Lich King
"Highest in their rank, Lich Kings hold high seats at the tables of their Void Princes." They have taken "the highest soul debt imaginable" and are therefore "prophets of each Void Princes religion." No single creature could service such a debt, so each Lich King holds sworn Liches beneath him, "all of which share their soul collection with their master."
They cross freely between this world and their Patron's, may end their obligation early if the Prince asks it, and act "as a god among the terrain" while helping to build their Patron's deviated plane.
Life
A Lich King is never a promoted Lich. It is a Lich who took a debt so large at the outset that the Prince had to build an institution to collect it, and the institution is the King's household: sworn Liches, their vassals, their tomb-servants, their prepared bodies, their harvest routes.
A Lich King's real power is administrative. He knows where every soul his household has taken went and what it was worth, and that ledger is what buys him the seat at the table.
Body
"The physicality of a Lich King is foul, husked and burning up from the inside with voided power," and that is a description of combustion rather than a figure of speech. A Lich King is a wider channel than a Lich and burns accordingly. The organs nearest the channel have been cooked down to a dry lattice and are no longer organs at all; heat comes out through the eye sockets, the mouth and every old wound, and in cold air a Lich King smokes faintly at the face.
They cannot be near dry cloth for long, they char the floor where they sit, and a King's hall is stone, water and iron with nothing soft in it. It is also why they live far from settled country, and the world has always read that as caution when it is substantially ventilation. They are, besides, targets for every religion and every government that opposes void magic.
Country
The High Throne of the Lich stands on the Dead Continent, in the far west, which is Mekuhlian country and the one place on Nu where such a seat could stand in the open. The Throne is a seat and an office rather than a building, and what has accreted around it over four thousand years is a black terrace, the ossuary of the households, the sworn-halls of the Liches who owe upward, and the field where the twenty million went.
Nothing grows in that field and nothing is buried in it. Liches from every continent travel to the Throne to swear, to renegotiate, and to be told what their debt has become while they were away.
Remembered
Mahlbar the Lich King, "the Defiler." A Mekuhlian, and it fits. He laid down his birth name upon the Stygian altar and died that night, and took up the name he is known by. Twenty million were sacrificed to the void on the Dead Continent at his hand, and the arithmetic that followed is what makes him the largest figure in this class: twenty million souls did not clear a debt, they established one, at a scale that required a continent to service.
The Eye of Mahlbar is his talisman and his connection of power to his Void Prince's realm, the object through which the arm reaches, and the reason he can act as a Lich King at any distance from the Throne. Delfi the Defiler holds the same rank under a different Prince, which is a rank within the void faiths held by one at a time, and there is a great deal of ill feeling.
Lore
Summary
Extended Lore
Still unwritten in the record for this entry.
- Where the High Throne sits on the Dead Continent
- Which Void Prince holds Mahlbar's oath
- How many Lich Kings there are, which no one has counted
- What a Prince asks for when it ends an obligation early