Book 4 Epilogue

++Family is the one thing Isabel Vornholt understood that Lord Dread never did.++

- Isabel Vornholt, “the Great Lich”

The Queen of the Fae saw that Lord Dread was starting to succumb in all the ways her Court had planned for.

Liches were powerful beings, but still human. Still, ultimately, destructible in all the fundamental ways the rest of their kind were. They were more clever and potent, and far more stagnant, and yet behind the aged bone and malevolence was a pure fountain of basic humanity. Of change.

They simply could not help themselves; it was in their nature to move and be moved by the currents of time, just as it was in the fae’s to be exempt from such things.

Winter was still months away, and so the long hours left little to do but wait and make merry. Most in the court were doing just that. Idling away the time one chunk at a time, lounging and leaning and whittling their present into past. The Queen did not. She had more vital matters to attend, and nothing in the world was yet as vital as Lord Dread.

She watched him through the veil, and smiled.

Even the ancient liches did not seem to know the fae had this ability, did not seem to understand how little they could hide from the elder race. Dread’s laboratory, irritatingly, was one location fortified beyond the Court’s ability to gaze on from afar, but the mansion was nothing like as impervious.

The Queen’s gaze passed through stone and mortar like the world’s finest glass, and followed Lord Dread as he made his way through the structure. She had just watched Dread speak with his husband and found great amusement in the interaction.

For such an old and potent being, Lord Dread seemed recently to be conducting himself more like a whipped dog than anything else. Dancing around and tiptoeing over the feelings of the humans around him. The Queen was not surprised by this.

A human, ultimately, was still a human. She had seen countless of their kind attempt to be something more, and had yet to encounter one that was above the basic limitations of their nature. Perhaps the flesh had accelerated things, but what was happening now…it was simply inevitable.

The Queen turned her gaze over to see the other liches. The ancient Sakhent was working, as usual. For all the airs of hedonistic obsession he gave, he was no less driven than Dread himself. Perhaps moreso. Sakhent was motivated by the unmatched pressure of being the second foremost magician in a wide and dense world, and that sort of tantalising proximity to greatness could drive a creature to do drastic things.

Right now, he seemed to be working on several projects at once. The Queen wondered how many were intended for use against the Gods and their servants, and how many for use against Dread.

Sascithius and the other lich, the new one, remained as stagnant as ever, getting on and working alone on their own smaller matters. She paid them heed out of caution and prudence, but did not truly expect much of significance from either of them.

The other liches, the new ones in Asyran, were also beyond her ability to see. Even more so than Vornholt’s laboratory, their structures and sanctuaries were immunized against all sorts of scrying. Apparently even the kinds used by the Winter Court.

This was more irritating than the Queen would have expected. Humans. Weak and predictable, except for when they were not. A thousand races had fallen to ruin by failing to take seriously the threat of a motivated human with free time and resources. The Queen would not make that mistake.

She resumed studying Dread, now lounging with a book in his living room, and felt herself smile. Not much longer now, the pieces were all assembled and just waiting to snap together.

Not long at all.

***

I entertained myself by getting through a few dozen books before it was time for bed. Idly, I noted that I may have to be more cautious with my reading habits now that my mansion was stocked with servants and a husband. Living alone, or with Sethira, tearing through a few hundred words per second was never of much significance, but that sort of cognitive function was generally not considered to be natural in humans, and demonstrating it might inspire some inconvenient questions.

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The trouble with becoming one of the wealthiest people alive was that it meant there were more eyes on me. I felt every one of them, all the time. I even thought I felt them now. A few paranoid glances around the room told me I was imagining things.

I dressed for bed and retired to find that Ilgryn was not already there. He seemed to have left the mansion, where to, I did not know. That was fine by me as I had not been particularly interested in attempting another child with him after the discovery of his revulsion.

It was so very inconvenient. I marry into the Vorets of all people, and I happen to get the one that could not create magical geniuses with me? Strokes of ill luck like this were the worst sort of hitch to any plan. Unpredictable and, in this case, basically impossible to reverse.

I weighed my options as I lay there and found, irritably, that I had precious few. Everything that I might do to resolve the issue would most certainly conflict with my oath to take care of family, and that ruled it all right out.

Waiting for him to die of natural causes would take decades at the very least, and that was ignoring the irritable fact that I now had the means to stave off death for him. He was family. Which meant I would be failing him if I allowed him to rot and perish rather than provide him with a new body.

My only remaining option, it seemed, was to find some other source of talent to make children with and pass them off as Ilgryn’s. That idea actually did have merit; it did not violate my oath, and it may even permit me to churn out even more powerful minions than Ilgryn himself would make.

The issue with it was singular, but very pronounced. Garamon did not look kindly at all upon illegitimate children. They were not stigmatised quite as much as they had been a hundred years ago or more, but producing one was still generally seen as a source of embarrassment.

Particularly if you were a woman.

If nothing else, my new birth sex had brought with it a few interesting challenges for me to overcome. I sat there and chewed away at the problem, weighing pros against cons. A lich can get a lot of thinking done when she has nothing else to focus upon, and my body was feeling uncharacteristically tired. A consequence of my having burned so much mana experimenting with Sethira earlier.

Eventually sleep took a hold and dragged me down into the abyss of my mind. I never dreamed, even with my new human body. Something about my consciousness seemed to just not produce such experiences. Like a lich’s mind was too cold and sterile to be occupied by fantasy even at rest.

So it was simple, pure darkness around my thoughts that receded when I finally came to with a start. I lay there blinking in uncertainty and surprise for a few moments, mortal meat struggling to dislodge the rust of mortal sleep. The sound that had woken me came again, confirming its nature in my mind.

It was a knocking upon my door. Heavy and hard, beaten with a tempo that spoke of haste and little strength held back. That I could hear it despite being a good hundred paces separated from the door was only because of the great brass ring used to make the sound, specifically designed to carry through my house.

I sat up and looked around, conjuring a light so that I could gauge the time on the grandfather clock placed at my far wall. It was past midnight, just. As dark and late as any visit I had received.

It took me only a minute to dress, but in that time the knocking rang out twice more. Whoever was there, they were more than a little desperate. They seemed to be striking with the sort of urgency I would normally expect from a person actively burning to death, though if that were the case they would surely have lost the strength to keep making such noise by now.

I was at the door and warily opening it thirty seconds later, servants falling back behind me as the noise continued.

There were a great many things I had expected to see on the other side. An endless list of potential encounters. The police, some idiot with a business proposition and odd ideas about calling ideas, one of the fae, one of the Gods. I was prepared, and dreading, just about anything, and I stiffened with magic at my fingers as the door swung open.

But I had not been expecting to see Agrian there. Agrian the younger, not the older. Agrian the magician, not the warrior.

He was taller than I remembered, though I doubted he had actually grown. Drenched with the rain pouring down outside and looking at me with that curious, intense focus I remembered him mustering so frequently.

His face was thinner. He seemed broader at the shoulders, and was not wearing clothes anywhere near as fine as he had used to. There was a walking stick tucked under one of his arms, gnarled and scratched in a way that told me it had seen heavy use. I wondered for a moment whether he had made it here on foot, but that was ludicrous.

I stared at him as he stood there and stared at me. The look on his face was odd. I did not see the hostility I would have expected, nor the hatred. I did not see much at all. It seemed to me like his expression was being carefully guarded, his thoughts concealed behind a sheet of iron.

I could not complain, I was doing much the same.

“Can I come in?” my brother asked me. The rain was falling heavy enough that it might have killed a rat, and I actually heard the impact of individual drops against Agrian’s scalp.

“Yes,” I told him, stepping back to grant him passage. I turned to my servants, but someone was already stepping forth to take his coat.

I led Agrian to my drawing room and offered him a seat, which he did not take. I did sit. My legs felt strange. Weak, somehow. Like the muscles were slackening on their own.

“I told you once that you only ever came to see me when you needed something,” Agrian said. “I’m a hypocrite, because I need something from you now.”