Lich's Labour Lost, Prologue

Senka breathed deeply of the fresh spring air, the smell of pollen filling her fine nostrils. She felt the warm, fresh-grown grass beneath her supple, tanned feet, as she wandered through the meadows, towards the bubbling brook she had spent so many years by. She felt a gentle breeze rustle her cotton-dress, the fabric pressing coolly against her ripe breasts, her nipples swelling slightly in the cold air.

She ran, full of youthful energy, enjoying the feeling of rushing air and her heart pounding, the slight wetness of sweat on her brow and her bare, tanned arms. She came to a panting halt as she stumbled down the bank on the other side of the meadow, laughing as she came to a halt beside the stream. Her chest burned from the brief exertion, and she gulped down air as she stumbled to her knees, looking into the perfect, crystal waters of the brook.

Looking back at her, like the finest mirror she had ever seen in her life, was her young, elfin face. Eyes as blue as cornflowers were framed in a carved, aquiline face, her nose slender and not too prominent. Strands of honeyed-blonde hair fell down around her face, perfectly matched to her rich, summer-tanned skin. She smiled, her rosey lips pouting in the reflection. One could- and many did- fall in love with so perfect a classical beauty.

She threw stones into the genteel, still water, laughing at the simple joy as ripples spread across her reflection. This was -life-.

But something felt wrong. She looked up. The sky was turning grey, the brightness of her spring clouding. Early summer rains, perhaps? She frowned. The clouds were not just grey, but black, dark shapes emerging from the sky, twisting and roiling, like living smoke.

She turned back to the brook, wondering if she should seek shelter under the copse of trees on the other side. But she gasped in amazement. The waters had turned black, and were frothing. Yet she could still see her reflection. No, there was-

her flesh was peeling away from her face, rotting. Her golden hair was falling out in clumps, whitenening before her eyes. Her fresh lips peeled away, revealing a rictus grin. Her eyes shriveled up into wet jelly, leaving black, mocking holes in her now pallid corpse-face.

Her hands flew to her cheeks, feeling for any signs of rot. She looked down, and screamed as she saw her hands were now entirely fleshless, skeletal and slender. The reflection laughed, as the rest of the flesh rotted away, leaving only a clean, crow-picked skeleton laughing at her, still wearing her dress....

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Senka awoke from her dream, feeling the urge to gasp and scream. She looked around at the dim surroundings, at the gently pulsing blue-light of her crystal-lamp, at the faded black silk sheets of her bed. She looked at her hands. Reassuringly skeletal. She rose gently from her bed, donning a crimson-red skirt as she rose, to look into her polished-silver mirror, which was enchanted to always show her True Form.

A Lich stared back at her, pulsing blue eyes, like two violet stars caught in her otherwise empty sockets. She felt relief. Always the same dream, the dream of her past. A dream of corruption, decay, and rotting, which was unpleasant enough and unlike how she had truly come to this form, but also...a dream of life. Of sensations she had not felt in centuries.

She studied her perfectly preserved bones, marble-white, gleaming in the soft, faintly blue light. She ran the stick-like fingers of her fleshless hand over her ribcage, feeling the absence of flesh, tendons, all organs save a pulsing, crystalline heart. Her Phylactery, or one of them. The core of her essence, which the destruction of even these bones would not harm, and from which a framework anew could grow. Even if the crystal heart was pierced, there were seven others she had hidden across the known world, any one of which she could awaken in, after a time.

Such Immortality, she had always believed, was worth any price. Yet still, when she rested, gathering her spells for the day, or hibernated, preserving her life-force and waiting out the years, still the dreams came to her. She ran her hands, arcane-magics feeding her soul with the illusion of touch. Her skull felt smooth and marble-like, because that was how she expected it to feel like. The silk of her skirt, her bedsheets, felt as silk-like as her imagination could recall. Yet her dreams were always so much more...intense than the magical senses she posessed could emulate. The breath in her throat, the swell of nipples, the overwhelming scent of pollen... even in a more fleshen form, she had not, could not, experience such intensity.

Donning the rest of her robes, Senka swept out of her bedroom. She had much work to do. Yet still the dream would haunt her, a memory that would intrude no matter what task she tried to focus on. She pushed it to the back of her mind anyway, and strode down the black, unlit corridors, her "eyes" seeing as clearly as if it were day. Shuffling, skeletal automata nodded automatically in the simulation of respect. Once they had probably been soldiers, or grave guardians, buried en masse in this mound. But she had easily subverted them to be her protectors, her servants.

They were also reminders. All flesh fades. Life, she told herself, was much more than merely being in a shell of meat. Life was about perfecting one's conscious self, about gaining ultimate knowledge, and ultimate power. Unlike some Liches, it was knowledge that had driven her to this state. She was not desperately avoiding the Hells or the Abyss, nor did she seek to turn this world into a world of shuffling automata bound to a single will. Instead, she kept to herself, her mortal life as forgotten as the lives of those who built this mound.

She glided effortlessly into her library. It was difficult to walk quickly when your legs did not have muscles or tendons. It was much quicker to use magic to levitate, to glide down halls like a hovering ghost, her feet trailing uselessly a few inches above the granite stone floors.

What had once been the central antechamber, dedicated to some long-forgotten barbarian king or warlord, was now stacked many metres high with books and eldritch tomes. Bound to a desk in the very centre was her librarian, a mummy enspelled with a complex and powerful magical intelligence, both custodian of these tomes and a perfect index.

"Good morning, Dewey." She said, in a voice that, though feminine, rang hollow and empty, like wind rattling through empty halls.

"The time is four hours past mid-noon, Mistress. It is mid-afternoon, not the morning." It responded in a wheezy rasp. Unlike her, the Mummy had actual lips and a dessicated, though weirdly functional, larynx with which to speak from. Whomever he had been in life, she would probably never know. The Mound had been centuries abandoned when she had first moved her three hundred years ago, and her idle efforts to find out from the locals and the annals of nearby kingdoms had drawn a blank. Some things were doomed to be forever forgotten, she supposed. She would not be one of them.

"Always efficient, Dewey. Perhaps you could help me with an inquiry?" She asked, politely, though in truth Dewey had no free will, and would obey her every command. Yet such niceties helped her maintain her sanity, she supposed. Liches who went Mad were ones who did not produce accurate research, and mastering all there was to know about the universe arcane and cosmic was her sole focus in unlife.

"State your inquiry, mistress."

"Dreams, Arcane, Divine, Artifical." She stated. She had set aside this decade for a really focused inquiry into the nature of orbs of annihilation, but the dreams were becoming distracting, and so she decided to resolve that enquiry first.

The Mummy listed several obtuse and ancient titles, and offered to help her retrieve them. She declined. She could do this faster without a shuffling mummy trailing her everywhere.

Levitating up into the crowded reaches of the antechamber, she scanned the many alcoves, the titles and numbers of the books she was looking for hanging in her mind. She quickly retrieved the books she was looking for, and sighed. She intuited already that these particular books were unlikely to contain what she needed, but she quickly scanned them anyway, her "eyes" processing each page of text in a fraction of the time it would take a slow, unoptimised mortal.

She read books hundreds of years old, written in Common, High Elvish, Thayan, Undercommon, Sylvan, Dwarvish and even one in Deep Gnomish. All spoke about the potency of Prophetic dreams, of Gods sending visions to followers, or of powerful other-worldly entities trying to enter the material world through the unconscious one. Some spoke of the dreams of Gods themselves, and how even comatose or dormant entities of great power could shape planes with their thoughts and dreams. But none spoke of anything like the malady she found herself with.  Finally she came to the one book in the collection she had been dreading. The Dreams of Old Ones.

She brought the ancient tome down to a lectern, keeping it at more than arms length, levitating away from her. She bound the chains to it with great force, and spent several of her saved up, high-level ward spells to shield the lectern and the space around it. Finally she lowered herself to the ground, so that she was firmly planted on the ground, her fleshless feet shuffling across the cold, uneven stone.

Opening the great tome slowly, a part of her tensed, though she had no muscles to contract. The words slithered about on the page, and trying to focus on any one of them for too long brought a great headache.
Carefully, and with great precision, she examined each word slowly, searching her ancient memory for its meaning. The language of the Old Ones was far riskier, and far more convoluted, than even Draconic. Even the language of Magic, which contained words of Power such as "STUN" and "KILL", could not match the Words of Raw Madness that inhabited this tome. One did not read books about the Old Ones, you merely tried to tame them. And only the insane or fool-hardy tried to -write- them.

She discerned very quickly that it did not contain the type of knowledge she sought. She was powerful, but she doubted her dreams were exerting pressure on reality, or were the result of non-linear sendings from herself in the future or past. She doubted even further they were the seeds of a new self being born, or any number of strange, contradictory ideas outlined in the book before her.

No. She realised. The dreams were not the problem. The dreams were a symptom of something greater. She would have to leave her Mound, she sighed, and seek something that was far stranger than even her book on the Old Ones.

She was going to have see a Psychiatrist.