++Before you begin reading my account, you must be equipped with certain knowledge. That of the world into which I was born, and how it compares with the more modern age I was later reborn into. To put it shortly, it does not.
To put it in more detail…I was what would now be referred to as ‘a caveman’. My people were not unintelligent, but their technology was limited to tanning hides and working wood or stone. Even basic metallurgy was beyond our understanding, for the time being. They were not an unhappy lot, but were ignorant about much of the world and prone to superstition.
This latter fact was fateful in my case, because it was what led to me growing up known as a ‘witch’.++
- From the writings of Isabel Vornholt, ‘The Great Lich’. 1,891 A.E
A week after my birth, or rebirth, I was still adjusting to the uncomfortable changes of my new form.
Fortunately, my mind was intact. A lich’s intellect is not exactly stronger than that of a mundane human, rather it would be more accurate to call it less limited. Without physical brains, confined by the inefficiencies of solid matter and flesh, our minds can expand endlessly and absorb information without limit. Rather than degrading over time, our memory capacity actually improves. For one of my age, I had access to essentially every memory I would experience after my first few thousand years of existence.
These memories were, by volume, essentially one hundred percent just me drifting in a universe-sized sensory deprivation tank, but it was good to know that I could still store more useful information in the future when needed.
In the future, not right away. Not until I could actually gain information. My body was tiny, vulnerable and, with its primitive nervous tissue still developing, too unwieldy for me to even move properly at will. But by far my greatest limitation was the simple fact that I did not speak the language of my parents.
They talked to and around me, gazing at me with smiling faces and bright eyes, but their babbling was entirely beyond my understanding. That, above all else, I would have to fix.
Learning a new language without instruction, or any existing translation into your own, is of course a difficult thing. Not impossible though, far from it. And given that I already had no choice but to sit around for hours on end witnessing the inane prattle of my parents, I did not even need to inconvenience myself in any particular way to go about doing it.
It helps, of course, to have my mental faculties, and my unusually fast-developed senses.
I committed sounds to memory, compiling a long list of noises and patterns in which those noises might be made. I then paid attention to see what common elements were present during each use of a given sound or set of sounds. Progress was not fast, as I was ultimately at the mercy of which words my body’s parents chose to use, but I was confident that, with due attention, I would be able to acquire this language before long.
More irritating than my uncomprehension, however, was the way I was being treated. I was Lord Dread, the greatest genius of magic who had ever existed, the inventor of necromancy and lichdom, the master of the universe. And I was being swaddled by the woman I could only assume to be my new body’s biological mother, who looked down on me as she held me against her chest, cooing and beaming as if it were some mundane infant she held, and not the ruler of all mankind!
This was only the beginning of my indignities.
I lacked the ability to control even my own bowels, and when my body needed to expel waste, it did so whether I intended it to or not. Had I known every word my parents did, I would still have lacked the physical ability to use them in complete sentences, so when I would periodically soil myself, I could communicate this fact only…by crying.
And then there was my food, or lack thereof. I was a baby. Babies cannot eat solids, nor digest them. Babies, newborn as I was, can take only one kind of food. And so I, Lord Dread, the most powerful lich to ever exist and the challenger of the Gods, would suckle upon the teat of a woman hundreds of times less knowledgeable than myself and a million times less magically gifted. I would do this until I was full, at which point I would announce the fact only by spluttering and coughing up a spray of the warm fluid onto my face and her breast.
She would smile as I did this, like my humiliation was terribly amusing.
Of course, I tolerated these indignities as I had no other choice. Even coaxed them on, because I realised that if I did not feed and sustain this new body then it would simply die, and I may well find my essence drawn back to the prison I’d spent so many eternities in. This, in the end, was yet another humiliation, because as established earlier I could not yet talk. I could not, when hungry, simply open my mouth and call out; ‘Woman, I hunger, present your nipples!’, no. I had to simply cry.
Like an infant.
But there are benefits to infancy, few and far between as they were. If I could be certain of one thing in my current state, it was being considered unthreatening and left in peace. So long as I continued to pass, in the eyes of those around me, as no more than an ordinary baby. I acted the part as best as I could, taking advantage of my new body’s birth parents and their desire to protect it.
It needled me to be so fundamentally helpless, naturally, but given that it was entirely beyond my control I simply learned to tolerate it. Either I would survive my infancy or I would not, and it seemed that for the time being there was little I could do to affect that outcome.
So instead, when I was left alone by my parents slumbering or busying themselves with work in rooms I could not see, I kept myself occupied by the most important thing I could do. The most important thing any being, anywhere, could do.
I returned to my practice of magic.
Let me say that it was agony at first, to see how withered my powers had become. The mind and memory was unaffected, but to see what pitiable threads of power my will could bind, while recalling the magical maelstroms I had once called on, was among the most miserable experiences of my existence. I soldiered on, driven by the urge to regain my past strength.
When weaving magic, there are at the simplest level two things that matter for it; ‘nature’ and ‘power’. The former I have touched on already, it determines the properties that your shaped mana will take on when manifesting a physical effect.
The latter is rather more simple, but no less important. It determines how intense the resultant effect actually is. Raw power is the difference between a fireball that ignites a tree, and one that burns down half a forest.
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I had long ago devised units of measurement for both nature and power, but they operated on such a vast scale that they were somewhat useless in my current condition. If nothing else, being an infant, and thus sharing the same level of starting power as any other human newborn, meant that I had an excellent chance to form new ones based upon a more universal standard.
I first worked to see what my absolute limit was in terms of power output, when straining to my maximum. I referred to this as one ‘vis’. Then I found out what I could manage comfortably, almost without distraction. This I called an ‘uncia’, and there were exactly twelve uncias in one vis. Working at my fullest, I could sustain a maximum exertion of one vis for no more than ten seconds.
That would not be optimal for training however, so instead I deliberately limited myself to briefer bursts of only ten uncias. If I outputted my full power too often I would not grow as fast as I could, indeed I had already learned that doing so would permanently damage my Vessel and limit what I might achieve in the future.
So I trained sensibly instead.
I would maintain a long and exerted effort of pushing myself at one quarter-vis, holding this magical strain for one hour. After that I would force myself to last a minute at ten uncias, then I would drop myself down to a mere uncia and maintain it until I was exhausted.
The harsh and rapid burn of near-maximum output left my Vessel feeling as though it were cracking apart at the seams, while maintaining the weaker levels strained it less, keeping it just as engaged as if I were hitting my limit, but without any of the tangible damage done by that extreme.
And when I was finished with both those levels of strain, I allowed myself to rest until such time as I felt the need to sleep.
Unfortunately, this new body needed a lot of sleep. Food, too. More of the latter than was normal for an infant, I think, for the drain on my magic was manifesting physically. I spent a lot of time, in those early days, suckling strength from my mother. But I was rapidly growing used to enduring humiliation.
A week passed relatively uneventfully. My training continued, of course, and by the end of it I was able to manifest a maximum power output of fifteen uncias.
Twenty five percent more than a newborn baby’s power was hardly formidable strength, and I did not expect to hear any songs sung about it in future generations, but compared to the levels I had been reduced to, it still felt like progress.
And my progress was not limited to the magical, either.
One week may not be enough time for a normal baby to learn how to speak, but that is because they are pitiable creatures of idiotic minds and primitive emotion. I was able to focus consciously on mastering the clumsy language spoken by my parents, and was soon enough boasting a vocabulary in the double-digits.
Using this, I could identify certain intentions on their part. I learned the word for ‘hungry’ and ‘feed’ rather soon, as well as the names of both my parents, and myself.
Isabel, apparently. You probably find that strange, but at the time I lacked the context to realise what it implied. Indeed, with my body still numb with the sensation of synapses rearranging and nerves thickening, it would not be for a few more weeks—and several dozen more words in my vocabulary—that I finally realised the obvious.
This new body of mine was female, not male. It took me finally developing the ability to control my limbs enough that I could look down, largely by turning my torso and lower body more than by forcibly lifting my too-heavy head, to find this out.
It did not bother me so much at the time, as I had long since moved past primitive notions of gender and their corresponding stereotypes. I felt equally disquieted in any body of flesh, regardless of what particular configuration it developed into.
My greater concern there was the knowledge that many cultures were not so uncaring of the matter. If I were born male, I could enjoy a position of dominance in most societies I had seen. Female, though…
This was where the latest stage of my great annoyance began.
***
Agrian’s office was colder today, and it had already been cold yesterday. He could see his breath in the air and feel his skin growing bumpy with the chill atmosphere around him. Winter, he had thought, was still a good few weeks away, and he’d insisted as much to his wife.
As usual, she had turned out to be right. The only reason he didn’t have a fire going already was because they both knew that would be his last surrender. He’d weather the cold for at least a few more days before finally making that concession.
She wouldn’t even notice if I did it right now.
Elizabeth was far too consumed with their new child, Isabel. Agrian could hardly blame his wife, their daughter was beautiful in ways he’d not known another living thing could be. Even now, he was sorely tempted to take up off his desk and seek the baby out, just to hold her again, just to watch as she stared at him. And only stared.
She never laughed, did Isabel. Never smiled. Agrian had heard that much was normal in babies, but what struck him about his daughter was that she never did much of anything else, either. She would cry when hungry, or in need of changing, but even that seemed less…raw? Yes, raw. Like there was no feeling behind it.
Elizabeth had her own worries about that, though, and Agrian was certainly not about to match his wife fear for fear. Someone needed to keep a stiff upper lip in his household.
He tried to focus on work without considering that, but apparently matters of his daughter were beyond even his ability to compartmentalise. Currently he had to go through reports from the Lachfel Trading Company, and ensure that all was as it should be. His own lands, for which the company was named, yielded little in terms of produce, and though the prize they surrounded was worth more than the most bountiful farm in Garamon, it did not feed him or his family.
What Lachfel did provide, however, was mana. Magical creatures, magical energies. Being seated right atop a layline was a commodity that went unmatched by virtually any other. This meant that, even if jealousy saw him being screwed over for pricing by most of his peers, Agrian could compensate with sheer wealth.
…usually. This year had seen a notch taken out of business.
Agrian wrote up his correspondence and left it at his desk, deciding to give himself a break. He’d look through it again, later, in a new state of mind, and either go through with sending it or, viewing it with new eyes, tweak it. His old routine, and one that always brought a certain level of clarity to his work.
Entirely unrelated to his adorable daughter waiting for him in the other room, of course.
Isabel was bundled in her mother’s arms and, surprisingly, not asleep when Agrian entered her room, but the girl looked to be making her way towards it. Even now, he thought, she was clearly different from other children.
Not that he’d seen many of course, but Agrian just had a…a feeling. He could tell by looking at her, sense her noble blood. His noble blood.
Suddenly overcome by the urge to caress her, he reached out to stroke his daughter’s face. To his surprise, she replied with a scowl and bit at his finger. It wasn’t an especially effective move. For one thing, Isabel didn’t have teeth. Even if she had, Agrian was a warrior of the third order. If anything he was more concerned about his daughter hurting her gums on his skin, and he was more than a little careful about withdrawing his finger.
“Lively, isn’t she?” he grinned proudly.
“Does she seem grumpy to you?” Elizabeth asked him, peering down at the child with a faint concern upon her features. Perhaps it was the baby weight, but Agrian found her looking so very similar to their daughter in that moment. Her face was rounder than usual, but the nose was still aquiline and sharp, the eyes sharper still. Her hair fell down in blonde curls and her lips were well-shaped, even pursed. She was, he mused, the second most beautiful woman in the world. The first was of course in her arms.
“Grumpy?” he asked, barely remembering the conversation as he looked at his family.
“I don’t know, she…well look at her face.”
Agrian did, but it just looked like a normal baby’s face to him.
“Is it…odd?” he ventured. Elizabeth scowled at him.
“She’s glaring!”
Was she? Agrian looked at his daughter again and…yes, she did seem to have rather a moody look upon her features.
“Ah, well, she’s probably hungry?”
“She always scowls,” Elizabeth sighed. “Seems to scowl even more when she sees me smiling at her.”
Agrian shrugged. Women would worry whether there was anything to worry about or not, he knew. He could do little to reassure Elizabeth about a fear that existed only in her head, and so he would merely support her and hope that she did not remain too panicked for long.
What exactly was she even afraid of, that their baby was evil or something? Isabel was a damned baby!
He smiled to himself at the very thought.