++I was known as a witch because, uniquely among my people, I had been born with the ability to see magic. To perceive it as a physical thing, as waves of light and coils of gas, differentiating its type through colours that are impossible to describe.
Growing up, of course, I had no idea what I was actually doing.
Imagine living in a world of deaf people, where you alone can perceive sound. Where nobody else even has a concept of what sound is. They can understand you describing it to them, and yet when you alone claim to be privy to this phenomena they simply conclude that you are mad, or lying, or, as was the case for many of the people I grew up around, a witch.
For my own part, I did know that what I saw was real, simply because there were physical events that correlated far too closely with the sights of my magical eye to be a coincidence.
Before a firestorm, I would see hissing coils of red mana slowly thickening in the air to drift skywards. The manifestation of unsettled spirits was precluded by transparent greys clumping together like motes of dust. To my people, these entirely natural phenomena were mysterious and unknowable things. To me, they were merely curious. I did not shy away from them in fear, far from it. I hungered to study them, to know them. ++
- From the writings of Isabel Vornholt, ‘The Great Lich’. 1,891 A.E
A month had passed since my rebirth into this pitiable new body, and I had made a great deal of progress on it.
Not in actually moving of course, that much was beyond my control. This primitive bundle of flesh would develop as it did, and I had no choice but to wait around for its limbs to grow strong enough to bear their own weight. No, instead I counted my successes among the growth of my power and the widening of my vocabulary. The former was by far the bigger surge of progress, with my maximum output now exceeding thirty uncia—almost three vis.
My powers of speech were growing more modestly, but were just as important. By this stage I had learned most of the common words my parents ever said to me and was moving onto learning the ones they used for each other. This was going exponentially more slowly, as with so many additional variables—such a widened pool of sounds and context—it took me far longer to narrow down the meaning of any given one.
Still, I was getting there. I had already learned the words for ‘outside’ and ‘work’, alongside a smattering of others.
In order to continue fueling my new search for knowledge, I had to ensure that I was placed in new situations. Ones where my parents talked not to me, but to other adults. A baby simply would not be addressed with the phrases I was looking for.
As humiliating as it was, my solution to this need was at the very least easily implemented. I feigned…’clinginess’. My mother was no longer bedridden after the first few weeks following my birth, and she would give me certain opportunities by wandering around my new home and speaking with what I could only imagine were servants.
This provided the obvious opportunities for my seeing speech in action, of course, but also gave me the just-as-valuable chance to assess the station of my new body’s family. I still held all my old goals of global domination, naturally, and getting a start on learning what tools I had available would be vital for using them.
I was also able to examine the fashions and material sciences of this strange new land, and let me tell you that doing this was among the most striking things I have ever experienced.
When last I saw mankind, they were still a wholly primitive people. Metallurgy was limited to clumsily made bronze or iron, and if the great pyramids and obelisks to the North were striking in their scale, they were certainly not replicable across the lands. Here, though, I saw advancement of the technological as well as the magical.
On those occasions where I was angled to peek out through a window, I saw snowy land beyond, a sprawling settlement made up of, at the very least, one thousand buildings or more. Even the smallest of them were several times the size of straw and mud huts from the time periods I left behind, and the largest of them even approached the scale of those great monuments that had once been the pinnacle of architecture.
Above many of them I saw drifting smoke, what I now recognise to be the product of industrial coal-burning, and it struck me how enlarged everything had become. I could not imagine so much construction done naturally, but to my shock I saw no visible signs of mana woven into the largest stonework
This was my first experience seeing the real effects of advancing technology, and it was a striking one.
Other new experiences would ease my time in this strange, transformed world. I was certain it was the one I had left behind, if only because I could feel the tether to my phylactery and tell that it no longer crossed dimensional boundaries, but there was so little of what I had once known that I may as well have found myself in another universe.
One day, the man honoured to call himself my father was sparring with his personal guards whilst my mother held me and watched. I would have made little of this, apart from irritation that I could not practice magic with them around, except that I was able to observe something new during the display.
Six men trained against my father simultaneously, each one of them a large, athletic and considerably fast specimen. Any logical prediction would have found him the lesser in this bout’s two sides, but as the signal to begin was given, and I watched eagerly in anticipation for his crushing defeat, I found him defying all the logic I had been running through in my head.
The men moved as one, and clearly knew what they were doing. They worked well to maximize the advantages of numbers, encircling my father and aiming to strike from several directions at once. They just were not fast enough.
Like watching a man move through air while his enemies waded through water, the being who called himself my father flitted around the hall and slipped between blows. He was so fast that his enemy’s swings at the height of their speed seemed to lag behind him, broad shoulders twisting aside from blows long before they could draw close. For a few moments he did only that, evaded and wove away, apparently happy to practice defence.
Then he struck, and in less than two seconds all six men were folded over and wheezing as the training weapon in my father’s grip thudded into their padded coats. Fortunately, only one of them vomited.
My father turned, then looked at me with a curious look upon his face. Instantly my mother was moving me around in her grip, looking to where he had, then beaming. They began to prattle away, and I could not understand more than one word in thirty.
But there were two things that I knew, now, for an absolute certainty. The first was that they were both ludicrously happy with something.
The other was that my father had just used a form of magic I did not recognise.
***
Agrian had no clue what it was that had Elizabeth smiling so much, but Elizabeth wasn’t surprised. Men, she mused, were not built for raising children. That was why they needed women, and when the child was as complex and unique as their little girl…well, that just meant the women were needed all the more.
“What did I do?” Her husband asked, even as he grinned down at his daughter.
“She watched you fight,” Elizabeth beamed. “She loves it, look at her!”
It had to be said, Isabel’s enjoyment was…hard to gauge. There was something about her face that seemed less instinctive and ‘natural’ than the expressions Elizabeth had seen on other children her age. Agrian the Younger had always been far less…what, masked?
Ludicrous, she was a baby. She’d need to know what her emotions were to start masking them. Either way, the look on Isabel’s face was still odd.
But it was clearly a happy one all the same.
“That’s a bit…uh, isn’t it boyish?” Agrian frowned.
Elizabeth affixed her husband with a glare, the second-highest grade she could muster. “Are you telling me that you will not, in fact, be doing the first thing we’ve found that makes our baby happy?” she asked him.
Agrian quickly called his battered guards back up to their feet, and soon enough they were all sparring once more.
As earlier, Isabell stared at the display with fascination, and this time Elizabeth stared at her daughter rather than her husband. She watched the girl’s eyes, wide, now, and looking almost to have inflated for it. She seemed to be following the combat. Not Agrian, of course, but the lesser warriors whose bodies moved at something close to human speed, she stared at and studied.
She never made a sound, but Elizabeth could clearly see her interest. She wondered what was going on in her little girl’s mind.
***
Now that I was not taken by surprise, and that the bout was progressing at a less blistering pace, I had a chance to more thoroughly study the men moving and fighting before me. Outwardly, they were just humans. Once I’d have been able to make a comment about their innards, too, but as of now I could barely even muster a gust of wind with my mana, let alone perform complex anatomical study from a distance.
The difference that mattered, though, was entirely visible to me. My ability to see mana was more natural than breathing.
I could see that, despite having never witnessed any magic from my father, his body was a fountain of mana. I’d always observed a strong Vessel to him, and assumed that there was some level of exertion he performed magically to have improved it. Perhaps a parlour trick done regularly, or some old training abandoned halfway through.
Now I knew better, and could see the real cause right before me.
As my father moved, the mana in his Vessel squirmed and writhed. I had seen similar patterns before, in those who channelled their powers for spellwork. Except there was no spell being cast now, no conscious exertion of power at all.
All of that magical energy was just circulating through his body and bleeding into the muscles and bone, the skin and tissues.
Making him fast, strong, durable. Making him more than human.
I lacked the shock and awe upon seeing this that you might expect, given that I, myself, was far more than human too. But this was an opportunity all the same, for while my mind had long since left the limits of my former species behind, I had yet to find a way of replicating that effect with my body.
Even as my mother continued drawing my ire with her dotage and endless mewling, I found my face affixed into a grin.
Yes, this opportunity would not be wasted.
***
Another month passed. By this stage, I was a good ten weeks into my infancy and finally starting to feel something approximating progress on the physical end of my body. I had long ago discovered what the limits were for my control over this fleshy prison, but those limits were, if gradually, beginning to expand.
I could clench and unclench my hands at will, exercising a good half of the range of motion adult fingers might enjoy. With more effort, I could make my legs kick out semi-randomly.
But the world was still not quite mine to touch, to manipulate. It is truly difficult to describe the frustration I felt in those early days, waiting for nerves to develop and properly connect. I had plenty of distractions, at least.
Chief among them now, since I could not really do anything significant with my body, was furthering my magical practices. By this point I had advanced in power even more, and was, when straining myself to the limit, capable of reaching a mana output of thirty-eight uncias for brief moments at a time. A pitiable amount, even by the standards of most human spellcasters, but I knew it was unprecedented for a baby.
The physical effects I could now produce certainly were. A vis is a truly tiny volume of mana, and if you could see the substance like I do then you would not even need to be told this fact.
This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
It gets more substantial when you look to what it can do to the world, however. . Mana, as far as I can tell, is the only force in the universe that can create energy.
And destroy it, but I wouldn’t need to worry about that for a while. I was not attempting to kill any Gods, yet.
Thirty eight uncias is at least past the threshold where the physical effects of mana become noticeable, even to the magicless monkeys that make up the majority of humanity’s population. I was a long way, still, from igniting targets with a gesture, but I could at the very least generate enough heat with enough speed that it manifested as short-lived sparks in the air. Like a lantern perhaps.
Pitiful for a being who had once redirected rivers by thinking about it, but I was actually, pathetically pleased to have once more gained the finesse needed to produce heat at will, as well as just force.
And with a few more weeks of progress, I was producing both at once.
Or close enough. Magical multitasking was not something I could perform, regardless of how high your maximum frequency it is possible to output only one form of mana at once. To combat this, I focused on producing sparks through heat, then swiftly changed to force,
The flickering beads of flame would last only for a few seconds. . Then, before they could die, I conjured a jet of air to fling them out. Combined in such a way, I was able to spread heat as far as several feet ahead of me. Why, my range was almost what my physical reach would have been if I had the fully developed limbs of an adult.
All the same, progress. Range is an inherently difficult element of any magical effect, simply because of the way intelligent lifeforms engage with the forces involved in the arcane. With a touch, I can employ all of my powers with perfect efficiency, limited only by my own mastery over mana. The moment the forces I attempt to produce and manipulate are past my skin, complications arise.
Naturally, this was yet another shortcoming I had been training to move past. In my prime I could finely manipulate the currents of mana as well from ten paces as I could via touch, and if I was not able to maintain peak efficiency at a distance beyond that I would still have enjoyed most of my powers up to a full mile from my own body.
In this life, I was still yet to snatch currents of magic farther than a human hair’s breadth removed from my skin.
So many inadequacies, so many impediments.
But none compared to my prison in the Depths, and that had not so even me flinch. There is nothing in the world capable of truly stopping a person with the will to see themselves succeed. Misfortune may destroy you, but it can never make you a failure. That is a decision you make for yourself.
By my sixth month of existence, I was finally making progress that was noticeable even beyond just minute comparisons to the withered abilities I had possessed a week before.
The magical advancements were significant. My maximum output now rested somewhere around the level of fifty vis, or six hundred and three uncias. When I put my mind to it, and with only modest strain, I could produce flames comparable to a large campfire, albeit only for a few short moments before they withered away.
Heat has always been the easiest measure of mana, but the easiest thing to produce with it is force. By now I was conjuring strong enough gusts of wind that they could be mistaken for natural, though not for much more than a pace beyond my body. The levels of power that had once been brief peaks of effort for me were now sustainable for some time before I even began to tire, and I had improved the range of my 100% efficient mana manipulation to an extraordinary three human hair breadths.
All of this was good. Indeed, it was all the sort of progress that normally took an apprentice many years of constant effort to come by. But the greatest fruits of my labours were not of the magical variety at all.
“Can you crawl, darling? Come on Isabel, crawl for me baby!”
It was hard to think of it as a blessing, understanding every humiliating word uttered by my mother, but in objective terms it was a precious ability. That, and my new control over the useless limbs I was now stuck with.
Walking was still beyond me, but I could, with effort, crawl. Or rather writhe. Though I had the coordination needed to at least move my arms and legs as I pleased, they simply lacked the strength to hold up my weight and forced me to lie flat on my belly and drag myself clumsily along.
Like a slug.
“Come on! You’re doing it! You’re doing it Isabel!”
My mother seemed to have grown more neurotic, she was now downright hallucinating. I had not moved even an inch since she planted me on the carpet and started gesturing for me to cross it, yet here she was insisting otherwise.
“I don’t think she can understand you, my love,” my father noted. He withered from my mother’s glare the way he always did, which I found vaguely amusing and more than a little pathetic. Of course, the real amusement came from what he believed to be my level of comprehension. I had been careful not to make it too clear how strong a grasp I had on the conversations around me, and was mainly letting myself be seen speaking and understanding speech based on what my parents seemed to expect me to manage.
My crawling ability was not quite so overdeveloped, but I still hesitated to show it off on command. Who did these insects think they were, ordering me to perform like a caged monkey for their amusement? I ought to have obliterated them for the presumption.
But I was still playing the part of an adoring child, and my parents seemed to expect me to be growing attached to them. I had managed to gather more knowledge about this world, enough to know that I was not in any immediate risk of being found and exorcised from my newfound anchor, but that did not mean I was in a hurry to give anyone good cause to have me examined more carefully. Besides, I needed to improve my mobility anyway.
So I crawled.
Agonizingly slowly, I squirmed my way across the heavily carpeted floor with tears welling in my eyes and pitiable grunts and squeaks escaping my tiny lips to vent out the effort.
Naturally, my idiot parents behaved as if they were witnessing the greatest achievement of human history. My mother was still gaping like a moron, while my father actually started to applaud like he was the audience in some mummer’s show. It only deepened my rage, and the knowledge that I had to keep that rage hidden fed it all the more.
After a long minute of effort, I had finally crossed the three or so paces separating me from my destination. My reward was yet another indignity; my mother swept me up into her arms while my father reached out to caress my cheek in what he likely thought to be an affectionate way. I rewarded his impudence with a vicious bite, which I must sadly note seemed only to amuse him, on account of my still lacking teeth at the time.
“A fierce one, isn’t she?” he grinned. “Like her father.”
The only way in which I was like my father was having a terribly under-developed brain. Fortunately for me, as a lich, my consciousness did not actually make any use of the clumsy meat that enabled thought in other lifeforms.
My mother seemed to notice my anger, having always had more of a knack for peering deeply into my emotions than her husband.
“I think she’s truly annoyed, Agrian,” she noted, then looked at me. “Isabel, what’s wrong dear?”
I was half-tempted to just tell her, but then that would not be an especially productive move for my current cover. She was probably expecting some gurgled blubbering to decipher, and inevitably interpret into a cause to do something she already wanted to. That was, I was quickly learning, the true essence of parenting, a long-winded exercise in proving just how good your own desires would be for the baby under your care.
There were disadvantages to posing as a mindless infant.
“Well there’s no time to cheer her up,” my father said after a moment. “It’s time to leave soon.”
I felt my mother’s arms stiffen around me, and for the first time in quite some time was struck by a sense of alarm.
“You agreed we would let her adjust, Agrian,” my mother replied abruptly. ‘Adjust’ was not a word I would have recognised until recently, but by now my vocabulary was more or less adult. Adolescent, at least. It let me follow this conversation, but not understand it yet.
“I did, and she has adjusted. Look at her!” My father turned to me and reached out to pinch a cheek, then chuckled as I unleashed my terrible wrath upon the offending fingers once more and fended them off with vicious gum-blows. “See? You can’t tell me you’re scared of my girl being frightened in cskch, she’s more fearless than even her older brother is!”
Interesting, a word I did not recognise. That could only mean that its meaning was highly context-dependent.
“Cskch!” I gurgled. “Cskch!” My ability to communicate was still hamstrung by trying to remain as seemingly-normal as I could, and even if I had already failed at that somewhat—I’d heard my parents discussing an apparently freakish grasp of language on my part before—I was still not about to sacrifice any remaining semblance of discretion at this stage.
For now, the best way I could show eagerness towards something was simply to repeatedly yell its name as loudly as my shrunken lungs could manage. It got the message across in any case, and I was treated to the rare sight of my father winning an argument.
More significant than that, was the outing I was subjected to next. I found myself stuffed into a new set of clothing that, as far as I could tell, had originated in some modern torture-chamber, presumably for the purposes of one-upping the levels of misery already induced by iron maidens and boiling oil.
The fabric was pink, of course, and made of fifty percent frills by volume. It formed a single piece covering my whole body and fanned out at the wrists and ankles, with an adornment that seemed halfway between a collar and a hat protruding up from the base of my neck. I was treated to the sight of myself in a mirror, and my first thought was that I looked uncannily similar to the ceramic dolls my father had proudly presented me with before being reminded by my mother that I was too young for such toys.
“You look so beautiful!” my mother cooed, holding me tight against her and gently rocking me in her grip. I had to try rather hard to resist my urge to tell her what I thought of the ludicrous outfit. That would only complicate things.
Fortunately, I wasn’t left in my torment for long. A few minutes later my parents carried me from the mansion and stuffed me into a waiting vehicle, something that was yet another new sight for my eyes.
It was clearly a horse-drawn wagon, though of a broad and thicker construction and bound to a full team of animals instead of just one. It seemed to have more in common with the heavy war chariots that had been used in the far East during my own era, many of which had ridden against my armies prior to the Gods stepping in. As my mother carried me into the vehicle, I saw for myself how different it was. Not something made for war and practicality at all—this was a luxury transport!
“How do you feel, finally getting out again, my love?” the man who called himself my father asked the woman who had pushed me out of her abdomen. My mother took her time in answering, and spoke only once the vehicle had already started rattling its way along the road.
“I feel strange having Isabel outside with me. Like she’s vulnerable.”
My father smiled with the kind of breadth that is reserved, in this world, for the truly stupid.
“She isn’t vulnerable with me, my love. Don’t worry.”
But of course my mother did worry, and naturally I worried too. I had not realised how much I had come to regard that cramped mansion as a safehouse, as a place of sanctuary. Out here, in the world, I was viscerally reminded of my new state. Nothing more than a baby. Boasting some magic, perhaps, but ultimately, still, nothing more than a baby. I would not make much of a fight of it, if someone moved to take my life.
Fortunately that did not happen, and we were able to complete our journey without any major complication. It was not until we actually arrived, however, that I had any inkling of where it was we were headed. Not even when we stepped out of the carriage to gaze upon the tall, grandly decorated building from the outside.
Only inside did I piece it together.
Monuments towered at the far walls, great statues of hard stone carved with unspeakable care. Each one depicted an imperious face that I knew well.
I knew these faces well, because it was these that I had gazed upon as I was banished. Ngalaru, the God of the skies. Maketa, the God of war and flame. Arundi, the God of nature and healing. I saw these beings only once before, when they descended from the heavens to strike me down and destroy my growing empire.
And now, to my dawning horror, I realised that I was being dragged into a place of worship dedicated to their wretched names.
My parents were oblivious to the maelstrom of fury now gathering up inside me, and it was only growing by the moment. There were other Gods in the Old Pantheon than the few I have named, but the statues here outnumbered even them by far. Countless smaller sculptures lay in-between the largest of them, depicting beings that seemed similar to the others, but were unknown to me.
It would have been easy to simply despair and thrash around like some feral beast, but as satisfying as it may be to release anger mindlessly in such ways, it is far from productive. Instead I made myself settle back and watched, waited to learn more. I was not left waiting for long.
There were large sets of wooden seats laying across the inside of the building in rows, each one half as wide as the room itself and made to accommodate dozens of people side to side. My parents, despite their wealth and lands, did not receive any preferential seating, save that they were able to set themselves down near the front without argument. This was very convenient for me, as it gave me a perfect view of things while bundled into my mother’s arms.
At the end of the building, at last, came a man dressed in flowing robes dyed to vibrant colours that I had rarely seen in fabric prior to my setback by the Gods. He looked out across the room with a placid, almost paternal look upon his face. I immediately loathed him for his condescension, but as previously established was in no position to disintegrate anyone just yet, so reluctantly tolerated it.
“Children, I thank you all for attending,” the man began, voice dripping with the same sort of patronising self-grandiosity that I had immediately clocked upon his face. I watched and listened as he moved through some sort of ritualised greeting, and if my attention span was truly tested by the effort of soaking it all up, I still managed it through constant effort. “...On this holiest of days, we gather together to venerate the protectors of our people. The creators of all that we cherish. Our Gods. The defenders of our people, the vanquishers of evil. They who delivered us from the terror of The Unnamed , they who taught us the proper path.”
My blood was boiling, and it only got worse. I saw books passed around, and though I could not yet read I could hear the words scrawled across them mumbled out as people around me did so. I could recognise the ‘holy’ scriptures being narrated, and what they spoke of.
They spoke of me.
The ‘Father of Evil’, the ‘Snake in the Grass’, so many names and titles that I would have accepted gladly. And yet they were not aimed at a man. No, all of these words were given to some unrecognisable demon.
I listened, as the roomful of gaggling morons went on to grunt out the rest of their story. To recount how the earliest men were plagued by hostility from a force beyond their world, a being made of distilled evil and power that threatened even the servents of the Gods
LIES!
This was what had become of my legacy, then. This was what the Gods had written into their pathetic history books. Lord Dread, an animal. Some mindless creature from beyond tricking and destroying and dominating simply due to…instinct? Nature? Not a man, acquiring knowledge and power to make himself more, but an entity without agency or direction.
LIES!
I was not an aimless force, everything I did was by my own will and intent. I suffered for my decisions, I was agonised by my own path, but it was, in the end, my own path. My choice, my will, my freedom used in my way. It was one thing to beat me, torment me, imprison me, but I would not sit idle and watch myself stripped of all agency.
By the time this pathetic ceremony was over, and my imbecile parents had finished mewling at the feet of their divine rulers, I had overcome the worst of my shock.
‘Suffering builds character’ is a saying I have heard uttered much, and not one I agree with. What I would say, instead, is that suffering tests character, and that it motivates those characters who are able to pass that test. I suffered greatly that day. Suffered humiliation of a sort that dwarfed anything I had experienced in my infancy. None of the things I’d experienced in my second infancy compared to hearing how I had been recorded in history.
And this suffering motivated me to rage, and to focus. Until now I had been thinking of revenge in an abstract, distant sense. Now, at last, I was once again treated to a glimpse of how my enemies had been existing in the ages since my battle with them.
Now, I had a place to start in my plans.