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The Dreamt Ones · “The Sworn”

Lich

The pact makes them. A void mage sacrifices enough souls, the Prince appears, and immortality is offered. Then the strings: "the Void Prince takes the soul sworn to him out of the Caelyrean, using it to pierce a hole through its protective shield, one that it can stretch one of its endless arms back through. Using this, it controls the physical form of the Lich." A Lich is a hand-puppet with a career, and the arm comes through the hole its own soul made.

"A lich is immortal, its soul safe with the Void Prince, so long as they obey." Death is survivable if a body has been prepared, and the higher class of Lich keep servants who do nothing else. Failure of the debt is not survivable.

Frailty

"If a debt is not paid, a lich will die instantly, resulting in their soul condemned and placed in the Void Princes prison." Another Lich may buy that debt and return them to the world, at terms. In each Prince's realm wait "countless Liches from all eras of time, both weak and strong," their debts growing every moment they are away.

The quota is the whole of a Lich's life. Everything else, the tower, the library, the politics, the centuries, is scheduling around a delivery date. A Lich who is prevented from harvesting is not weakened; a Lich who is prevented from harvesting dies on the day, wherever it happens to be standing, mid-sentence, and its household scatters within the hour to find somebody to buy the debt before the soul is filed. The commonest way to kill a Lich is not violence. It is delay.

Body

A Lich is a held body, and the flesh it runs through stops doing its own living. Cells cease dividing, hair and nails stop growing within the hour of occupation, and the blood settles where gravity leaves it, so the body-servants turn their master like an invalid. Wounds do not heal; they close, exactly as they were, so a Lich two centuries in one vessel is a seam-work of old openings that never knitted.

The flesh does not rot, because rot is what happens to a body that has been abandoned and this one is occupied. What it does instead is dry: it loses water year by year, the fat goes waxy, the skin tightens and splits at the creases, and the joints seize. A Lich of eighty years in one vessel is light enough for one servant to lift. That is the true reason for the prepared bodies, and it is why the real work of a Lich household is oil, steam, damp cloth and warm rooms. A living host, as with Marcus Blackstone, avoids all of it and burns the host instead.

Society

The household is the unit: body-servants who maintain the spare vessels, a harvest arm that collects souls at quota, an archivist who tracks the debt, and one person, always mortal and always terrified, whose only job is to know where the master is. Above it sits whichever Lich King holds the oath, and a Lich's collection is never entirely its own.

Between households the etiquette is entirely about time. A Lich will not keep another Lich waiting, and to delay a peer's business deliberately is a declaration of war answered by an attack on the vessels rather than on the person. Outside the Dead Continent the whole arrangement is hidden, and a Lich in a Nu'uman city is a scholar, a physician or a lord with an unusual number of shuttered rooms.

Tongue

Liches surrender their birth name. A person who becomes a Lich stops being addressable by anybody who knew them, and every binding, oath or curse keyed to the old name lapses in the same hour. Names taken are Naga'esh in flavour and are usually an accusation.

Every Lich carries the mark of the sworn: a place on the lip or the jaw where the skin will not take colour, left where the Prince's arm touched the mouth that spoke the total aloud. It moves to each new vessel within a night of occupation, which is why a Lich cannot disown its own debt by changing bodies, and why a Lich meeting another Lich looks there first.

See also
The Dreamt OnesMekuhlianLich KingShadeGhostGhast