The Ditch

	The Vaskhul practice of persecuting ‘witches’, those who dared toy with the boundaries of life and death, of soul and body, was quite well known by now.

	Many had been left to rot in trenches or burned in great pyres in the Vaskhul crusades across the countryside. As their divine fires streaked ever closer to Osivyver, they wreaked havoc through havens and hovels hiding such magi, leaving a trail of shallow graves and ashy piles. Tonight was no different. Beneath the glowering golden moon of Vask, on a clear and starry night, slaves dredged a mound of dirt over a pile of primarily human bodies under the watchful eye of their towering armored handlers. A deathly silence had befallen the slaves, in direct opposition to the jovial and victorious clamor of the small group of knights responsible for the atrocity they were now cleaning up.

	One slave happened to catch something; the twitch of a soot-covered hand beneath the pile, a little shift of the bodies. He gasped, and stepped away, calling out to the guards.

	“Sirs, sirs, one is moving!” he said.

	“Bah! No matter, keep going! If it isn’t dead yet, it will be once you’re done!” shouted one of his overseers in return, a bellowing laugh punctuating his dismissal.

	Although he would begin to protest, knowing the wily ways of the witches, he opted to say nothing. If a punishment comes for his captors, let it be so. His spade dug back into the dirt, and he tossed another mound atop the pile.

	…

	The rains had come, and the stench of the shallow grave would be quite unbearable were anyone in the forest to experience it. They battered the dirt, turning it to pallid mud that sept between the days-rotting corpses. As it all began to wash away, as the grave once more bared itself to the sky, a sliver of the gilded moon crossed overhead, peering between the clouds. An ebon hand reached through the pile, swinging down and beginning to claw its way to the top. Slowly, surely, one move at a time, a body crowned from the womb of death, drenched in rot but itself untouched by the same, two golden eyes burning with resolve.

	There, she clawed herself out, birthed with a vengeance anew. The rot of her compatriots sloughed from her body under the heavy rain and she stood where the slaves had once stood, the pile once more beginning to shift. Another body, this one intact but most certainly touched by the decay, rose from the pile, and several more after it, shambling and gnashing and empty in eyes. Her soul inhabited them each, prepared to puppeteer them in a grim play for vengeance that they deserved but would not get to experience themselves. Though their souls had passed, their bodies would only be allowed rest when their killers had as well.

	The Lich of the Wilds was born, beneath the canopy, beneath the rain, beneath the countenance of Vask, and above death.