Chapter 3: An Unpleasant Opportunity

  ++ I was already a boy of three by the time I made my earliest, clumsy successes in the field of magic, remarkably swift progress despite my being entirely self-taught. Not that I knew this myself of course, I simply had no reference.

  When I began to consciously and deliberately manipulate mana I cannot quite recall, due to my youth at the time, but I know that by the time I was able to run and eat without the assistance of my parents, controlling magic was as easy to me as breathing.++

  From the writings of Isabel Vornholt, ‘The Great Lich’. 1,891 A.E

  Finding out what had become of my legacy was, if nothing else, exceptionally strong motivation. By the time my parents returned me to our mansion, I had already gathered my thoughts and resolved to do all in my power to escape from this meaty prison of mine. On the one hand, I still had no practical way of doing that save for just waiting until it aged into adulthood naturally. On the other hand, a mere childhood was literally no time at all compared to what I had endured in my previous jail…and I could get a lot done while I waited for it to end.

  My vocabulary improved constantly, in no small part due to a stroke of luck on my end. My mother had apparently noticed me studying the text of those books that had been handed out in what I now recognised as a church, because she had taken to sitting me on her lap and reading to me before bed.

  Or, I should say, before she fell asleep, and allowed me even more free time to practice my magic. With my days and nights passing largely spent in these two kinds of studies, I was making rapid progress in both magic and language. I was also learning more about the world at large, and much of that was another source of fuel for my endlessly-growing anger.

  I featured heavily in the children’s stories of this new time period, and my depiction was just as offensive as was the one found in religious scripture.

  Lord Dread, at least, was a recorded name, they had gotten that much right. Everything else though…pitifully inaccurate. Stories told of me as some demonic force, something beyond human born in the darkest pits, a foil to the Gods. They erased all mention of my study and careful accumulation of power, replacing it with a story of some dull monster.

  And the tales they told of my defeat were more offensive still.

  To believe these accounts at face value, I was bested by some mouth-breathing ‘hero’. A knight in shining armour, or a king leading his men-at-arms or, in the most egregious of cases, some illiterate, feces-eating, urine-drinking, window-licking, slack-jawed, knuckle-dragging, lead-chewing, sheep-sodomizing farm boy who, in every version I had read, somehow lacked the basic cognitive function to do anything with his life besides return to his stupid farm after defeating me.

  Mixed in with all the infuriating lies and propaganda, I did at least learn a fair amount of practical information. I learned that the Gods still very much held sway over this world, that much was clear from the way they were mentioned and, of course, from the fact that I had attended a ceremony in a church dedicated to them. More specifically, I knew now that their influence was widespread and something entirely baked into this ‘Empire of Garamon’ I had found myself born into.

  Ignoring the regional priests, who appeared to do nothing and be nothing, I found constant mention of Godtouched and Demigods in my mother’s stories. This was not conclusive on its own, naturally, but as I gained further mastery of both the written word, and wriggling across carpets like some sort of frightened invertebrate, I was soon able to seize books of my own to read. This doubled as practice for my magical abilities, too, as my infantile limbs could not actually manipulate the tomes or their pages without arcane aid yet.

  Unfortunately, I still lacked the power to obliterate those who defied me. As a result, my efforts to read were periodically interrupted when someone—usually my interfering mother—would catch me in the act and gently confiscate the book, citing a fear that I would damage it.

  Days ago, this would have been concerning for me. I had been initially worried about the need to blend in and avoid attention from the Gods’ spies, now, though, seeing how mutated my story had become in the history books, I knew better.

  It did not matter if I was caught reading or speaking beyond my years, because the idiots who lived under my ancient enemies’ rule would not know how to identify the real Lord Dread if I were to stand before them in my full power. Recognising me as an infant? It was preposterous.

  And that was not all, I soon found that I did not even have anything to fear from more accidental risks of discovery. Exorcisms and basic precautions like them were rare and unheard of, and the closest thing I found to texts detailing the possession of children were accounts on how cranial measurements could predict undesirable behaviour. As ridiculous as I might have expected, but very good for me.

  The only thing I was still hesitant to be caught doing was magic. That, still, I had yet to find some way of predicting the reaction of. There was little tell of magicians in the books I had been able to pilfer from the mansion’s library, and they were not mentioned as much as I would have expected in the histories. To my mind, that was good cause to suspect that the wielders of magic were not well treated in this society.

  Still, I continued training at it, and my powers kept growing.

  Another consequence of my reading up on history was that I was able to expand my vocabulary faster than ever, and while I had earlier struggled with understanding what went on in new situations, that I had not already experienced and memorised the words used around, that weakness was now all but gone gone. As a result, I took no time at all to understand when, roughly a week after my first trip to church, I heard my parents discussing that my mother was once again pregnant. . I did not care about this information, and so I dismissed it. What I did care about was learning more of my surroundings, and so I made myself continue practicing my humiliating slither at every chance I had until I could, at the very least, make my way across more than just individual rooms unassisted.

  Doors were no problem now, fortunately. Using mana, I could just about force them open with the levels of projected force I was now capable of mustering. Making a habit of doing it would eventually tire me, as I needed to exert my maximum output to do so, but it was never more than a few moments of work at a time. The handles were the tricker part, but still manageable.

  For the next few months I developed something of a reputation among my parents’ household as an escape artist, as none of them could fathom how exactly an infant incapable of even walking could get around as I did. This was the closest thing to my due respect I had yet to receive, and I accepted it for what it was. More pressingly, though, I seized whatever information I could by brute force.

  There are not many places a creature of my size could not hide in that old estate, and my frequent searches for knowledge in the mansion’s library had made me more than a little adept at sneaking around the bumbling oafs who served as my family’s staff. What helped further was that I had chance to observe the structure thoroughly. As said already, the building itself was what I now know to be called a mansion, and though it was exceptionally large it was also lightly occupied. Even with a full staff of servants and workers, any given room was likely to be empty at any given time.

  In my case, this was a mixed blessing. It meant I had my freedom to move and hide as I pleased, and the utter distress this brought to my mother as she searched for her missing baby was the greatest entertainment I had. However, it also meant that I had a hard time finding my way towards human conversations, which were easily my greatest source of knowledge now that I had exhausted all of the books within easy reach.

  All the same, I was still learning over time. I learned, for instance, that my father was considered to be a man of high station in our nation, the country of Garamon for which our people’s empire was named. And it was an empire, the biggest I had ever seen. Certainly not when I was human, and not even in the millennia I spent as a lich.

  Advancing time brought changes, yes, but to hear the description of trade and battle in countries separated from me by thousands of miles was still a frightful experience.

  One that took some time to unravel, too. Even now I did not know where many of these places actually were, and my eavesdropping took months before I finally started to work it all out. By the time I had something close to an understanding of this new world’s geography, I was already walking.

  This was another humiliation. Though I could control my limbs far better than was normal for a child of my body’s age, they were still ultimately clumsy things. I was not fully incapable of fine movements anymore, yet there was an undoubtable awkwardness that came as much from my growth rate as anything else. Legs that I had grown comfortable with being one length would suddenly be an inch longer just weeks or even days later, catching on things I had not expected and tripping their master without warning.

  My parents, and the people of the household, found this terribly amusing, naturally. They found it even more amusing when I spoke, because I was forced into using broken words and sentences as I practiced properly forming sounds with a mouth and tongue for the first time in aeons.

  Even then, a child of merely fifteen months being able to communicate verbally as I did was far from normal. I swiftly became the pride of my idiotic parents, and was soon subjected to a new torture; being paraded around at balls and social affairs.

  This was, though unpleasant, nonetheless a new opportunity. At such events, where attendees inevitably became chatty with alcohol, I was able to hear adult conversation with far less guarding around it than a mere child would usually be permitted to, especially a child at the weekly church sessions I was subjected to.

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  I soaked up discussions of politics and economics, both of which I found interesting, as well as countless trivialities that, although entirely boring to me, were nonetheless extra context important to learning more of my new surroundings. I paid more attention than I let on, and when a particular discussion seemed to be less intriguing than an interaction I saw nearby I would motivate my mother to carry me away with a few choice utterances.

  Even where I was unable to hear anything of note, I saw plenty. The rooms that held these social gatherings all seemed to be large and well decorated. As I had known already, my parents were of some sort of noble class in Garamon, owning large swathes of land alongside the local city—called Lachfel. Within Lachfel, few people dressed as finely or spent as easily as they did, but many of the guests I saw at these new events were a match for them in both regards.

  So these were gatherings of the social elite, another chance to learn more. I soaked up knowledge as always and played along with my moronic parents’ desire to show off my speech. I was starting to suspect now that I had not managed to feign infancy as well as I would have hoped, admittedly being rather under-exposed to human babies due to my previous choice of career as Lich King. All the same, I faced no issues from my slip and life continued smoothly.

  What made my life less smooth and exponentially more complicated was the return of Agrian the Younger, who was apparently my new older brother.

  Agrian II was a good five years my senior, which left him still shy of seven years’ age. Despite this, he had already developed into one of the more repugnant living creatures I have ever had the displeasure of encountering. That is including my many thousands of years existing as a lich, to be clear.

  While I still struggled with waddling around on my fat, unresponsive legs, the little nightmare who called himself my brother could practically sprint. He stood two full heads taller than me and was likely more than double my weight, but lacked most of the fat that kept my form so needlessly heavy. Indeed, moving was not even difficult for him. He could run around for fun.

  But the boy’s physical features were by far the least noteworthy thing about him. The first quality I actually saw when we met, the one that left me actually speechless at the sight of him, was the aura of magical power welling around his body. A magician of average talent could have trained from birth, as I did, and would still have attained only one tenth the power I saw in Agrian the Younger by the time they were his age. The aura of mana blossomed around him like a fire. I found myself wondering what sort of mental paragon I had just encountered, to have so much influence over the arcane..

  The first thing he did, upon seeing me standing before him as our parents introduced us, was simply walk over and shove me down with a grin on his face.

  Our father found this terribly amusing, while our mother found it much less so. Agrian received a stern talking to, particularly after the Baron was glared into agreement by his wife, and eventually the boy shot me a look and mumbled out an apology.

  From that moment onwards, it seemed, we were enemies. I would have liked to be consulted about this fact, but then I was rather used to being denied choices by this stage.

  At his age, magical genius or not, Agrian still had little to no impulse control and would essentially act out any random urge he experienced at the moment of experiencing it. This was not good for me, as it meant that any time he found himself bothered by my presence—which was often—he would do something to punish me for it. Invariably something physical, and usually in some way painful.

  Shoves were common, but the boy was also rapidly innovating his arsenal to incorporate slaps, close-fisted strikes that were not quite punches, and simply tackling me to send us both crashing down. None of these actually managed to badly hurt me, fortunately, but all of them stung my pride. I tolerated this ongoing abuse, sometimes punished but rarely to any significant degree, while I tried to continue my training in spite of it.

  Eventually, I came to realise that Agrian II had no intention of even leaving me in the privacy of my own room for those brief windows where I could work on my magic without oversight.

  This was not going to end, not if Agrian II was left to his own devices. My father considered it to be good sport, laughing more than frowning and simply noting how much of a liking Agrian had taken to me. My mother, on the other hand, was distraught, but ultimately incapable of lifting a finger. She could pressure my father, and try to sway him with appeals or threats of uncomfortable family dinners, but ultimately had no actual control. He was the man of the house, and she the woman. This did not have promising implications for my own future in a female body, but had more immediately problematic effects on the amount of time I was spending on the ground after being bowled over by a hairless baboon.

  Ordinarily, my response to this predicament would have been simple; I would have killed the devil-child to keep him from tormenting me. Unfortunately, that was not a realistic option at the moment. My mother was already pregnant again, and I knew that I would be expected to deal with other children from other families eventually too. Ultimately, if people who irritated me consistently died or went missing, it would cause a level of disruption and paranoia that might make my life difficult.

  No, I needed a less invasive solution here.

  Fortunately for me, six year-olds are not the most complicated of creatures. Agrian continued his usual horrors as normal, and I bided my time until the two of us were alone. Then I made my move to end things.

  We were in one of the spare rooms, which I had picked up a habit of occupying while I focused on strengthening my magic. I had recently, finally, crossed the threshold of mustering one hundred vis, and could now maintain a maximum output of approximately ten dozen for a few minutes at a time. Even I was wary about doing so with physical effects, for one hundred and twenty vis was at the point where I might well be a threat to my environment. Force of that level could knock down furniture from well beyond my reach, and conjured heat might light bedsheets on fire.

  I could also change the nature of my mana enough to muster electricity, and even that left the air reeking as it tore through it in sharp arcs.

  Agrian was not privy to any of this of course, as far as he knew I was simply ‘weird’ in enjoying isolation for no reason. Another infraction he sought to punish me for.

  “What are you doing, stupid girl?!” He spoke in a clumsy, grunting manner that rather reminded me of a chimpanzee who had been forcibly and painfully endowed with the power of speech. Normally I did not respond to his mindless babbling, of course, but if my plan was to work now I would need to

  “I am doing magic,” I told him. It felt oddly freeing to speak. I was unable to exercise the full breadth of my vocabulary, naturally, as the being I spoke to was still but an idiot child, and yet compared to the monosyllabic gurgling my disguise had largely limited me to, this felt like I was exchanging theorems.

  And as you might expect, it went entirely unappreciated by Agrian. He merely scowled at me.

  “Liar! Babies can’t do magic, what are you doing?” he was not remotely surprised to see me speak so well, I thought, probably having heard talk of my advanced mastery over language already. Or maybe he had not, and was simply too ignorant and youthful to even be aware of how odd it was.

  “I can,” I replied evenly. Instead of attempting to argue, which I knew would not work, I simply extended a hand and began pushing out mana. Not a lot, I kept it limited to a mere dozen or so vis. Even that was enough to conjure a steady flame perhaps twice the size of my own palm, hovering just above the skin and putting out a shocking amount of heat. At this point, my main worry was that I might accidentally injure this pathetically fragile body of mine through practice. In the past, I had enjoyed far more resilience than I did now.

  But in the short term, I was more concerned with Agrian’s response to what he saw of me. And that response was…promising. In an instant his anger faded away, replaced with fascination as he stared at the flame.

  “You can do magic,” he mumbled. The boy did not look as surprised as I would have usually expected. I knew why of course, and even if I had not, what he did moments later would have shown me. Agrian raised his own hand and conjured his own flame with a grin. It was considerably larger than my own. “So can I!”

  I will admit, feelings of rivalry and bitterness towards a six year-old child are not the most dignified sensation for the inventor of necromancy to experience. However, in my defence, I would note that whatever dignity I once possessed had left my body somewhere around the first time I required assistance to clean fecal matter from my backside.

  I buried those feelings nonetheless, because they were distracting, and took the chance to study my brother’s display. For raw power, Agrian seemed to be my rough equal, unless he was holding back. That seemed likely as he was also straining himself less; where I was trembling slightly with the mental effort of focusing my power, Agrian looked as though he could have sustained a second flame just as easily. Even knowing what I did of his mana reserves, I must admit to being surprised by the boy’s output and mastery.

  Not a hair short of genius.

  “When did you start learning?” I asked Agrian. He shrugged, apparently disinterested in that way that only young children can be.

  “Don’t remember.”

  “Oh, I asked daddy before and he told me. I wanted to see if you remembered though, mummy said that you have a very good memory and that you would know.” It was a painfully obvious taunt, but then if there is one advantage to dealing with children it is the lack of need for subtlety.

  “I started learning when I was three!” Agrian told me at once. “Before you came along.”

  Not close to my own talent, naturally, but still gifted enough that I found myself surprised.

  “How did you learn magic?” Agrian asked me, staring with the sort of unmasked curiosity I might have expected from a dog, or perhaps a cow.

  “I do not know,” I told him. He scowled at that.

  “Stupid girl!”

  As irksome as he was, I found my idiotic brother a good deal more easily handled after this revelation. Apparently his fascination with magic was no less than mine had been, back when I discovered it in my own—original—childhood.

  And now that I had verified that Agrian the Younger possessed a talent to go along with that enthusiasm, I became more invested in where he had been and why we were only recently meeting. I did some digging in my usual way, prompting conversations as well as I could while limited to single syllables and making a good deal of inferences to piece things together slowly.

  He had been sent to stay with a relative of the family, a scholar of the arcane, for reasons that were patently obvious. Apparently this uncle of ours—Uncle Edwin—had been instructing the boy since quite some time before my rebirth. That went some way to explaining the ridiculous amount of liberties he had been granted, from our parents’ perspective they were enjoying a rare visit from their eldest son,

  He must have been used to seeing others perform magic, and no doubt all of them were far older than him. That explained why he had responded so well to my own demonstration—it was likely the first time he had ever seen physically significant magic from one his own age, let alone younger.

  This was also fortunate for me. My original plan had been to simply overpower and terrorise the boy with my magic, rendering his six-year-old’s strength useless. Now I knew that it may not have even worked, I could not even be sure of overcoming him in a contest of the arcane. But the revelation of my brother’s skill was, itself, noteworthy.

  With that in mind, I decided a new course of action as well. A new entry onto the list of ways I would amass power.

  Firstly, I needed to reveal my own magic to our parents in as spectacular a fashion as I could to gain whatever social power came from being a renowned prodigy myself. Second, I needed to further study my father’s mysterious physical powers and find a way to replicate them.

  And third was my work with Agrian.

  Agrian was a young and gifted spellcaster, and I had seen with my own eyes how much damage could arise from such a thing left unattended and to develop on his own. My third path to power was him. I began, then, my long and arduous work of trying to tutor my elder brother.

  Because if I was to spend the next twenty miserable years growing up within this family, I would make sure it was the strongest family it could be.