrolled a spell scroll and read the words emblazoned upon it.

When they’d looted the necromancer’s tower, Autumn had taken four scrolls from that gilded vault. The banishment scroll she’d used to rid themselves of the undead elemental tied to the black cauldron. A Counterspell and Planar Binding spell scroll she intended to use against the hag.

And finally, Dragon’s Breath.

As the scroll burned away in Autumn’s hands, she spoke the word of power towards the undead arrayed before her.

“Burn.”

Roaring from the witch’s mouth came a cone of great dragon fire, hotter than a god’s forge or even the devil’s own hellfire. It incinerated the undead in an instant and turned the statues to naught but molten glass. The air within the mortuary chamber boiled as the stream of flame continued to roar. It felt like an age had passed before the inferno ceased, but it couldn’t have been more than a few seconds at most.

Autumn bent over as she hacked out plumes of smoke.

“I hope — cough — I hope that doesn’t — cough — happen every time I do that,” Autumn finally coughed out, wisps of dark smoke streaming out of her mouth as she spoke.

“You! You! Gahhh!” The Mad Embalmer let out an inarticulate scream of rage at seeing his army undone.

Unfortunately for his blood-pressure, non-existent as it was, that wasn’t all the bad news he was to receive.

Across the smokey chamber, Liddie appeared holding a gilded canopic jar aloft. “Hey!” she yelled, drawing everyone’s attention. “Is this it?!”

The Lich’s milky eyes bulged at seeing his phylactery held in the pirate’s hands. Screaming, he darted towards her through the air.

“Take your filthy paws off my soul jar, damnable hellspawn!”

Liddie laughed as she danced out of the Lich’s way. “Hah! I guess I was right! I wasn’t even sure it was it! What an idiot! He fell for the oldest trick in the book.”

“Just destroy it!” Nethlia roared as she rushed towards the Lich.

“I tried! It didn’t work! I need something sharper than mithril!”

As Autumn straightened up, her eyes fell upon the dragon blade held loosely in Eme’s hands. Blinking the smoke out of her eyes, she fluttered her gaze between the snow sword and the soul jar.

“Eme, your blade — cough, cough — you need to cut the jar.”

Eme started at Autumn’s hacked words. She glanced down at the blade in her hand — the Snow Demon’s Fang, Yukioni no kiba, in her native tongue. A blade made from a dragon’s tooth. If anything could cut the lich’s phylactery, it was that. Her dragonbone fingers clenched tightly around the tsuba-less, white-wrapped hilt as her eyes filled with a steely resolve.

“You can count on me!”

Like the wind was at her feet, she sprinted towards the fight, having resheathed her blade quickly.

Autumn doggedly followed in her footsteps, the others not too far behind.

Eme slid to a stop once she’d come as close enough to the pirate currently dodging devastating spells as she dared. Setting her feet apart, she grasped her blade’s hilt with one hand and the saya, the sheathe, in the other.

“Liddie! Over here!” she called.

Hearing the catgirl bard’s call and seeing what she intended to do, Liddie grinned and lobbed the phylactery underhand towards her.

Snarling, the Lich sped through the air towards it.

Eme closed her eyes. Crouching low, she listened to the music of the world. She listened to the rapid beat of her heart, to the rush of wind as the jar hurtled towards her, to the singing of her blade as it waited in its sheathe for the perfect moment to strike.

She listened.

And when it all aligned, when the song became one, she drew her blade in a flash.

For a moment, Eme thought she’d missed. Her blade had cut so cleanly through the air that it wasn’t until she opened her eyes that she saw that she’d cut the soul jar perfectly in half.

The Lich’s fingers had barely brushed the phylactery when she’d struck.

As the two halves fell, they let out a keening whine. They exploded with a substantial force, sending all of them, including the Lich, tumbling across the ashy ground.

Autumn groaned as she lay on her back, staring up at the stone ceiling with stars flashing in her eyes.

Beside her, the ancient Lich rose. His withered body shook with an incalculable rage. He stared down at Autumn as the others tried to claw themselves to their feet. Pointing a finger towards the downed witch, he spoke with such venom, such hate, that it felt like a physical thing.

“You have cost me dearly, thief. Do you have any idea how hard a soul jar is to make? Do you know what I had to do to get it? No, you are an ignorant child. You are but fuel for my art. An ingredient. I would have loved to take you apart and put you back together, but now? Now you’ll just die. Finger of D—”

“Oh, shut up and just Burn already!”

The flames engulfed the Lich.