Published at 1st of December 2023 10:41 am

Chapter 69 The Eternal Flame

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Even as the first waves of dwarves charged at him, the Lich began to flex and move in the unfamiliar body. It had only been the last few months that it had begun using drudges to practice walking and moving for the day when it finally had a body again. Not that it saw a need for such things normally. It was more efficient for it to sit there on its throne as the nerve center for the vast web of activity than to focus all its attention on a single place like this, but this was too important to let Krulm’venor deny him such a prize. So, the Lich would tear its enemies apart itself.

It was clumsy and slow as it moved but not as slow as the creatures of flesh that surrounded it. Krulm’venor could have burned them all to ashes, but it lacked the flames of the other spirit, and its shadows would not be effective until the infernal light was doused, so it would do this the hard way.

The Lich tapped his vast magical reserve to dampen the effect on him, as the infinite well of shadows in his soul counteracted the light. It would not make for an offensive weapon just now, but it would ablate the damage that the searing radiance inflicted on it so casually.

The first warrior to attack it with a heavy war hammer managed to actually hit the Lich because it was too distracted with adjusting mana flows and trying to stay upright as it integrated with the metal skeleton. The blow was hard enough to crush a normal man’s skull, but it just made the Lich take half a step back as it threatened to fall over before it lashed out in rage, taking his attacker’s head clean off with a casual backhand.

“You will not touch me!” the Lich shouted loudly enough to echo.

This was another reason that it didn’t care for bodies. Safe in its throne room, it could never be harmed, but here? Now? One of these filthy creatures might actually damage it, and that was intolerable. It had touched tens of thousands of lives, but none of them were permitted to do the same to it. The thought was completely unacceptable, and the Lich would not stand for it.

When the next dwarf swung his axe at it, the Lich was ready and stepped to the side before he snapped the presumptuous warrior’s neck. Looking around the room, it grew weary just thinking about just how many times it would have to do something so demeaning. There were dozens of warriors still alive, and except for a few priests praying at an altar near the far wall, they were all bent on chopping the Lich into pieces if they could. If it only had full access to its shadow magic, it could have already ripped everyone’s souls from their bodies.

The Lich grabbed the nearest warrior by his arm and swung him about like a club, knocking the others out of its way as it continued toward the center of the room. It had made its decision. It would destroy the light first and then fight the dwarves in the dark. They tried to stop it, of course, but their attacks, though well coordinated, were far less threatening than the intensity of the light as it got closer and closer to the man-sized brazier in the center of the room.

The Lich left a trail of corpses in its wake as it climbed the dais, and by the time it stood at the very threshold of the eternal flame, its steel bones were smoldering and sparking, while the annihilation of opposite elements of dark and light that was occurring, emitted a foul black smoke from the parts of it that were steadily burning away. This forced the Lich to pour out even more power just to keep its hands from disintegrating as it grasped the lip and flipped the thing over. As it did so, it could hear Krulm’venor screaming in its mind, which was a welcome sound. But the Lich was so focused on gloating to the godling that it almost missed the sound of the warhammer flying towards it.

The Lich saw the danger at the last moment, but it was too late to dodge. That was just as well because it was too late for whomever had thrown the glowing weapon to stop the Lich. At the moment of impact, the incandescent object was the only light it could see, but as it slammed into the Lich’s chest, knocking it off the dais and sending it twenty feet across the room, it could see a second source of light, too: the thing that had thrown the weapon.

“Begone, foul demon!” the glowing dwarf roared. “My light is not yours to dampen!”

The Lich forced itself to stand, noting that several of its ribs had been cracked as it felt its own pain for the first time since the day that it died. It didn’t like the sensation, though it did feel a flash of fear. Was a god itself confronting it? That wasn’t supposed to happen yet. It wasn’t the plan, and the Lich wasn’t sure it would be able to handle such a thing. However, when it looked more closely, it saw what had happened. This was not a god. This was a mortal that had been infused with the powers of their deity in the same way it channeled its shadows through Krulm’venor and Oroza so often.

That was a more manageable threat, it decided as the glowing dwarf walked towards it.

“You stand on the bones of heroes, and you shall die for desecrating them!” it called out, slamming the butt of its warhammer on the ground.

That was no mere gesture. The Lich could feel the wave of energy that rippled outward in all directions. Then, seconds later, the ghosts of the very heroes that were buried in the ornamental tombs around the edge of the temple began to rise from their graves and pick up their weapons.

“You cannot kill me,” the Lich said as it walked towards its enemy, noticing that it was now limping slightly from the mighty blow. “You cannot kill death, nor can you use the dead against it!”

The Lich reached out and began to vie for control of the legion of translucent warriors advancing on it. If nothing else, it was a good gauge for the power of the thing that opposed it. It wasn’t impressed, though. Standing there in the nearly dark room, it couldn’t quite usurp that power because of the consecrated ground that weakened it, but its dwarvish enemy couldn’t seem to fight it off either, and one by one, the ghostly warriors froze in place as the two of them tugged at the souls in a contest of control in which they were for the moment fairly evenly matched.

“Impertinent dog!” the avatar of the All-Father yelled. "You dare to touch the souls of my heroes!”

“You imperious buffoon,” the Lich responded. “Dare you fight me in a place so dark?”

The avatar realized its mistake and flared its aura all the brighter for it, but the Lich was already planning a terrible attack. It opened its mouth, and instead of screaming, a thousand of the shadows it had devoured in Ghen’tal vomited forth. The shadowy warriors flickered to life and charged at the glowing avatar, each wearing the face of a dwarf they’d devoured.

Warriors of pure shadow would never reach their goal with that much light pouring off the dwarf. They weren’t supposed to, though. They were just a distraction to weaken the light’s hold on the ghosts it had raised. While they swarmed the avatar, it cast its gaze around the room until it found one of the ghosts with a crossbow. The weakness of the avatar was not in the god that puppeted it but the fragile vessel that held so much power.

So, the Lich poured its indomitable will into that single spirit, crushing its ability to resist. Then, in a single instant, it turned and shot its bolt not at the metal skeleton on the dais but at the servant of its own god. The Lich would have smiled then if it had possessed lips. It watched the bolt fly through the air just as the heavenly avatar was finishing off the last of its shadowy horde penetrating the protective bubble of light, piercing the mortal beneath just above the sternum.

“You monster!” the thing cried out. “You think this can stop a god with healing powers that you’ll never understand? You—”

The bolt had just been one more distraction. It had seen the healing magics of Siddrim in great detail now, and it knew such a blow was nowhere near mortal, but every wound and distraction further weakened its hold on its own ghostly minions, and as the avatar paused to pull out the bolt and heal the wound the Lich was turning one ghostly warrior after another to its side.

By the time the avatar of light was aware of what had happened, it was badly outnumbered, and the Lich’s new forces were advancing. What happened next was not a battle but a slaughter. The living could not hope to face the dead, and some wouldn’t even raise a weapon against a hero they had such a high opinion of, but that would not save them, and one by one, life was massacred in the room until the only person still breathing was the dwarven avatar.

He’d done everything he could to save himself, and his skin was now bronze, and the healing magics kept a dozen fatal wounds from overpowering him, but he no longer had a chance. Even as the Lich closed in on him with an utterly normal battle axe, the dying avatar tried to overwhelm him with blasts of holy light and forge fires. The latter was useless, and the former was painful, though hardly dangerous.

“The All-Father will hunt you down, you monster!” the avatar of the divine said while the cruel, twisted skeleton stood above him. "He will find you, and you’ll—”

Those were its last words, and the Lich clumsily brought the axe down on the man’s head, splitting it in two.

“I hope he does,” the Lich rasped, “You can tell your All-Father that I’m coming for him next.”

As the avatar died and the Lich devoured the last of the glowing spirits, it was finally once more alone in the dark with only the tiny guttering flame of Krulm’venor to provide any light at all.

The godling had mentioned that the shadows were only kept away by the light that the Lich had now extinguished, so it had expected that something might happen next, but the scale surprised even it. As the lights went out, suddenly, a tide of shadows swept into the building. Windows shattered, and some of the crystal skulls were knocked from their places of honor onto the catwalks in front of them as an umbric tide swept into the building like a physical thing.

These creatures had no idea what it had done to their kind in the last place it had found them, as there had been no survivors, but here the things were much more numerous. How many centuries had they stirred and paced at the edge of the light, waiting for their chance to devour the dwarven souls laid to rest here, the Lich wondered.

It didn’t know, but it knew that they would not have a chance to steal its feast, and just like last time, it opened up the yawning whirlpool of power in its soul and devoured the endless tide before it even understood what was happening. After the first few seconds, the furthest shadows started to flee. They would be the only ones to escape because even as the Lich was enveloped in hoarfrost and ice, its hunger grew, and its reach expanded. It hadn’t even touched the dwarven souls, but it would once it had finished dealing with these delicious creatures.

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